17 Nov 2004 Atlantis Not Found: Mud, Anyone?
From the Frankfurt, Germany Allgemeine Zeitung, November 16:
Occasionally, it occurs that hobby researchers make important scientific discoveries. If one accepts the press conference that was recently organized in Cyprus by an architect from Los Angeles, one could get the impression that such feat was pulled off once again.
Robert Sarmast claims that he has definitely discovered the Acropolis of Atlantis in the Mediterranean Sea between Cyprus and the Syrian coast, presenting multicolored images based on measurements of underwater sonar. These images allegedly show the ancient castle of the sunk city, a channel as well as remainders of a city’s wall.
What Sarmast did not know (or what he concealed), is the fact that [German] geophysicist Christian Huebscher of the University of Hamburg (Zentrum fur Marine und Atmospharische Wissenschaften), together with colleagues, analyzed and measured this particular area of the sea last summer on board the Dutch research ship “Pelagia.”
The researchers were not in search for the lost island of Atlantis. As scientific experts on the mighty salt layers that rest under the bottom of the eastern Mediterranean, they wanted to find out more about their condition. Their sonar data also detected those submarine hills, which Sarmast now interprets as the Acropolis of Atlantis.
According to Huebscher, however, these [structures] are old mud volcanoes that are approximately 100,000 years old. These volcanoes were produced because the mud which lies under the salt layers penetrates through fractures and breaks into the salt layers and bulges the bottom of the sea floor. Such ‘mud diapirs’ exist on the bottom of many oceans. Thus, such finds are not as spectacular as the baseless statement that the legendary Atlantis has been discovered.
Hat tip and thanks for the information to Benny Peiser, who has more.