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TRAVEL AND GEOGRAPHY
Geography
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The legend of Atlantis.
Tectonic processes and the death of the continent.
Secrets of Mount Ampere.
An insidious volcano.
Evidence of the ancients.
A series of disasters.
Also on the topic GEOLOGY ARCHEOLOGY OF EARTHQUAKES
ATLANTIS ATLANTIS.
The legend of Atlantis has been haunting humanity for the third millennium, more than 6 thousand volumes have been written about it.
But did this mysterious civilization exist?
If so, when and where?
How to interpret the evidence of the ancients?
The legend of Atlantis.
The mythical continent, or the island of Atlantis, was first described by Plato (427-347 BC) in the dialogues of Timaeus and Critias with reference to one of the seven sages of ancient Greece – Solon.
During his trip to Egypt, Solon recorded the story of the ancient Egyptian priests of the temple of the goddess Neith in Sais, who, according to historians and archaeologists, Egyptologists, relied on written evidence left by the ancients more than 30 thousand years ago on papyri that have not come down to us.
Atlantis is named after Atlas, the brother of one of the titans of Greek mythology – Prometheus.
According to Plato, the mysterious continent was inhabited by the Atlanteans – a fearless and powerful people who reached the highest level of civilization and fought with a certain proto Athenian state.
It was located in the Atlantic Ocean beyond Gibraltar and died about 12 thousand years ago (between 9750 and 8570 BC), plunging into the depths of the ocean "in one day and a disastrous night" as a result of a grandiose natural disaster.
Aristotle (384/383-322/321 BC), an ancient Greek philosopher and disciple of Plato, categorically did not share the concept of his teacher and it was in the dispute about Atlantis that he uttered the famous phrase: "Plato is my friend, but the truth is dearer".
Atlantis is a mystery for geologists, geophysicists, seismologists, oceanologists, as well as for historians, archaeologists, art historians and people studying ancient cultures.
There is no hope of finding golden statues of goddesses, the temple of Poseidon or anything like that in the depths of the ocean.
The processes of erosion, sedimentation and other natural processes mercilessly destroy the traces of ancient civilizations, but indirect evidence of their existence still reaches us.
Tectonic processes and the death of the continent.
If we approach the problem from a geological point of view, it boils down to the following question: did there exist in historical time a microcontinent or a huge archipelago that sank into the water catastrophically quickly?
No more than 20 years ago, the theories of fixism prevailed in science, according to which the positions of the Earth's continents are unchanged, which allowed the appearance of ocean depressions due to sharp subsidence of blocks of the continental lithosphere.
This was a strong argument in favor of the existence and death of Atlantis.
However, this concept contradicts modern ideas about the tectonics of lithospheric plates, according to which continents cannot sink.
From the point of view of this theory, the model of the destruction of Atlantis looks like this.
The outer shell of the Earth consists of separate, slowly moving lithospheric plates.
The hypothetical death of Atlantis is of particular interest, firstly, as the largest geological catastrophe that has occurred in the memory of mankind; secondly, as a result of the manifestation of endogenous, i.e. deep, tectonic processes occurring on the border (or in the junction zone) of two giant continental plates: the African, which is part of the southern Gondwana series, and the Eurasian, which is part of the northern Laurasian.
Where the lithospheric plates converge, the thinner and deeper submerged ocean lithosphere, colliding with the continental one, breaks and moves under it, dragging the ocean islands with it.
Continental plates collide, forming mountains.
Thus, as a result of the fact that Africa "piled" on Europe, the Alpine folding arose, which gave rise to the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Karadag in the Crimea and the Pamirs.
Within these mountain ranges, earthquakes still occur).
The place of the collision of plates was both the Mediterranean Sea and the Azores Gibraltar fault system, on the axis of which, like a skewer, a chain of seamounts is strung, which stretches from the Azores archipelago to Gibraltar.
Thus, Atlantis was in a tectonically active zone, still showing volcanic activity.
(It is enough to recall the Messinian earthquake of 1908 or the disaster of 1775, when Lisbon was lost in half an hour.)
A huge crack is clearly visible on the map of the geophysical study of the Azoro Gibraltar region.
Seismic data reveal short focus and long focus earthquakes, abnormal magnetic field and heat flow in this area.
Methods of deep seismic profiling made it possible to detect signs of a partial shift of one plate under another, which could result in the death of Atlantis.
In 1981 and 1984, the Institute of Oceanology equipped two expeditions for trial dives of an underwater diving bell and testing of other equipment of the Vityaz research vessel.
The research was carried out in the area of the Ampere seamount, located in the Atlantic Ocean about 500 km west of the Strait of Gibraltar and part of the Hosshu seamount system.
Formations resembling the ruins of a city were found on the flat top of the mountain.
The participants of the expedition managed to photograph something similar to the masonry of the wall and make a number of drawings from nature, which served as a reason for sensational reports in the newspapers.
What they saw was surprisingly reminiscent of ancient dwellings in Chersonesos: firstly, cells ranging in size from 5 to 10 m, very similar to the rooms of houses, and secondly, although, as you know, nature avoids right angles, and scientists saw a lot of straight parallelepipeds, buildings resembling stairs and even something like an arch.
Divers broke off fragments of weathered basalt from one of the alleged masonry, and experts checked them for traces of processing tools.
It was not possible to find an unambiguous answer, however, experts were inclined to the conclusion that the "walls" are still not man made and there are no "ruins of an ancient city".
Further careful study showed that the mountain is an old volcano, broken by deep cracks, stretched almost at right angles to each other and creating the impression of"rooms".
Another thing was more important: when the basalt was subjected to chemical analysis, it became clear that it was formed not under water, but in the air, i.e. at the time when the Ampere rose above the surface of the ocean.
The system of underwater ridges of Hosshu stretches from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Azores archipelago and forms a ridge dominated by flat topped mountains, once cut off by surface erosion, as evidenced by pebble boulder deposits formed as a result of surf wave activity.
If we take into account that 40 thousand years ago the level of the world ocean was 100-120 m lower than it is now, and the age of the mountains (according to the potassium argon definition) ranges on average from 7 to 9 million years, it is quite natural to assume that these ancient volcanic formations could once have been islands.
And people could well live on the islands.
However, the rise of the ocean level during the Cretaceous transgression (immersion) or later could not lead to catastrophic consequences, since the rise of the ocean level is a very slow process, as evidenced, in particular, by coral deposits.
It can be assumed that the sinking of the islands, or, conversely, the rise of the sea occurred as a result of some grandiose catastrophe, for example, the collision of the African and Eurasian plates.
The question is, how and when did this happen?
And is it not about Atlantis, which has been searched for for the third millennium?
Where to find Atlantis?
If we collect and publish all the data about where Atlantis could be located, we would get a fascinating book in which we would have to tell about South America, with which the famous philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) identified Atlantis in the utopia New Atlantis; and about the North Sea, where, according to the German pastor Jurgen Spanut, there was a mysterious continent near the island of Helgoland, and about the search in the early 19th century from Yucatan to Mongolia and from Svalbard to St. Helena.
Atlantis was "prescribed" in Brazil, Scandinavia, Palestine, in the Strait of Pas de Calais, etc.
Among the active supporters of its existence were the artist and philosopher Nikolai Roerich and the geologist, academician Vladimir Obruchev.
Since the end of the 19th century, the most popular version has been the version of the Russian traveler and scientist, academician Avraam Norov (1795-1869), who suggested the existence of an island in the Mediterranean.
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