Senate Dunk It Or Debunk It! Now disc: The Oak Island Money Pit

Dunk It Or Debunk It! will bring popular myth and conspiracy theories before the scrutinizing eyes of the JC Senate Floor! With each topic, I will try to promote the positive claim: I'm the believer!
Then it´s up to you to debunk it, and put me back on the ground. Or will you dunk it and make us all believe?

FIRST ROUND: ATLANTIS


My. Wasn't it pretty.

Around 10,000 BC, Atlantis was a superpower. It conquered many parts of Western Europe and Northern Africa. But after a failed attack on Athens, around 9500 BC, disaster struck, and a flood wiped away the entire kingdom. Knowledge of Atlantis was passed down to us by Plato, who got it straight from the great Solon.

Not only do I believe this to be true, I also think I know where to find Atlantis.

But first! Who doesn't believe? Who feels like doing some debunkin'?

 

debunkin

 

After we're done with Atlantis, we should try God.

 

I'm not equipped to defend the Christian God, but if anybody else wants to take it, by all means.

 

The paranormal BS of anything is not something I agree with but many things have a seed a fact. It'd be nice if Atlantis was this awesome thing that Conan is descended from but all evidence is definate. It woul dertainly not be some magical realm of enlightenment but may...MAY...have been a land mass sunken to the ocean floor which contained soem record of humanity for good or bad.

 

Atlantis and God have a lot in common. Camp fire stories embellished over decades including fifth hand accounts of events passed down by the story teller's brother's cousin's second wife who heard it from the goat herder who swears it is all true which is then written down and later, much later, proclaimed as Truth. Whilst God has become humanity's comfort blanket for the unknown and unknowable, in particular, the prospect of death, Atlantis appeals more to our delight of finding lost treasure.

In short, if the evidence for the existence of Atlantis is limited to the scribblings of Plato who happened to be huddled around the camp fire one night during story time then I say debunked.

 

I love the idea of actual historical roots for legends. Thera? A mega tsunami sweeping over Crete?

 

Not so fast, Hoth.
The idea of a lost kingdom, wiped out by a natural disaster in that era, is perfectly plausible. After all, if we're talking 10,000 BC, that's before stone houses. Atlantis would have been made mostly of wood. The decay time can't have been more than 3,000 years. Atlantis is gone, and you will never find it. And you can´t debunk what´s impossible to establish. However, considering the nature of this planet and the fragility of early civilization, it's more likely than not that some kingdom existed that we don't have on the books.

Consider:


Santorini. The Thera Jabba is talking about. Doesn't that look like a mother of a volcano mouth to you? A veritable supervolcano. Right in the middle of an early civilization. Right next to Plato.

You oughta visit, they have beautiful beaches with black sand.

But I don't think that's the location of Atlantis.

 

The biggest thing that has to be addressed, I think, is the idea of the size of the landmass in question. The island is described, in the quote provided, as the size of Libya and Asia put together. Now, of course, it has to be kept in mind that we're talking those areas as they were defined at the time. Libya was used for Africa, and Asia was Turkey around the Mediterranean and to the Nile. To get an idea of approximate sizes of those landmasses, Asia was known at the time to go as far east as India (The Macedonian Empire at it's greatest stretched this far towards the end of Plato's life). That's over 3000 miles. Additionally, from north to south, that's around 1000 miles. For Libya, it would be quite a bit smaller, but stretched roughly from the Nile westward around another 2000 miles. To approximate, we'll use about 1000 miles for thickness there as well. In terms of area, that means we're looking at Asia at around 3 million sq miles, and Libya at around 2 million sq miles, for a landmass that's around 5 million sq miles in size. Now, for some comparisons, Greenland is only around 0.8 million sq miles, Australia is around 3 million sq miles, and Antarctica is just over 5 million sq miles.

Comparing the landmass we need to the area we're looking settles it quickly. Considering the pillars of Hercules as a reference to the Strait of Gibraltar, as is commonly done, tells us that it was located somewhere in the Northern Atlantic, but over 5 times the size of Greenland. Now, we have a good understanding of the plate tectonics there, and the Midatlantic ridge represents where the sea floor is spreading. The whole region is an area of new land growth, and had such a large continent been there, there's nowhere for it to have disappeared to. We're not talking about a city in a costal area that just had to get slightly lower than the sea level, we're talking about a landmass with a surface 3 million sq miles that needs to have disappeared, all the way down to the sea floor, around 2.5 miles below the surface of the ocean. That's a volume of at LEAST 12.5 cubic miles of earth that has to disappear, and we don't find that anywhere.

 

I think we need to assume two things:
1. The land mass has been exaggerated by someone or multiple people who came before the great Solon.
2. It's sunk.

 

Those are the same kind of assumptions creationists adopt when they argue for the literal interpretation of Genesis. If Atlantis was a bible story I could imagine those assumptions being championed.

I will grant you that a mythical lost city is somewhat more plausible than the existence of God but not much, particularly when you consider the evidence.

 

That's called the Prosecuter's fallacy.

 

If Atlantis was real, that would be awesome.
But if it was real, we should have found it by now. And seriously, the legend is that Atlantis was sunk because they pissed off the Greek gods. Who still believes in the Greek gods?

 

Well, there are less fantastical theories.

He and colleagues have a theory pointing to an upwelling of material through the Earth's mantle beneath the North Atlantic Ocean called the Icelandic Plume. (The plume iscentered under Iceland.)
The plume works like a pipe carrying hot magma from deep within the Earth to right below the surface, where it spreads out like a giant mushroom, according to White. Sometimes the material is unusually hot, and it spreads out in a giant hot ripple.

The researchers believe that such a giant hot ripple pushed the lost landscape above the North Atlantic, then as the ripple passed, the land fell back beneath the ocean.

This theory is supported by other new research showing that the chemical composition of rocks in the V-shaped ridges on the ocean floor around Iceland contains a record of hot magma surges like this one. Although this study, led by Heather Poore, also one of White's students, looked back only about 30 million years, White said he is hopeful ongoing research will pinpoint an older ridge that recorded this particular hot ripple.

http://www.livescience.com/14974-geologists-remains-landscape-rose-north-atlantic-ocean-56-million-years-sinking.html


I buy it, and hope that eventually more answers will be found.

 

The landmass could have been exaggerated.

Or it could have drowned at the end of the Ice Age

 

I buy the idea of an island country called atlantis, that was advanced for its time in antiquity that could have been destroyed by a natural distaster.

But not the "Atlantis of fiction" I doubt the real atlantis was an expansionist empire or anything like that, had magical tech, or really influenced anything outside of their local area.

 

Obviously it is located on the back of a giant turtle which must surface every few thousand years to feed on penguins.

 

The main thing I want to know is whether the "Dunk It" pun was intentional for a civilization that was destroyed by mass flooding.

 

will somebody spawn a jcc thread from this so i can spam it?

 

I nearly picked up a book today that's about sunken civilizations and cities and the like. Timewise, it would line up, but at a much slower pace, with that rise in sea levels from the end of the ice age, but that area off of Southeast Asia is clearly observable. With Atlantis, we've an idea of the size that puts it huge, certainly not a city or even a small region. And we're told where to look. When we do those two things, we find an area that simply couldn't have had that landmass. This isn't in line with something like SE Asia because that landmass is still there, just submerged. The North Atlantic isn't the same case.

 

Undeniable proof!

 

Reminder, this is a Senate thread (even with the Atlantis topic), and for a Senate thread, it's a discussion of ideas, not links without context or general 'filler' posts. They should be contributing to the discussion itself in some way. I'd rather not have to, but will start editing out those posts if they remain a significant share of posts going forward.

 

Not at all, I actually wanted to start with a different myth but thought it might be too controversial as a first topic, so I decided on something a bit more kid-friendly.

 

If we had some ham we could make a ham and cheese sandwich, if we had some cheese

That's a good article but the whole premise is that geologists have "recently discovered this roughly 56-million-year-old landscape". The giant hot ripple theory relates to the formation of geological structures tens of millions of years ago. I don't think there was much in way of man made cities or civilisations that far back. The time frame for the mythical 'Atlantis' is recent history by comparison.

I still say Atlantis is thoroughly debunked as just campfire stories. I mean, we are talking Plato here. What has Plato ever done to further the cause of science?