Google refutes UK tabloid's story on Atlantis existence

A Google Earth official on Saturday denied the London tabloid The Sun's claim on the existence of Atlantis, a legendary island which Plato had described sinking into the ocean "in a single day and night of misfortune" around 9000 BC.

The Sun on Friday published pictures from Google Earth showing what resembles a city street grid on the ocean floor west of Morocco, in an area known as the Madeira Abyssal plane, about 960 km off the African coast.

But Google says the undersea grid lines spotted while browsing Google Earth's ocean maps by an aeronautical engineer from Chester in northwestern England, Bernie Bamford, are data artifacts rather than sunken streets.

"What users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process," a Google spokesman said. "Bathymetric (or sea-floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data. The fact that there are blank spots between each of these lines is a sign of how little we really know about the world's oceans."

In his book Timaeus, Plato describes Atlantis thus: "This great island lay over against the Pillars of Heracles, in extent greater than Libya and Asia put together, and was the passage to other islands and to a great ocean of which the Mediterranean sea was only the harbor; and within the Pillars the empire of Atlantis reached in Europe to Tyrrhenia and in Libya to Egypt."

Plato wrote that the island was struck by violent earthquakes and floods and subsequently sank beneath the sea.