Thist story about a sunken island being discovered is fascinating, but the corollary theory from the project head strikes me as… unlikely?
Researchers in Spain have uncovered lost islands that sank into the ocean millions of years ago, some of which still have their beaches intact.
“This could be the origin of the Atlantis legend,” Luis Somoza, the head of a project to study volcanic activity off the Canary Islands, told Live Science in an email.
The team found the islands on a seamount, or underwater mountain, which contains three now inactive volcanoes and is about 31 miles (50 kilometers) in diameter. Its base is about 1.4 miles (2.3 km) below the surface of the ocean.
Scientists dubbed the newfound seamount Mount Los Atlantes after Plato’s fabled civilization that the gods plunged into the ocean as a punishment for its citizens’ immorality.
“They were islands in the past and they have sunk, they are still sinking, as the legend of Atlantis tells,” Somoza, a geologist with the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain (IGME-CSIC), said in a translated statement.
With all due respect to brother Luis, this sounds like some Graham Hancock bullshit to me. Let’s assume he’s right, and that Plato was indeed inspired by this thing. How would he have even KNOWN about it in the first place? We’ve only discovered it now with 21st century technology. The seamount has probably been submerged for millions of years. The article observes that the seamount might’ve been visible above water during the ice age… but that would’ve been about thousands of years before Plato’s time (to be sure, he does say that whatever happened to Atlantis did so about 9,000 years earlier), and it would’ve required there to be enough humans to have witnessed what happened and to preserve that knowledge (through oral tradition to boot, as Plato also says) for millennia until it reached Plato. I know our remote ancestors were probably a lot smarter than the likes of Hancock, Donnelly, von Daniken et al give them credit for being, but I find this concept awfully hard to accept… sorry Luis, but I’m not buying it.
