'lost City' Found Off Cuba - Is It Atlantis?

Barely touched since the colonial era of piracy and shipwrecks, sea bottoms around Cuba are an underwater fantasy world promising treasure-laden sunken ships, insights into times gone by — and maybe even a lost city.

As well as gold-laden Spanish galleons, important secrets and insights into regional history, global environment trends, ancient geography and marine science also lurk in the depths.

A ‘lost city’, that could turn out to be the fabled city of Atlantis, has been located by a Canadian scientific research team. In a press release dated Havana, 14 May 2001 Reuters of London informed the world that Soviet-born ocean engineer Paulina Zelitsky, the president of Canadian-based company Advanced Digital Communications (ADC), had detected ‘a sunken city’ in deep waters off the west coast of Cuba, the largest island of the Caribbean.

“It’s a new frontier,’’ says Zelitsky poring over video images of hitherto unseen seafloor taken by underwater robots.

“We are the first people ever to see the bottom of Cuban waters over 50 meters. … It’s so exciting. We are discovering the influence of currents on global climate, volcanoes, the history of formation of Caribbean islands, numerous historic wrecks and even possibly a sunken city built in the pre-classic period and populated by an advanced civilization similar to the early Teotihuacan culture of Yucatan,” she said.

ADC has also been exploring a string of underwater volcanoes about 5,000 feet deep off Cuba’s western tip, where millions of years ago a strip of land once joined the island to Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

LOST CITY OFF WESTERN CUBA?

Most intriguingly, researchers using sonar equipment have discovered, at a depth of about 2,200 feet, a huge land plateau with clear images of what appears to be urban development partly covered by sand. From above, the shapes resemble pyramids, roads and buildings.

Satellite-integrated ocean bottom positioning systems, echo sounders and high precision side-scan double-frequency sonar have detected the presence of what are being described as ‘shapes’ that ‘resemble pyramids, roads and buildings’. Their regularity seems consistent with the idea that they represent an ‘urban development’ composed of ‘symmetrical architecture’.

Paulina is cautious about what lies beneath the glistening blue waters of the Yucatán Channel, admitting only that she is ‘excited but reluctant to speculate until a joint investigation with the Cuban Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society takes place.