ANOTHER scientist has come forward to challenge American researcher Robert Sarmast’s theory that a rise on the seabed off Cyprus is part of the lost continent of Atlantis.
Earlier this week, a French geologist living in Cyprus called Sarmast to a public debate on the issue. A day later, a German physicist said what had been found by Sarmast’s expedition was a merely a 100,000 year-old underwater mud volcano. He and two other scientists said they had surveyed the same area last year.
In an email to the Cyprus Mail yesterday, physical geographer and marine geologist Dr Ulf Erlingsson from Florida joined the fray.
Erlingsson is the author of Atlantis from a Geographer’s Perspective: Mapping the Fairy Land, which pinpoints Ireland as the likely location, based, like Sarmast, on Plato’s writings.
However, Erlingsson argues that with over 20 years of experience of mapping the sea floor with sonar, and having studied the Atlantis dialogues in detail, Sarmast’s Cyprus hypothesis “does not hold up to scrutiny”.
Erlingsson says the Cyprus hypothesis appears implausible to begin with, for several reasons. “Because the island of Atlantis does not fit in the Eastern Mediterranean with the measures that Plato gave (3000×2000 stadia), and also because it is assumes an extremely low sea level very recently.
Furthermore it is not positioned outside the pillars of Hercules, nor in an ocean,” he said.
“However, the real killer of the hypothesis is that 100,000-year-old mud volcanoes exist on the spot. How could it then have been dry land only 12,000 years ago?”
Sarmast dates the deluge that was said to have submerged Atlantis at between 10,000 and 30,000 BC.
Erlingsson said that if that area had been above the sea surface until recently, “as the Cyprus hypothesis stipulates”, then the mud volcanoes would have been eroded sub-aerially. “The whole landscape would show signs of recently having been drowned,” he said.
“We can see examples of this in the southern Baltic Sea, drowned about 10,000 years ago. The fluvial morphology is easily identifiable under the mud. Thus, if German experts were there last year and failed to identify signs of sub-aerial erosion, the hypothesis that it recently was dry land must be dismissed.”
Responding to the German argument on Thursday, Sarmast said that what he had found during his expedition last week was a “table top mountain” and not a mud volcano. He said that it was not a big surprise that there were mud volcanoes, but that did not mean his find could be classified in the same category. He challenged his detractors to prove their claims.
Sarmast, the author of Discovery of Atlantis: The Startling Case for the Island of Cyprus, announced last Sunday that he and his team had located man-made structures in the area they had earmarked as the site of the underwater lost city.
He said two walls three kilometres long had been located and that the Acropolis Hill was 2.5 miles long and half a kilometer wide. His team is putting together the sonar side-scans taken during the expedition, which should be ready within 10 days. Sarmast hopes to launch a second expedition which will utilise submarine technology capable of shifting 30-50 metres of sediment a day.
