Google Finds Atlantis!

Google Earth's new ocean topography maps are so thorough and fascinating that new discoveries are being, um, unearthed every day. Why, just last week, a British aeronautical engineer was poking around the new ocean-mapping program when he discovered an odd grid pattern on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. The grid was spotted some 600 miles off the Canary Islands and, according to CNet, appeared to be as big as Wales. Said engineer had to take about five minutes before he reached the inevitable conclusion: The grid is, he decided, the layout of a massive underwater city. In fact, it's nothing less than the lost continent of Atlantis, which sank beneath the waves oh so many millennia ago!

Alas, the truth is sadly more mundane. As word of this discovery spread around the world and the Internet, Google's representatives had to announce that no, this wasn't Atlantis. And it wasn't a really ambitious tic-tac-toe, either. It was just a trick of sonar-mapping technology. The bathymetric data used in Google Earth was collected by a boat grid-mapping the ocean floor, and the lines are a quirk in the sonar readings that merely trace the path of the boat as its crew does its work. So, no, no Atlantis. Or Sasquatch, Yeti, or redemption for Michael Vick.

But is the Atlantis story really dead? Not if ordinary people have a say in it. According to the New York Times, the debate is still raging on social-media sites all over the world. In fact, CNet's story alone has an astonishing 5,971 diggs. After all, who needs the truth when Internet rumors are so much more fun?