The Awl

Did They Find Atlantis?

Dave Bry — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 14:20:32 +0000

In a strange coincidence of timing, considering the horrible news and footage coming out of Japan over the past three days, an international team of scientists working in south Spain believe they have pinpointed the location of the city of Atlantis. This is a major big deal in archeology. Plato wrote about Atlantis in 360 B.C. It was said to have been an engineering marvel located near the "Pillars of Hercules" (as the Straits of Gibralter were called back then), that it was built around an island temple to Poseidon which was surrounded by concentric rings of water and land, like a bulls-eye, and that it was "swallowed up by the sea and vanished" over a single day and night thousands of years earlier. People have been telling stories, and writing songs, and making movies and TV shows about it since—and searching for evidence to prove that it did in fact, ever exist.

Over the past few years, as explained in an hour-long documentary called Finding Atlantis that aired last night on the National Geographic channel, a group of scientists led by Richard Freund of the University of Hartford have been studying satellite imagery and deep ground radar maps of a patch of coastal mud-flats in Dona Ana Park, just outside the Spanish city of Cadiz. Freund believes that Atlantis is, in fact, another name for the biblical city of Tarshish (also known as "Tartessos"), which was thought to have been destroyed by a tsunami in the third millenium B.C.

Satellite imagery sure is helping archeologists a lot. Remember last year, the same stuff helped buttress claims—as detailed in David Grann's excellent book The Lost City of Z—that a complex civilization once existed in the Amazon: The legendary city of El Dorado, perhaps.

Interestingly, though, Freund found his most compelling evidence about Atlantis 150 miles inland from where he believes the city was located. In central Spain, in the ancient ruins of a number of smaller "ritual cities" that have been excavated by archeologists. The ruins have structures that look like they were modeled after the temple of Poseidon that Plato described. And they are marked with symbols in the shape of the bulls-eye. Freund believes that these ritual cities were built by Atlanteans who survived the tsunami and wanted to memorialize their great lost city.

I'm sure other scientists will come forward to say Freund is full of shit. But I found the National Geographic show pretty convincing. It airs again Tuesday at 8, if you want to watch.

Lastly, as noted and displayed above, there have been many songs written about Atlantis over the years. I think the video for this next one probably gives us the most accurate vision of what life there was really like.

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Filming Nature Footage Arduous, Amazing, Disgusting, Beautiful

Dave Bry — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:45:12 +0000

Nice piece in the Times today about the process that went into filming the state-of-the-art nature footage featured in the Discovery Channel's new series "Life," which debuts Sunday. "In that first episode viewers see a strawberry dart frog's tadpoles come to life, then watch the mother carry each baby up a rainforest tree to a safe perch inside a bromeliad plant. Then they see the mother lay eggs to feed the newborns until they can move on their own, weeks later. Without any dialogue the shots tell a gripping story about a mother's commitment to her offspring." The National Geographic clip above, from 2008, shows the same. The Discovery version (which will by narrated by Oprah Winfrey, who will hopefully refrain from the funny-style inflection and corny jokes) was shot by a guy named Kevin Flay, who used a camera slightly larger than a tube of lipstick.

"Mr. Flay mounted the Iconix camera on a tripod and a track to capture the mother making her way across the canopy floor. Then he had to find a way to show the frog making the arduous climb up a tree to find a new home for her tadpoles. 'For that, we decided we needed to take some sort of crane device,' he said, 'just to help give the sense of the epic journey the frog was taking.' After the cameras were set, 'it's just patience-waiting for the frog to do the right thing for you, he said."

Like feed her own eggs to her young. Ewww, gross! But, also, Wow, cool!

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Inaccessible Vistas More Accessible Via Internet

Dave Bry — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:00:53 +0000

It's so good that different people are equipped to do different things. If I was to try to assemble my own motorized paraglider and fly over the Sahara Desert taking pictures, I would die probably ten minutes into the assembly part. Luckily, there's folks like National Geographic photographer George Steinmetz in the world, so I can do what I do best: sit at my computer. Breathtaking photography is here.

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That Tsingy Is Too Tough

Dave Bry — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:40:23 +0000

Places I'd like to visit if my feet were made of giant foam cushions reinforced with kevlar: The Tsingy de Bemaraha national park and reserve in Madagascar. "This 600-square-mile protected area is an island unto itself," according to a National Geographic story with a gorgeous photo gallery, "a kind of biofortress, rugged, largely unexplored, and made nearly impenetrable by the massive limestone formation-the tsingy-running through it." Made up of jagged, 300-foot-tall stone spires called "grikes," the tsingy is apparently like Manhattan combined with the most horrible gravel driveway you ever stepped on barefoot.

It is also teeming with all sorts of animals that have evolved in seclusion from the rest of the world, Galapagos Islands style. Giant snails, dwarf chameleons, Decken's sifaka lemurs (whose feet are made of giant foam cushions reinforced with kevlar) and their predators, the cat-like fossa. (If you have kids, you might recognize some of the names from Dreamworks popular Madagascar franchise.) It looks and sounds like one of the most amazing spots on the planet. But also, sadly, one of the least comfortable.

In Malagasy tsingy means 'where one cannot walk barefoot,' but we found that the landscape demanded much more than sturdy shoes. In several spots we tried exploring using rock-climbing gear. The tsingy chewed equipment and flesh with equal ease. At times it was like climbing amid giant skewers, the consequences of a fall suggested in the mutilated trunks of toppled trees below... We stemmed narrow ravines and nervously straddled fins that were like fences topped with broken glass. The rock pierced our boots, leaving holes in the rubber. Usually we came over needle-sharp rises only to descend onto mats of thin soil covering yet more serrated rock.

Great. More serrated rock. I'm not going there. But again, do look at the photos. They are breathtaking.

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