Atlantis team brush off scientific skeptics
By Jean Christou

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THE Atlantis expedition team yesterday brushed off the revelation by a German physicist that the underwater formations found off Cyprus last week are 100,000 old submarine volcanoes, and not the legendary lost city.

American researcher Robert Sarmast, who is leading the charge to find Atlantis, challenged the German physicist to go to the particular hill that he has located and to prove that it’s an underwater volcano.

In an interview in Wednesday's edition of the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, physicist Christian Huebscher said he and two Dutch colleagues had already sailed in a boat to the same area where Sarmast says he has found Atlantis. They identified the phenomenon as 100,000-year-old volcanoes that spewed mud, the paper said.

The volcanoes were formed when 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. Similar volcanoes can be found on the bottom of many oceans, the newspaper said.

Sarmast told the Cyprus Mail yesterday: “I did see the article. They went to the area and said they found some underwater volcanoes. There are underwater volcanoes so this is not a big surprise,” Sarmast said. “But what we have found is a tabletop mountain… I challenge them to prove that this is a volcano.”

Sarmast, the author of Discovery of Atlantis: The Startling Case for the Island of Cyprus, announced on Sunday that he and his team had located man-made structures in the area they had earmarked as the site of the underwater lost city.

He said two walls three kilometres long had been located and that the Acropolis Hill was 2.5 miles long and half a kilometer wide.

Sarmast bases his theory that Cyprus is Atlantis on Plato’s writings Timaeus and Crititias, saying that almost every clue in Plato’s description of the legendary continent perfectly correlates with scientific data which he has accumulated.

Currently, his team is putting together the sonar side-scans taken during last week’s secret expedition, which should be ready within 10 days. Sarmast said he hoped to have a second expedition up and running before too long, which will utilise submarine technology capable of shifting 30-50 metres of sediment a day.

The second expedition will cost in the region of $250,000.

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