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Science

City Beneath The Sea 24

Posted by timothy from the musta-been-a-heckuva-milk-carton dept.
gergi writes: "Found this story over at abcnews. Seems some scientists found a city they weren't sure even existed, Herakleion, that used to be at the mouth of the Nile, now underwater 3.5 miles offshore." They're blaming an earthquake for the city's disappearance. The dig (swim?) has been going on for a few years now, but now some of the impressive finds are being announced. Public exhibitions are promised for a couple of years from now.
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City Beneath The Sea More

City Beneath The Sea

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  • desalination treatment? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I can't believe they are going to go and "pre-process" these amazing statues with a "desalinisation" treatment. Obviously the statues' location for the past 2000+years being underwater is part of their "history". By desalinating them, the scientists are robbing us of much of the actual history of the statues. If something spends most of its time in a given state, that is the nature of that 'something' and I don't want those pesky scientists messing around with it!
  • LOL. Ok, now that i know youre a geologist, it all makes sense.
  • I wonder if maybe the function of Hapi was only known to modern scientists via writings linking Herakleion (which perhaps worshipped Hapi) with a large flood...

  • ...it was placed south of Greece, not in middle of Atlantic

    Neither is this... It's off the Egyptian coast. With just a bit of imagination, one could describte it as south of Greece. Especially since the Greeks where quite 'Greece-centric'.

  • Hmm... at mouth of large waterway... destroyed by earthquake... hidden for millenia under water... statues of large people wearing women's clothing... maybe it's time to rethink that move to San Francisco.


    Zaphod B
  • If you are interested in this archaeological site, there is more info and some pictures at the project website [franckgoddio.org].

    ______________

  • The city was found in 1996 and is under 30 feet of water. They just NOW retrieved some of the artifacts.

    Here is MUCH more official here : http://www.frankGoddio.org/english/projects/abouki r/mission/mission_01.asp [frankgoddio.org]

    "Franck Goddio is best known for discovering the ancient royal city of Alexandria and Napoleon's lost fleet in the Bay of Aboukir. He has found more than ten historically valuable sunken ships. Franck Goddio is a founder and Chairman of the Franck Goddio Society."
  • Anything brought up (aside from gold I presume) is treated. Otherwise it turns to mush. (And as for the tablet, its outer layers would chip away.)

    Being submerged in sea water for 2000 years won't do much damage is there is no air and sunlight as well.
  • of course they are going to "pre-process" the statues. Those statues are a world treasure, and the world should be able to view them. Are you saying that the ancient people of Herakleion built them to remain in the sea for all eternity?

    Sure, they have been underwater for over a thousand years, but they will eventually be destroyed by the water, resulting in a worldwide loss of these amazing statues and relics.

  • That was the catch of some Indiana Jones movie/game, IIRC. The Homer claims about Atlantis were unclear - and after all, it was placed south of Greece, not in middle of Atlantic. So - could this be it?! I wonder when they find that advanced technology. :)
  • A very similar city has been discovered off the coast of Cuba

    http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010514/lf/cuba_t reasure_dc_1.html [yahoo.com]

    A good read.

    Art Bell [artbell.com] had discussion about it as well.

  • True that.
    funny how the city off of Cuba hasn't had as much coverage as the one just found off the Nile.

    It seems to me like the one off of Cuba would have a greater media interest, guess I don't need to know about it.

  • Today, they showed off some of their most impressive finds atop a barge, including 20-foot-tall pink granite statues representing a pharoah, a queen and Hapi, the Nile goddess of flooding;

    well, isn't that a bit ironic?

    ---

  • A very similar city has been discovered off the coast of Cuba

    That article also talks about sonar images of what look like pyramids and roads under 2,200 feet of water. I don't see how those could be artificial. Certainly the oceans have risen in the last 20,000 years, but not by two-fifths of a mile. The land could have fallen, I suppose, but I doubt that any event that's violent enough to cause that much vertical shift would leave anything recognisable as buildings behind it. Regardless of little objections like that, no doubt the Atlantis and Mu crackpots will have a field day with it...

  • Also if they bring such statues above the water and don't desalinize them, they'll crumble in a few years due to uptake of moisture from the air.

    If we want them to last and want people to see them, there is no other way.

    Yours Yazeran

    Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer

  • The reson for the subsidencen in the Venice laguna is that the cities in the area has been pumping fresh drinking water out of the sediments below the laguna. This has been done to such large an extent, that the sediments have started to compact. Furthermore, as in my response to the previous post, subsidence in river-deltas is a natural fenomena and observed at all big deltas.

    Yours Yazeran

    Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.

  • What can i say. I'm a geologist, we are all nuts.. :-)

    Yours Yazeran

    Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.

  • Sorry, but you misunderstand the theory of continental drift.

    It is right that the continents drift with an average speed of 4 cm/year, but it is only at the boundry-zones (like San-Andreas in California) that the shift is observed. Within the plates, there is no lateral shift of one city relative to one other. Neither is the coastline a plate boundry. The plate boundry between Africa and Europe is much further north (between Cypres and Tyrkey), therefore shift along this boundry cannot be responsible for this.

    Vertical shifts on the other hand, vould be exspected and observed in any large river delta, due to the constant addition of fresh sediments.
    These loads the underlying crust, and is responsible for slow subsidence (as observed at the Mississippi delta). The reson for subsidence due to addition of material is that the earth's crust is isostatically compensated, that is it 'floats' on the denser mantle.

    Such downwarping of the continental edges at large river-deltas most likely has drowned a lot of prehistoric cities.

    Yours Yazeran

    Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.

  • Why isn't the really interesting stuff ever on the front page, anyway?

  • Continental drift is an unlikely culprit, but the ice ages have done a very similar thing (although they are unlikely to be the factor here). Most of the likely relics of the original inhabitants of the Americans... pre-indians, or whatever they could be called, are on the former coast, off in the pacific ocean. The same process that made the land bridge between siberia and alaska also gave us a few extra miles of coast, all the way down.

  • Hey - at least it's the right side of the straits of Gibraltar :)
  • Franck Goddio is a founder and Chairman of the Franck Goddio Society

    He's a modest man. Really down to earth.

  • The Italians are facing the same problem, as Venezia (Venice to us Anglos) is sinking [discovery.com]. The water level is so high that moderate springtime rain will cause Piazza San Marco to flood [asu.edu].

    As millennia pass, I hope that humankind buys in to the notion that a coastal area just isn't a good place to build--great place to visit, though....

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