Explorer claims he has found Atlantis acropolis off Cyprus

By Philippos Stylianou

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ROBERT Sarmast, who is searching for the lost kingdom of Atlantis off the coast of Cyprus, claimed this week that new sonar images reveal the city's acropolis and its defensive walls 1.5kms beneath the surface of the Mediterranean

He told a Limassol news conference: "I am absolutely convinced we found Atlantis."

His claims were greeted with huge international press interest and scepticism from some experts,

He said their six-day scan of the seabed 80km south-east of Cyprus using sonar technology had revealed massive man-made structures corresponding to Plato’s description of two walls 3 km long and the Acropolis HIll, which was 2.5 miles long and half-a-kilometre wide. It also showed deep trenches and old river beds.

"Everything matches Plato’s description and it should certainly be the worlds’ biggest coincidence if it is not what we’ve been looking for," said the 35-year old Iranian-born author of the book "Discovery of Atlantis: The Startling Case for the Island of Cyprus."

But Michel Morisseau, a French geologist living in Cyprus, dismissed Sarmast’s discovery as an impossibility.

"We do not know if Atlantis ever really existed and even if it did, it must have collapsed upside down into the earth by the huge earthquake and floods; there is no way any remnants could have survived," he told the Cyprus Weekly.

Indifferent

Morisseau, formerly of the French Geological Survey Department, admitted he had not read Sarmast’s book, but he was reacting to computer simulated footage of his sonar expedition shown on Cyprus television.

"I am not interested in his book, I am completely indifferent to it," he said.

"What I am interested in is what he is saying, and it has nothing to do with scientific fact. Every geologist knows that there are sea mounds in that area and nobody can believe that there could be any man-made structures so far down. This fellow is just putting things together to make a claim," he added.

He went on to challenge Sarmast to an open debate, saying he would first like to see the ship and the equipment used in the expedition. He added that computer images could be manipulated to look like anything.

The Cyprus Weekly sought Robert Sarmast’s reaction to the challeng. At first said he did not mind having a debate with Morisseau, although he did not know who he was. But he appeared negative when he heard that the Frenchman was questioning his technology.

"The ship and all the equipment we used are posted on our webpage for anyone to see and the people we are working with are Phoenix International in the USA who were involved in the Titanic expedition," Sarmast said.

He added that the high-resolution images they brought from the deep would be processed in UK laboratories which do work for government agencies and there is no questioning their results.

"It takes more than a degree in geology to understand Atlantis and I don’t see any point in discussing with someone who didn’t have the courtesy to read my book," Sarmast said.

Million hits

He added that the final image data processing would be ready in about two weeks and they too would be posted on the expedition webpage.

He noted that they had one million hits on their webpage since the announcement of the expedition results.

In his press conference Sarmast explained that they used side-scan sonar technology brought in from the UK to explore the earmarked area.

The sonar unit was dragged behind the exploration vessel with a 4,500m-long cable lowered to about 50m above the sea floor. In this way, he said, they could get high-resolution images.

"What we can do now is run tests over these apparent walls and see if there are hardened structures running throughout the middle of them. There may also be things we couldn’t see with the sonar, because we could only see a little bit at a time. We need to put these things together and get three-dimensional models, so we could have more news in a couple of weeks," Sarmast said.

In his book, Sarmast suggests that the high form of Atlantan civilisation developed here at a distant time when the Mediterranean was mostly dry land with lagoons and became engulfed as the Atlantic ocean flooded the basin.

Michel Morisseau discards this theory saying that when these things were supposed to have happened Cyprus looked very much the way it is today.

German physicist Christian Huebscher told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper that he had identified the features seen by Sarmast as 100,000 year-old volcanoes that spewed mud.

Huebscher, of the Hamburg Centre for Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, is quoted in the newspaper as saying he and two Dutch colleagues had sailed in a boat to the same area at which Sarmast claimed to have located Atlantis and made their findings.

The Director of the Antiquities Department Pavlos Flourentzos also dismissed the theory as a historical non-starter. But Sarmast insisted: "We know from science that there was a flood. We know that the area we are looking at was above water. And we know that certainly people lived in this area a long time ago for thousands of years. After all this is where the story of Atlantis originated, in Greece and Egypt; this is where the myth comes from. Plato and Solon, among the greatest brains this planet ever produced, related these events as history, they believed in it, it was no myth to them. And they handed it down from the Egyptians, who were known in the ancient world as the best keepers of history. So, everything we are doing here is in line with history and it happens to corroborate what these ancient people told us."

Asked about the legal aspect of his expedition, Sarmast said the recent exploration was carried out in international waters, but if any archaeological discovery was made it could be claimed as falling within the exclusive economic zone of the litoral states, in this case Cyprus and Syria. He noted that the would-be delimitation line between the two countries cut through the middle of what he believed to be the Acropolis Hill of Atlantis.

In reply to another question, he said that there could be remnants of other Atlantan cities closer to Cyprus.

Sarmast has spent 9 months in Cyprus preparing his expedition which cost $200,000 so far, while another $250,000 would be needed to pursue it further.