Terra Australis (Atlantis) - conclusive evidence?

reply to post by antithesis.


Yes, that is the gist of it.

Mercator's 1569 map shows several 'mythical' islands that seem to have match underwater locations.

How did he know about these?



Mercator (top) MS Encarta (centre) NASA Bathymetry (bottom)



Mercator (top) What is visible today (bottom)



Details here www.riaanbooysen.com...

Take a peek at a full size image of the map instead and you'll see that Mercators accuracy of North/South America isnt particularly good. Compare Europe and Africa, there is a noticable difference: They look quite accurate and like a regular map (well, a very poor map), but the rest of the world become progressivly worse the further away you get.

That may be true, but how could he have imagined the dotted plateaus into existance, in exactly the right locations? Mercator's depiction of Hudson Bay is inaccurate as far as the relative size of the bay is concerned, yet it shows practically all the coastal details as we know it today.

Originally posted by Riaan
That may be true, but how could he have imagined the dotted plateaus into existance, in exactly the right locations? Mercator's depiction of Hudson Bay is inaccurate as far as the relative size of the bay is concerned, yet it shows practically all the coastal details as we know it today.

The water's color is different where it is less deep.

Such areas warrant special attention from sailors, as you can well imagine, since they might rip the bottoms out of your ships and cast ye down to Davy Jone's Locker.

AAARRRR.

HARRRR TE

Mercator's depiction of Hudson Bay is inaccurate as far as the relative size of the bay is concerned, yet it shows practically all the coastal details as we know it today.

I don't think so it appears to be a distorted view of the Labrador sea and the Davis straits which had been visited prior to Hudson's voyage.

Shallow areas. Many ships of that time carried up to a 100 fathoms of cable attached to an anchor. Sailors were noted for their ability to sense when water began to shoal beneath them. If they could anchor in an area they usually noted it. They could often find these areas as their tended to be more fish nearer the surface at such places.

You might want to too see how many of these shallow areas are less than 100 fathoms deep.

[edit on 29/9/09 by Hanslune]

reply to post by Riaan


Feedback received from one of the forums I posted this article on was that the islands on the sub-merged plateaus in the Caribbean may simply have been warnings to sailors of shallow waters in those areas. This sent me back to the drawing board (actually, my map books and the Internet in search of topographical information about the ‘shallow water’ areas of the Caribbean). I soon discovered the 1625 map of the Caribbean by Henry Briggs (below, centre), which clearly differentiates between shallow waters (dashed lines) and islets within these regions. What happened to these islets?



I contacted several leading authorities on oceanography in search of high resolution bathymetry maps, who were quick to point out that many of these islands (typically sand banks one or two meters above sea level) had been washed away by hurricanes. A good example of this is in fact the Dry Tortugas en.wikipedia.org... (E on my figures), of which some islands have disappeared as late as 1875.

Based on this evidence I have to conclude that the mapping of the Caribbean most likely had very little to do with maps dating from thousands of years before and that the information must indeed have been obtained by the early Portuguese and Spanish explorers.

The same cannot necessarily be said of the Brazilian islands (Fig. 1.62a on my website), though, unless the disappearance of islands B to D and the second island of group E (Fig 1.62a on website) can be attributed to some (other) kind of natural phenomenon active over the past 500 years (any ideas?). The island group E is visible from the sky (NASA shallow topography map below), but the others are definitely deeper below sea level. The Encarta Interactive World Atlas ocean floor topography seems to be in error (see Fig. 1.62a) as it suggests that these ‘islands’ are more than 90m below sea level, which does not appear to be the case judging from the NASA images.



Hires images of these figures can be downloaded here www.riaanbooysen.com...

Not sure of your point Riaan

Are you saying the Brazilian island don't exist now but existed in the past?

Yes, indeed. My argument is that at some stage the sea level must have been low enough for all of these islands to be exposed. Depending on the exact depth below sea level of these islands (B,C,D,E), this may prove that theycould only have been mapped (being visible) thousands of years ago.

The depth scale of practically every bathymetry map I could get hold of is however too coarse to be able to determine at exactly what depth they are, which is rather frustrating.

Best, Riaan

I have done some additional work since my last post, but more significantly have drawn up a brief summary of the key arguments of my theory, for those interested.

Downloadable here (PDF, 1.7MB).