Atlantis revealed at last... or just a load of old Googles?

For centuries the story of Atlantis has captured the imagination - a fabled city of great beauty, culture and wealth that was suddenly swallowed up by the ocean.

Its location - or at least the source of the legend - remained a tantalising mystery. Was it really in the Mediterranean and not in the Atlantic at all?
Some claim its ruins lie beneath the waves off the coast of Cornwall. Others say they've been found in the Black Sea.



False hopes: Google said the grid-like markings, thought to reveal the location of mythical underwater city Atlantis, are an artifact of its map making process

But for a few hours this week, experts hoped the riddle may finally have been solved.
More than six hundred miles off West Africa and more than three miles down lay a mysterious grid of lines that resembled the streets of a city.

Was this where the ocean's might overwhelmed Altantis, drowning its people and sweeping away a civilisation?

Or would it prove to be yet another reminder that, actually, there may not have been an Atlantis anywhere at all.



The grid system was found in an area known as the Madeira Abyssal Plane off the coast of Morocco, not far from the Canary Islands
The image - discovered on internet mapping tool Google Earth - lay in an area of the Atlantic long thought of as a possible location for the city.

Experts were agog, marine geologists baffled and internet bloggers were buzzing.

There were just two problems, however.

First, the grid of streets, walls and buildings turned out to be the size of Wales. That meant Altantis was 20 time as big as Greater London.

More problematic still, the grid of lines doesn't exist on the sea floor. According to Google, the pattern is an 'artifact' of its map-making process.

Details for the ocean maps on Google Earth come from sonar measurements of the sea floor recorded by boats - and the area around the Canaries was mapped by boats travelling in a series of straight lines.



The grid can be found by anyone using the latest version of Google Earth on their computer. It lies in the Canary Basin, 620 miles west of the Canary Islands, and east of the undersea Konstantinov Ridge.

'It's true that many amazing discoveries have been made in Google Earth - a pristine forest in Mozambique that is home to previously unknown species, a fringing coral reef off the coast of Australia, and the remains of an ancient Roman villa, to name just a few,' said a spokesman for Google.

'In this case, however, what users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process.'Bathymetric (sea-floor) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea-floor.

'The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data.' The grid was spotted by a British aeronautical engineer who claimed it looked like a 'man-made aerial map' of a city. Bernie Bamford, 38, of Chester compared it to the plan of Milton Keynes, the Buckinghamshire town built to a grid design.

Dr Charles Orser, curator of historical archaeology at New York State University said the site was 'one of the most prominent places for the proposed location of Atlantis'. 'Even if it turns out to be geographical, it definitely deserves a closer look,' he added.

In 1997, Russian scientists claimed to have found Atlantis 100 miles off Land's End. In 2000 a ruined town was found under 300ft of water off the north coast of Turkey in the Black Sea. The area is thought to have been swamped by a great flood around 5000BC, possibly the floods referred to in the Old Testament. In 2004 an American architect used sonar to reveal man-made walls a mile deep in the Mediterranean between Cyprus and Syria. In 2007 Swedish researchers claimed the city lay on the Dogger Bank in the North Sea, which was submerged in the Bronze Age.

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