Searching For Atlantis

Scientists know that over 10,000 years ago our oceans rose by several hundred feet, causing millions of hectares of land to disappear suddenly and forever.  Scuba divers can witness the prehistoric march of time, for instance, upon the coral walls of Barbados today while descending deeper past ancient coral that died from lack of light as waters continued to rise.  Lying offshore in many corners of the globe, waiting to be discovered by amateurs and professionals alike, are thus vast amounts of evidence from those kingdoms and cultures wholly buried when the Ice Age melted.

In a time many millennia before the Egyptians built their famous pyramids atop the eastern sands of the Sahara alongside the once fertile banks of the Nile, the case is mounting for a civilization that was crushed under the rising waters of the ocean.  These days marine archaeologists are not only surveying ships underwater but also potential evidence of megalithic builders lost beneath the waves a very long time ago, such as the Bimini Wall in The Bahamas or Yonaguni in Japan.

Not many tourists think about the possibility of finding evidence of lost and forgotten ancient civilizations, but there are a growing number of equatorially-based popular destinations attracting divers keenly aware they may discover Atlantis, not to mention the many businesses that now refer to themselves by that name.  The fabled city has sparked imaginations since the Golden Age of Greece over 2,500 years ago, after Plato detailed the story of its sudden demise in 9600BC.

In fact, two years ago in the deep-water trench between Cancun and Cuba treasure hunters based in Havana reported finding Atlantis.  What the ADC actually found remains to be proved, but their video suggests a city lies over 2,000 feet below the surface.  It might simply have been a Toltec or indeed a Mayan city that literally slid into the sea, similar to the fate of Port Royal, the scurrilous Jamaican pirate city swallowed one day by the Caribbean during an earthquake in the seventeenth century.

Whether diving in lakes, seas or oceans, there is plenty to explore.

In a particularly catastrophic era beginning nearly 20,000 years ago, when the Earth suddenly entered its warming period, signaling the end of our most recent Ice Age, it left in its wake several vast glacial lakes supported by massive ice dams.  They eventually collapsed, flooding all lands in their path while emptying these prehistoric lakes.  

Whether diving the murky waters of Rock Lake in Wisconsin, or the crystalline Caribbean, Black or Mediterranean Seas, the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, intrepid researchers, academics and authors continue to find and examine puzzling artifacts left behind by very ancient people and certainly fueling the debate among archeologists.
Other than the South Pacific region where many wrecks from the Second World War are explored regularly, like Truk, newer dive sites where oe might find evidence of an ancient civilization, like South India or in the Gulf of Cambay, often present an insurmountable challenge to recreational divers.  Nevertheless, Atlantis itself was supposed to be located in the Mediterranean on the island of Thera, and then perhaps it might also be located in the eastern Atlantic near either the Canaries or The Azores.

Assuredly, however, a more pleasurable dive would be to the warm and clear waters of Bimini and Andros.  Ponce de Leon, who thought the legendary Fountain of Youth would be located there, explored the island itself, as well as the mysterious carving of a shark that can only be viewed from the air.  People studying the possible existence of a maritime civilization would have stretched from Mexico to the Mediterranean, whose lands disappeared after the Ice Age melted.

Take a trip around the world to Okinawa and visit the very strange structures located in the South China Sea, said to be remnants of the lost Lemurian empire; the Land of Mu, which itself stretched across the Pacific, in addition to the incredible array of fish and dazzling flora beneath.