Lost City of Atlantis Off the Coast of Brazil?
Always the stories of legend, it appears the famed lost city of Atlantis is one step closer to being real with Tuesday's discovery of granite rock found 900 miles off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in the Atlantic Ocean.
Granite is important to the mystery because the stone is normally found on dry land which suggests it once was at a higher elevation before sinking into the sea, reported The Japan Times.
The finding was made in conjunction with The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) and the Geology Service of Brazil (CPRM).
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Almost 3,000 years ago, ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote of Atlantis and the erupted volcanoes that destroyed the land and sunk it into the Atlantic. The area however, appears to be in a different location than what Plato described, which is believed to be in the Mediterranean.
Roberto Ventura Santos, the CPRM geology director believes "Brazil's Atlantis" is mostly symbolic, according to The Huffington Post.
"Obviously, we don't expect to find a lost city in the middle of the Atlantic," he said to the Telegraph. "But if it is the case that we find a continent in the middle of the ocean, it will be a very big discovery that could have various implications in relation to the extension of the continental shelf."
Gifu University professor, Shinichi Kawakami, told The Japan Times, "South America and Africa used to be a huge, unified continent. The area in question may have been left in water as the continent was separated in line with the movements of plates."
JAMSTEC will continue to pursue it's advancements in the ocean and released this statement on their website, "to contribute to the advancement of academic research in addition to the improvement of marine science and technology by proceeding the fundamental research and development on marine, and the cooperative activities on the academic research related to the Ocean for the benefit of the peace and human welfare."
Atlantis was previously thought to be found in 2011 off the coast of Spain.
