More recently Navarro, in an argument mainly geological, has also
called attention to the continental character of some species of
the fauna and flora of the eastern Atlantic islands, with the same
implications as his predecessors.[26] But there seems to be little real
addition to the evidence of this nature; and no one has made it more
apposite to the existence of Atlantis Island 12,000 or so years ago.
EVIDENCE OF SUBMERGENCE
The great final catastrophe of Atlantis would surely write its record
on the rocks both of the sea bed and the continental land masses. As to
the ocean bottom it would be the natural repository for vitreous and
other rocky products of volcanic and seismic action occurring above it.
Termier relates what he considers very significant indications at a
point 500 miles north of the Azores at a depth of 1,700 fathoms, where
the grappling irons of a cable-mending ship dragged for several days
over a mountainous surface of peaks and pinnacles, bringing up “little
mineral splinters” evidently “detached from a bare rock, an actual
outcropping sharp-edged and angular.” These fragments were all of a
non-crystalline vitreous lava called tachylyte, which “could solidify
into this condition only under atmospheric pressure.” He infers that
the territory in question was covered with lava flows while it was
still above water and subsequently descended to its present depth;
also from the general condition of the rock surface that the caving
in followed very closely on the emission of the lavas and that this
collapse was sudden. He thinks, therefore, “that the entire region
north of the Azores and perhaps the very region of the Azores, of
which they may be only the visible ruins, was very recently submerged,
probably during the epoch which the geologists call the present.” He
believes also that like results would follow a “detailed dredging to
the south and the southwest of these islands.”[27]
It will be observed that the whole of this very tempting edifice is
built on the declared impossibility of tachylyte forming on the sea
bottom under heavy water pressure. But Professor Schuchert insists
that: “It is not pressure so much as it is a quick loss of temperature
that brings about the vitreous structure in lava. In other words,
vitreous lava apparently can be formed as well in the ocean depths as
on the lands. What the cable layers got was probably the superficial
glassy crust of probable subterranean lava flows.”[28] If that be so,
there is, of course, no need to infer a descent of territory into the
depths in that region of the mid-Atlantic. This tachylyte matter seems
enveloped in uncertainty.
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