Hey guys. So…my sister is a graduate student at Stanford University (Geophysics), and she sent me an album of screenshots she took (using Google Earth) of various underwater locations in or near the Caribbean Sea that she had used in a presentation. Before attending grad school, she worked at a company that did remote sensing for detecting submarine terrorist threats.
The photos in the album that she sent me are very, very interesting, IMO. I’ve attached a link to my Google plus account.
Hmm, maybe you could shed some more light on why they are very, very interesting?
Deep-sea jogging trails?
Since there is no apparent question in the OP, let’s move this over to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Sorry, I only meant to apply the very, very superlative for the photos #, 4, 6 7, 8, and 10. The other photos in the album are, to me at least, mere curiosities and landmarks (such as the first one which is probably just a fairly large seamount/volcano). Photos $4, 6, 7, 8, and 10 are hard to reconcile with my understanding of general scientific principles and overall education, which probably isn’t saying much (the other ones are easily explained, I think, by wave action, especially the last two photos).
Note: The following refers only to those numbered photos above: =)
The main reason is because of evidence that much of Earth’s topography, including the land below the oceans, has a fractal-like nature. This assertion is cited in a paper written by Jayne, St. Laurent, Gille (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Florida State University, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, respectively) titled Special Issue - Bathymetry from Space - Connections Between Ocean Floor Topography and Earth’s Climate.
Quoting a description of a sea floor topographical (bathymetrical) map (emphasis mine):
A more common example of the fractal nature of the Earth’s geology is that of coastlines. It can be easily observed that the coastline of any nation in the world is “rough,” viewed from above in space. The fractal nature of the coastline refers to the fact that this roughness is independent of distance of viewing; in other words, it is scale-invariant, or self-similar. So not only will the coastline of Alaska, for instance, be jagged and rough viewed from 200 miles above Alaska, but it will remain so viewed from 20 miles, 2 miles, … , 20 m, 2 m, 0.2 m, etc. At no non-microscopic scale can we observe that the coastline suddenly loses its roughness.
A paradox that has emerged from this finding is that the arc length of a coastline between two points along a coast that have a finite shortest path distance, according to the traditional “classical” definition of arc length, should have an arc length that increases without bound as one subdivides the coastline into some number of subarcs, approximating each subarc with a straight line, thereupon summing up the lengths of these straight lines to estimate the total length of the coastline. “Classical,” or “rectifiable” curves are ones whose approximated length by this method described converge to a finite length (real number) rather than increase without bound (diverge).
Translating the above fact from two-dimensional coastlines to three-dimensional topographic surfaces, the probability of even a very small patch of land, either subsurface or above, exhibiting angular geological geometry is exceedingly low, let alone for cliffs that are at the scale of either thousands or hundreds of feet, with sharp and repeated angles, which should be extraordinarily rare. (This happening would be analogous to, I speculate, the coastline of Alaska suddenly becoming “straight.”)
I thought at first that the cliffs could be a result of major earthquake faulting…but it’s not very likely IMO; as far as I know, faults in actuality are more like jagged fractures themselves, with the likelihood of faults that are hundreds of feet high in vertical displacement and highly linear over a distance of thousands of feet being almost preposterously unlikely.
I just can’t think of any phenomena that would have formed at least some of the images in those photos. They stand out to me as anomalous, out-of-place, and almost alien. If they were on dry land, I would be at a loss as to explain images #4, 6, 7, 8, and 10, and although I would like to very much deny it, I couldn’t help but think that the no matter how much time the Earth has been in existence, how great are the forces acting on the Earth, that there are some things and events whose probabilities are so low that they shouldn’t exist or form even if we waited until the “end” of the universe…and that if I saw this above land, I would feel a chill run down my spine and feel that we are not alone in this universe.
But we don’t know the oceans as well as we do the land, and we don’t actually know if the topography is really what is being shown. I’m wondering what your 1) impressions, 2) scientific/geological explanations are on #4, 6, 7, 8.
It’s Atlantis! (sorry)
Without really knowing what I’m looking at, the images remind me of early computer graphics that weren’t detailed enough, and would, for example, depict a mountainside as straight and flat. But again, that’s my uneducated impression.
The only way to really know for sure what’s down there is to send an expedition I guess.
I’m kind of curious as to how prevalent and well-known the Atlantis myth is in the United States. If I ask 100 random people in the U.S. who are 30 years old, and ask them what they know about Atlantis, how many do you think would say “no idea” or “it’s a casino/resort?” Is it really something that “everyone’s heard about,” or is it just something that people who are into New Age spirituality or highly educated / well-informed are aware about? (Any reason in particular for bringing Atlantis up?)
All you’re seeing are areas where our maps of undersea terrain are low resolution.
I mentioned Atlantis for a couple of reasons. First, because your images reminded me of other underwater mapping images with anomalies that were claimed to be “proof” of Atlantis but turned out to be technical glitches of some kind. You’ll probably still find examples of them on the Internet.
The other reason I mentioned it, and please don’t take this the wrong way, was to draw you out if that was indeed where you were headed. I had a hunch that you wanted these images to mean something more than they did. A term like “very, very interesting” without explaining why was one indication. And detailed explanation of the fractal nature of Earth’s geography, without taking into account the resolution of the images, looked more like an attempt to convince yourself of something. (I just re-read that post and saw the line at the end that I didn’t get to the first time: “if I saw this above land, I would feel a chill run down my spine and feel that we are not alone in this universe.” Now I see that my hunch was a certainty.)
I’m not saying this to put you down. I was exactly the same as you the first time I saw a similar image on the Internet and got pulled in by the explanation that it was proof of Atlantis. I’m just trying to let you know, through lessons that I learned, that there’s nothing more to those images.
This. Most of the sea floor that has been mapped has been done so at a very low resolution. These features are artifacts that arise when you make a map with very limited data and have to fill in the blanks.
In addition, graphical representations of the sea floor are virtually always greatly exaggerated in the vertical scale in order to show detail. Thus features that appear to be plunging canyons or steep towering mountains are in fact much less pronounced when viewed to scale: here is an obligatory XKCD graphic that compares the depths of many bodies of water. Note the representations of the Mariana Trench (the deepest point in the ocean) and Mauna Kea (the tallest mountain on Earth) with accurate scaling: they appear as a shallow valley and a low, gently sloping hill, respectively.
OH MY GOD! What could these structures possibly be??? Ancient roads? An ancient city under the Mississippi?
Dredging trails
Personally, I believe that the Caribbean archipelago was once a continuous chain of land that isolated the Caribbean basin from the Atlantic Ocean, and the Caribbean Sea as it exists today did not do so prior to the catastrophe which involved the Atlantic Ocean breaking through the chain of land which acted as a dam, filling the dry basin and transforming it into the Caribbean Sea; the islands in the archipelago, namely Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Dominica, Guadaloupe, St. Vincent, etc. are the remnants of that continuous mountain range.
(This has nothing to do with Atlantis.) This catastrophe probably happened millions of years ago. I speculate that an advanced alien civilization could have lived in that dry basin millions of years ago and carved out these formations and structures from the land which was then dry, and thousands of feet (up to 16,000 ft) below sea level.
It’s worse than I suspected…
That’s just utter bullshit, I can tell you as a trained geologist. Lots of landforms are pretty damn angular and geometric, from faults to joints. Behold this geometric shit. Aliens, amIright?
Thanks, Mr. Dibble. Now I have that crow-hoppin’ music from Looney Tunes stuck in my head.
