Latest / The Infographics Show Podcast / The Disturbing Secrets of the Black Spot in the Sahara

Transcript

The Disturbing Secrets of the Black Spot in the Sahara · The Infographics Show Podcast

• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Okay, I want you to close your eyes for a second. Well,
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: maybe don't close them if you're driving, but use your imagination.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: I want you to picture yourself just floating, drifting in
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: low Earth orbit. You're up there in the quiet, looking
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: down to our planet. You pass over the deep blue
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: of the Atlantic, you hit the western coast of Africa,
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: and then you were staring down at the Sahara Desert
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: and it is just this endless, undulating ocean of sand, gold, rust, ochre,
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: just miles and miles and miles of well of what
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: looks like nothing.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: It's one of the most hostile and beautiful landscapes on Earth,
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: no question exactly.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: But then as you're floating over it, something breaks that pattern.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Right there in the middle of the Mauritanian desert, something
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: is staring back at you, and I yeah, and I
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: don't mean that in some kind of metaphorical sense. I
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: mean a massive, perfect blue and brown bull's eye.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: It's just it's startling to see from space.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: It's forty kilometers wide, it has what looks like an
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: iris of pupil, these incredible concentric rings. It looks completely artificial.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: It does like a target that some god painted on
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: the desert floor, or maybe I don't know, a landing
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: pad for something absolutely enormous.
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: It is uncanny. When the first astronauts started going up
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: in the Gemini missions, they actually used it as a
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: landmark because it was so distinct.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: They could see it that clearly.
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it was one of the first things they'd
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: look for. They nicknamed it the Eye of the Sahara.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: Geologists of course call it the Rechet structure.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: But and this is the big butt. If you have
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: been anywhere on YouTube in the last say five or
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: six years, and I know you have, you probably know
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: it by a different name entirely. You've heard the whisper
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: the theory that this isn't just some weird rock formation.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: You've heard that this is the smoking gun, that what
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: we're actually looking at are the skeletal remains of the
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: lost city of Atlantis.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: The fabled city of Rings, the empire that sank beneath
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: the waves.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: That's the one, and that right there is the tension
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: we're going to be diving into today. It's this incredible conflict.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: On one side, you have millions of people, you have
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Internet sleuths and some very very persuasive video essayists who
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: are absolutely convinced that this is the greatest archaeological discovery
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: of all time, just hiding in plain sight.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: And on the other side, on the other.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: Side, you have the geologists who look the same structure
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: and see something totally different. They see a one hundred
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: million year old magmatic blister that's been sliced open by erosion.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: Right, it's a clash between a really, really seductive story
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: and a well, a really complex geological reality.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: So that is our mission today here on Beyon Infographics.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: We're not just going to look at the pretty satellite pictures.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: We are going to read the fine print of the.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: Earth itself, getting into the details.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: We are going to dig into the ancient texts, the mineralogy,
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: the fluid dynamics of magma, and maybe most importantly, the
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: psychology of why we want this to be true so badly.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, and I'll be honest, I'm the guy
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: who truly deeply wants to believe that the magic.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: Is real, and I'm here to be the resident wet blanket. No,
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: I'm just kidding. I'm here to try and show you
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: that the story the geology tells is actually it's arguably
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: cooler than the magic.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: We will see about that, I remain skeptical. But before
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: we get completely lost in the desert sands, I just
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: have one quick request for all of you listening. We
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: put a ton of work into digging up these sources
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: and putting these stories together. So if you enjoy this
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: kind of really detailed exploration, please just take two seconds
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: to rate the show five stars on whatever app you're using.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: It really does help. It helps other people find the show.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: It keeps the lights on, and let's us keep unfolding
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: these maps. So thank you for that. Okay, let's start
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: with the phenomenon itself, because we really can't ignore the
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: cultural moment here. This theory, the idea that the eye
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: of the Sahara is Atlantis. It's not brand new, is it.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: No, not at all? Not entirely floating around in you know,
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: fringe communities for a good while. There were a couple
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: of guys Georgia s Alexander and Natalas Rosen who were
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: writing about it back in the late two thousands.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: But it was pretty niche back then, oh very niche.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: It didn't really explode into the mainstream consciousness until quite.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: Recently, and That's where Jimmy Corsetti comes.
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: In, right, Jimmy Corsetti. He runs a YouTube channel called
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: bright Insight. And you know, we have to give credit
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: where it's due. The man is this phenomenal communicator, a
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: truly gifted storyteller.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: He is. His background is in communications. Yeah, and he
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: was a fraud investigator, I believe, which is interesting because
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: he structures his arguments like he's presenting a case in court.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: That's a great way to put It's very methodical. Here's
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: exhibit A, here's exhibit B.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: I remember watching his first big video on this. I
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: think it's got something like what twenty million views now
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: maybe more.
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: It's a huge number.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: And I have to admit I sat there and I
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: watched the whole thing and I had goosebumps. I really did.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: Because he doesn't just come out and say, hey, I
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: think this is Atlantis.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: Oh, it's much more clever than that.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: He pulls up Plato's original text. He pulls up the
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: high red satellite imagery from Google Earth, and he starts
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: layering them one on top of the other, and visually,
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: just on a purely visual level, it is startling.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: It is. I mean, if you just look at the
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: surface level, and you don't dig any deeper. The coincidences
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: seem absolutely impossible to ignore. It feels like a lock.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: So let's walk through those coincidences, because this is the
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: core of it. This is why the theory went so viral.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: Let's start with Plato, the source material, the only source material.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: In his dialogues, The Timius and the Critias, he gives
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: a very specific description of Atlantis. First, he says the
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: capital city was circular.
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: Check the reachet is, for all intents and purposes circular.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: Then he says it was made of concentric rings of
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: water and land, specifically, two rings of land and three
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: rings of water, all surrounding a central island.
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: And when you look at the reachet from space, you
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: see these high circular rings, which would be the land rings, right,
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: land rings, separated by these wide circular depressions, which, if
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: you just filled them with water, would be the water rings.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: It looks exactly like the diagrams you see in books
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: about Atlantis. It's uncanny, it really is. Okay. Then Plato
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: says there was an opening to the sea to the south,
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: a great canal that was built to connect the city
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: to the ocean. You pull up Google Earth, you look
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: at the rechat and there is this very distinct breach
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: in the outer rings pointing towards the south southwest.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: It's what geologists call an o ed or a waddy,
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: a dry river bed essentially. But yes, it's an opening
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: to the south.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: It's an opening. It's there. Then Plato says the city
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: was sheltered by high mountains to the north, which were
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: famous for their quote number, variety and beauty. And to
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: the south of the city there was a vast oblong
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: plane stretching out towards the sea.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: And again, you just pan out on the mat.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: You open Google Earth, you look north of the richat mountains,
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: you look south, a vast flat plain.
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: It feels like you're just taking boxes on a checklist,
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: doesn't It feels like you're reading the legend on a
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: map that suddenly makes sense.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: It feels like a slam dug. It really does. And
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: then Corsetti and the other theorists they bring in what
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: they say is physical evidence from the.
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: Ground right, moving beyond just the visuals.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: They point out that if you go into those depressions,
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: the low areas between the rings, the sand is salty,
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: you can find these white, crusty salt deposits everywhere. And
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: the argument is salt means ocean, ocean water, So the
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: argument is that these rings, these canals were once filled
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: with sea water.
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: Which would imply that either the Atlantic Ocean was once
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: much much higher or that this entire section of Africa
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: was much lower exactly.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: And then then comes the climax of the story, the destruction.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: Plato says Atlantis was destroyed in a single day and
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: night of misfortune and vanished beneath the waves cataclysm. The
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: cataclysm and the theory beautifully connects this to the younger,
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: driest impact hypothesis.
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: Which is the idea that a comet or asteroid fragment
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: hit the North American ice sheets about twelve eight hundred
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: years ago, right and.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: That impact caused a massive catastrophic meltwater pulse and sent
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: a global tsunami ripping across the planet.
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: The thinking being that a wave of unimaginable size swept
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: across North Africa completely washed over the reshot, scoured the
• 8:15
  Speaker 2: city clean, buried it, and then receded, leaving behind all
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: the salt and the mud as evidence.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: And to back that up of CORSETI points to these
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: huge sweeping patterns in the desert sand around the structure,
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: giant ripple marks, and he says, look, that's evidence of
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: massive waterflow. So you see how it all fits together.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: It's a compelling narrative. It ties everything up in a
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: neat little bow. You have the ancient text, you have
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: the satellite visual, you have the supposed ground proof, and
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: you have this catastrophic ending that explains why it was lost.
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: It's a fantastic story.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: It's the ultimate I told you so to every skeptical
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: history teacher I ever had.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: It is a very, very sexy theory. I completely get
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: the appeal. I do. We all want the world to
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: be more mysterious than it is. We want to believe
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: that we are a species with amnesia, and if we
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: just look in the right spot, we'll finally remember our
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: lost golden age.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: I can hear a butt the size of a continent
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: coming in your voice right now.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: There is a massive butt, a truly colossal one. Because
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: while visual match is so satisfying, the moment, the very
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: moment you start to apply any kind of real rigor,
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: the moment you actually check the measurements, you check the translations.
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: You check the rock chemistry. The theory doesn't just develop
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: a few cracks, It completely utterly disintegrates.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: See, I hate it when you do this. You're about
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: to ruin my entire fantasy with math, aren't you.
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: I Am absolutely going to ruin it with math and
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: with ancient Greek and with radiometric dating.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: Oh boy, Okay, all right, let's rip the bandaid off.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: Let's start with the source itself. Let's start with Plato. Okay,
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: because the theorists, they treat Plato's text like it's a
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: pirate treasure map. You know, X marks the spot. But
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: was it ever intended to be that?
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: That's the fundamental question. And to answer it, we have
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: to understand the source Atlantis. The story of Atlantis only
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: exists in two dialogues written by the philosopher Plato around
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: three sixty BC, the Timaeus and the Critius, and nowhere else,
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: nowhere else. It is not a herotogus, the Father of History.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: It's not in any Egyptian hieroglyphs that we've ever found,
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: it's not on any Sumerian tablets. It is a story
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: that is completely unique to Plato.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: But the story inside the text, it claims to be
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: much older. Right. This is where the famous game of
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: telephone comes in.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: It is the ultimate game of historical telephone. It's a
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: story within a story within a story.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: So walk us through that chain of custody.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: Okay. So Plato is writing this. In the dialogue, he
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: has a character Cretius the Younger telling the story. Critias
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: says he heard it from his grandfather, who was also
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: named Critius. We'll call him Critius the Elder.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: Okay, So that's one step back.
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: Cretus the Elder, in turn, heard it from his father,
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: a man named Dropides. Dropides was a close friend and
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: relative of Solon, the great Athenian lawmaker and poet.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: Solon. Okay, I know him. He's a real historical.
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: Figure, a very real, very famous figure. And the story
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: goes that Solon, while traveling in Egypt around six hundred BC,
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: was told the entire history of Atlantis by an unnamed
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: Egyptian priest in the city of ciss.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: So let me get this straight. From the supposed Egyptian
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: priest to Solon, then sol On to drop Ades, drop
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: Ads to Cretius the Elder, Critius the Elder to Critius
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: the Younger, and then finally Critius the younger to Plato
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: who writes it all down.
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: That's the chain. And notice the gap. Solon was in
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: Egypt around six hundred BC. Plato wrote this down around
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: three hundred and sixty BC. That is a two hundred
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: and forty year gap.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: Passed down orally through at least four different people exactly.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: And we have to remember who Plato was. He wasn't
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: a historian, he wasn't an archaeologist. He was a philosopher.
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: His entire career was built on using myths and allegories
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: to make philosophical points, like.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: The allegory of the cave.
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: The cave is the perfect example, or the ring of Guiges.
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: That's a myth he uses to talk about morality and justice.
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: Atlantis wasn't the point of the story. It was a
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: plot device to make a bigger point, and.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: The point was that Atlantis was the villain.
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: Right. Yes, that is the single most important detail that
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: people who want it to be real always forget. In
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: Plato's story, Atlantis is the corrupt, materialistic, imperialist naval power.
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: They're the bad.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: Guys, they're the evil empire.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: They are, and they launch an unprovoked attack on ancient Athens,
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: which Plato describes as this perfect agrarian, spiritually pure, socialist
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: style utopia. The whole point of the story was to
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: serve as a pautionary tale. It was to show that
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: a modest, virtuous state like his idealized Athens will always
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: in the end defeat a wealthy, arrogant and corrupt empire
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: like Atlantis.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: So it's basically political fan fiction for his own time.
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: Essentially, yes, it was a thinly veiled warning to the
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: Athens of his own day, which was becoming very much
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: a naval empire. But okay, let's play the game.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: I want to play the game.
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: Let's assume for a second that it's all true that
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: Solon really did hear a story about a real place
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: from a real priest. Let's look at the math. This
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: is where the internet sleuths usually just gloss over the
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: details or frankly get them wrong.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: Okay, hit me with the numbers. Let's do this.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: Plato gives us very specific measurements in a unit called stadia.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: The Greek stadium was a standard unit of length, roughly
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: equivalent to about one hundred and eighty five meters or
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: around six hundred and seven.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: Feet okay, one hundred and eighty five meters.
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: Got it. He says, the central island of Atlantis, where
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: the royal talis was, was five stadia in diameter.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: Okay, so five times one hundred and eighty five meters,
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: that's nine hundred and twenty five meters, so less than
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: a single kilometer across about half a mile, a tiny
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: little central island, very small. He then goes on to
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: describe the rings of water and land around it. The
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: first water ring was one stadium wide. The first land
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: ring was two stadia, The next water was two, the
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: next land was three, and so on.
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: He's very specific, very specific. When you add all of
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: that up, the central island, plus all the land rings
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: and all the water rings, the total diameter of the
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: entire city of Atlantis was about twenty seven stadia.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: Okay, the meth twenty seven times one hundred and eighty
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: five meters, that's four nine hundred ninety five meters, so
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: just under five kilometers. We're about three miles across.
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: Exactly between four point two and five kilometers tops. That
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: is the explicit size of the capital city that Plato described.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: Okay, So how big is the rich At structure.
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: Again, the outermost ring of the rich At structure is
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: forty kilometers across. That's about twenty five miles wide.
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: Whoa, okay, wait, that's not even close.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: Not even the same ballpark.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: So the rich At structure is almost ten times bigger
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: than the city Plato described.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: It's an order of magnitude different. It's like finding a
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: footprint the size of a bus and saying it belongs
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: to a human. The scale is completely wrong. To make
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: the rich At fit Plato's description, you have to arbitrarily
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: decide which of its many rings count and which ones don't.
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: Or you have to argue that Plato, a man who
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: is obsessed with geometry and perfect numbers, just casually got
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: his measurements wrong by a factor of ten.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: That is a huge, huge discrepancy. I've seen Corsetti's video
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: where he says the size is identical. How does he
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: get there?
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: He gets there by being very creative with the measurements.
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: He takes a measurement from Plato that describes the size
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: of the entire plain south of the city and tries
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: to apply it to the city itself. It's a misreading
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: of the text, plain and simple. The city was small,
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: the rich Chat is massive.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: Okay, so the map scale is just it's completely off.
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: What about the location. Plato says beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: Everyone agrees that's the Strait.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: Of Gibraltar, right, Yes, that part is pretty much universally accepted.
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: The Pillars of Hercules is the Strait of Gibraltar, the
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: gateway from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: And Plato says Atlantis was an island situated in front
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: of or beyond the Straits in the Atlantic Ocean. That's
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: what we call it the Atlantic Ocean. Correct.
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: Now, where is the Rechat structure.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: It's in Mauritania, West Africa.
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: And it is south of the Straits, but it's deep inland.
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: It's five hundred kilometers that's over three hundred miles from
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: the nearest coastline. It is not an island in the ocean.
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: Ah. But the theory is that North Africa was under one,
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: that the ocean was much higher, and the rich it
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: was a coastal city.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: Okay, So let's look at the geology of that claim.
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: We have very good data on past sea levels. We
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: can look at the sea level curves and twelve thousand
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: years ago, which is when Plato says Atlantis fell.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: That was the end of the Last Ice Age exactly.
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: And because so much of the world's water was locked
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: up in massive continental ice sheets, the global sea level
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: was actually about one hundred and twenty meters or four
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: hundred feet lower than it is today.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: So the coast would have been even further away from the.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: Rice ship, dramatically further away the rich It would have
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: been even more landlocked than it is now. For it
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: to be a coastal city, the entire geological structure of
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: North Africa would have had to radically uplift by hundreds
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: of meters in just a few thousand years, which is
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: geologically impossible. There is zero evidence for that.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: But what if you go way back? Has it ever
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: been underwater?
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: That's a great question. Let's go back to the Cretaceous
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: period about one hundred million years ago. That's when sea
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: levels were at their absolute highest in Earth's history, maybe
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: three hundred meters higher than today. Even then, the reachshot
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: sits on what's called the Mauritanian Plateau, which has an
• 17:07
  Speaker 2: elevation of four hundred to five hundred meters above sea level.
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: It has likely never been underwater in the time that
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: complex life has been on land.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: So it was never a port city. At best, it
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: would have been a high altitude mountain fortress.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: A mountain fortress with no source of fresh water.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: Yes, okay, But what about Herodotus. This is a very
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: specific point I've seen debated online. People say that Herodotus,
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: the father of History, actually put a place called Atlantis
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: on his map of Africa. So if Atlantis is just
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: a myth made up by Plato, why is it on
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: a historian's map from before Plato's time.
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: This is a classic case of a linguistic trap combined
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: with wishful thinking. Herodidus wrote his histories around four to
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: forty BC, which was about eighty years before Plato wrote
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: his dialogue.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: He comes first, He comes first.
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: And he does mention a people called the Landis, but
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: he's very clear about where they live. He locates them
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: near a mountain called Mount Atlas.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: Which is the Atlas Mountains in modern day Morocco and Algeria.
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: Correct, the Atlas Mountains are way up north near the
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: Mediterranean coast. The rich at structure is way down south
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: in the deep Sahara. They are thousands of kilometers apart.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: So it's not the same place at all, not even close.
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: Herodotus says, these Atlanti's people got their names simply because
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: they lived near Mount Atlas. He wasn't describing a lost
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: naval empire with concentric rings of land and water. He
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: was just describing a local Libyan tribe.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: So people see the word Atlante's on an old map
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: and they immediately jump to the conclusion that it must
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: be Plato City. But it's really just a reference to
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: a completely different location and people named after the mountain range.
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: It is pure confirmation bias. You go into it looking
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: for Atlantis, so you see the word at Lanti's and
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: you show, aha, I found it, but you conveniently ignore
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: the fact that the location is wrong, the description is wrong,
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: and the context is wrong.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: Okay, so the text doesn't fit, the math doesn't fit,
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: the location doesn't fit. I'm feeling a little disheartened here.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: I'll be honest.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: The facts can be disappointing.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: Sometimes they can. But I want to pivot now to
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: the rocks themselves, because even if it's not Atlantis, the
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: richet structure is profoundly weird.
• 19:10
  Speaker 2: Oh it's bizarre.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: Nature doesn't usually make perfect bull's eyes. You don't just
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: walk through the woods and find a forty kilometer wide
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: target painted on the ground. There has to be an explanation.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: That is absolutely true. Circular features of that scale and
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: geology are rare, but they do happen, and usually when
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: we see them, our first thought is an impact crater,
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: an asteroid, And for a long.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: Time that's what a lot of scientists thought this was, right, Yeah, astrablime.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: In the mid twentieth century, Yes, that was the leading hypothesis.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: It just looks so much like a crater. But then
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: geologists actually went there. And this is a really crucial
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: point because a lot of the Internet theorists operate from
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: this premise that mainstream science has just ignored the site.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you always hear that, why aren't geologists studying this?
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: Right? But they have been there. Geologists have been crawling
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: all over the reshaw since the nineteen thirty parties. They've
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: mapped it, they've sampled it, they've drilled it. And when
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: they went looking for the telltale sign of an impact,
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: which would be what shock metamorphism, specifically things like shocked
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: quartz when a space rock hits the ground at you know,
• 20:14
  Speaker 2: twenty thousand miles per hour. The pressure is so immense
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: it actually rearranges the crystal lattice of quartz grains in
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: the rock. It leaves a unique fingerprint.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: And did they find any.
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: Zero, Absolutely none, no co aside, no stishovite, which are
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: high pressure forms of silica. There is no evidence of
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: an impact. It is definitively not an impact crater.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: Okay, so it's not a meteor, and we're saying it's
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: not a city. What in the world is it? How
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: does nature build a bullseye?
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: You need a very specific a magmatic piston.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: Okay, that sounds like a heavy metal band, but I'm intrigued.
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: It is pretty metal. Actually, I want you to imagine
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: the Earth's crust in that part of Mauritania is a
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: giant layer cake for hundreds of millions of years. You
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: just have these flat layers of rock being deposited sandstone, limestone, mudstone,
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: one on top of the other.
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: Okay, I got the cake, nice flat layers.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: Now from deep deep below, from the mantle, imagine a
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: giant plume of molten rock of magma starts pushing straight
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: up into the bottom of that cake. Okay, But and
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: This is the absolute key to the whole thing. It
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: doesn't break the surface. It's not a volcano that erupts
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: in a big explosion. It's more like a blister. It
• 21:23
  Speaker 2: pushes the rock layers up from below, bowing them into
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: a huge dome shape, but it never quite.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: Pops, like a giant geological pimple that just won't come
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: to a head.
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: That is surprisingly accurate and slightly gross analogy. Yeah, a
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: subterranean pimple. The magma pushes everything up, creating this massive,
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: swollen dome one hundred kilometers across. And this happened in
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: two very distinct phases, which is what gives the structure
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: its complexity.
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: Okay, walk me through those two faces, because the timing
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: here is everything.
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: It is so Phase one happens roughly two hundred million
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: years ago. This is the Triassic Jurassic Boundary, incredibly violent
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: time in Earth's history. The super continent Pangaea is literally
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: tearing apart at the scenes.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: This is when Africa in South America unzipp in to
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: create the Atlantic.
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: Ocean exactly, so deep faults are opening up all over
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: the place. Magma is surging up from the mantle and
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: the magma in this first phase was very distinct. It
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: formed what geologists call politic gabros silitic gabros.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: Okay, I'm gonna need a translation for that. Is that
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: just a type of rock it is.
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: Gabro is basically the same chemical composition as the black
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: basaltic lava you see erupting in Hawaii, but it cools
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: slowly deep underground, so it forms larger crystals. It's a hard, dense,
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: dark rock. And this magma didn't just push up. It
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: also injected itself sideways between the existing layers of sandstone.
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: These horizontal intrusions are called sills.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: So going back to your cake analogy, this is like
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: injecting a layer of hard chocolate gnash into the middle
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: of your sponge cake layers.
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: That is a perfect analogy. You're injecting these hard, resistant
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: sheets of rock into the pre existing softer sedimentary layers.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: So that was phase one. Then the whole thing just
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: sits there and cools for one hundred million years.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: We fast forward a hundred million years. We're now in
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: the Cretaceous period.
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: Yes, roughly one hundred million years ago. Dinosaurs are at
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: their peak, walking around what is now Mauritania, and a
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: second pulse of magma pushes up right in the.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: Same spot, and this magma is different.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: Very different. This stuff is what we call alkaline magma,
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: and even more strangely, carbonate tites carbonytites.
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: That sounds exotic.
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: It is incredibly exotic. Carbonatites are one of the weirdest
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: rocks on Earth. They're igneous rocks, so they come from magma,
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: but they're made mostly of carbonate minerals like calcite. It's
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: like molten limestone. They are extremely rare. And this second
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: pulse is what really pushed the center of the dome
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: up high. So now you have this big swollen bump
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: in the landscape a dome.
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: But a dome still is into bull's eye. A dome
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: is just a big hill. How do you get the rings?
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: You slice the top off. That's where the next one
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: hundred million years of erosion comes in. Wind and water
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: start to scour the top of this dome away, planing
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: it down flat. Now remember the layer kick. It has
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: alternating layers of different hardness. You have hard sandstone than
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: maybe a soft mudstone, than one of those really hard
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: gabro sills, than a softer limestone.
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: I see where this is going.
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: Now, when you slice the top off a dome that's
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: made of alternating hard and soft layers, you get rings.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: It's inevitable. The soft rock layers erode away faster, forming
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: valleys or depressions. Those are the water rings. The hard
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: resistant rock layers, the sandstones, and especially those gabr sills,
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: they resist erosion and are left standing up as high
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: circular ridges.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: So the concentric circles aren't the walls of an ancient city.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: They're literally just the result of differential erosion hard rock
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: soft rock, hard rock, soft rock exposed in a circle.
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: Precisely. The Richet structure is a natural cross section of
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: the Earth's crust. It is the deep geology of the region,
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: laid bare for us to see from space.
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: It is actually pretty incredibly explains the rings perfectly. What
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: about the very center, the central island In the photos,
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: the middle of the rechap looks like a jumbled, chaotic mess.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: I know, geologists call it a brichia. What happened there?
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: It looks like a collapsed building.
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: This is my favorite part of the whole story. It's
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: a process called hydrothermal karsification.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: Okay, now you're just making words up to sound smart.
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: I promise you I am not. Remember that second pulse
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: of magma, the cretaceous one, the weird alkaline stuff. It
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: brought a lot of superheated fluid with it, water, carbon dioxide,
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: other volatiles, all trapped in the magma and heated to
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: extreme temperatures. This superheated acidic water start to circulate through
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: the rock layers deep underground, especially the limestone layers.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: Like a giant subterranean pressure cooker.
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: Exactly. And what does hot acidic water do to limestone.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: It dissolves it, like sugar and hot coffee.
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: It dissolves it very, very efficiently. So this hydrothermal fluid
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: dissolved the limestone, creating massive underground caverns and voids deep
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: beneath the center of the dome. Eventually, the roof of
• 26:03
  Speaker 2: these giant caverns can no longer support the immense weight
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: of all the rock sitting above them, crsh.
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: The entire roof caved in, the.
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: Whole center of the dome collapsed catastrophically into the void
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: that had been eaten away underneath. The rocks shattered into
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: millions and millions of jagged angular fragments. That is what
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: brechia is. It's just a term for broken rock that's
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: been cemented back together. The center of the reach at
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: is a megabrechia. It is a massive natural collapse structure.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: So the collapse wasn't a city sinking into the ocean
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: because of an earthquake. It was a geological roof collapse
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: caused by hot acid water dissolving the foundation from below.
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: Which honestly is an equally dramatic story just on a
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: geological timescale. And this whole process, this deep magmatic activity,
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: is what brings up other interesting minerals. You mentioned diamonds earlier, Yeah, I.
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: Heard there were diamonds involved somehow well.
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: There are related structures in the area called kimber lights.
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: Kimber lights are these explosive volcanic pipes that come from
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: extremely deep in the mantle, and they're famous for being
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: the primary source of diamonds on Earth, and the carbonatites
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: themselves often contain high concentrations of rare earth elements.
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: So finding these things proves the structure as deep volcanic roots.
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: It proves it's not a surface feature like a city.
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: It's a pipe that connects us to the deep Earth.
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: Okay, this brings us to what I think is the
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: real smoking gun, the thing that for me definitively kills
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: the Atlantis theory even more than the incorrect map size.
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: The dating. How do we know when all this happened?
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: This is where the hard science comes in. We use
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: a technique called radiometric dating, specifically for these kinds of rocks,
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: ar gone argone dating or r ARE.
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: Okay, how does that work?
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: In simple terms, it's basically a geological stopwatch. Certain elements
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: in rocks, like potassium forty, are radioactive. They decay into
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: other elements, in this case, argn forty at a very precise,
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: very well known rate the halflight. Exactly when magma is liquid,
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: any argone gas can escape, but the moment it cools
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: and solidifies into a rock crystal, that argon gas gets trapped.
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: The stopwatch starts by carefully heating the rock in a
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: lab and measuring the ratio of the trapped argon forty
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: gas to the original potassium forty. We can calculate almost
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: exactly when that rock cooled and solidified.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: So what does the stopwatch say for the rocks of
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: the richet structure.
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: The lithos paper and other studies have dated these rocks
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: very carefully. The gabriusils from phase one they clock in
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: and around one hundred and ninety to two hundred million
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: years old, and the central carbonotites and the hydrothermal brecia
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: from phase two they date to roughly ninety eight point
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: two million years old, give or take a few million years.
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: Ninety eight million years ago. Yes, so let's put that
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: in perspective for everyone. When the richid structure finished forming,
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: when its center collapsed into its current shape, who was
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: around to witness it.
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: Dinosaurs, specifically Cretaceous dinosaurs like Spinosaurus and Cartuodontosaurus were walking
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: around that landscape. Our species, Homo sapiens wouldn't show up
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: on the planet for another ninety seven point seven million
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: million years.
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: So for this to be Atlantis, Atlantis would have had
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: to be a civilization built by I don't know, velociraptors.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: Which would be an absolutely amazing movie. I would watch
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: that movie, but it is not human history. The timeline
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: is simply impossible. You cannot build a city twelve thousand
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: years ago on a geological structure that formed one hundred
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: million years before your entire species even existed.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that pretty much seals it, doesn't it. There's no
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: way around that number.
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: There is no way around the physics of radioactive decay.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: But I do have one lingering question from the internet
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: theorists the salt ah They claimed the salt and the
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: sand proves it was once part of the ocean. If
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: the Atlantic Ocean was never there, why is the sand salty?
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: There are two main reasons for that. First, this is
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: one of the driest places on Earth. In deserts, you
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: get a process where groundwater, which always contains some dissolved minerals,
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: wicks up towards the surface through capillary action. The water
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: then evaporates in the intense heat, leaving the minerals, including salt,
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: behind as a crust. That happens everywhere in the Sahara.
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: So it's just natural salt concentration exactly.
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: But second, and more importantly, remember our layer cake. Some
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: of those sedimentary rock layers are hundreds of millions of
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: years old. They were formed in ancient shallow seas back
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: in the Paleozoic or even the Proterozoic eras.
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: So the salt is in the rocks themselves.
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: Yes, The salt is ancient. It was trapped in the
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: rock when it formed. As that rock erodes over millions
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: of years, the salt is released into the local environment.
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: Its geological salt, completely unrelated to the modern Atlantic Ocean and.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: The so called tsunami ripples, the giant patterns in the sand.
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: That is pure wind. This is classic Aolian geology. Wind
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: blowing across a vast desert for thousands of years creates
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: massive dune fields and giant ripple marks that from a
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: satellite can look exactly like patterns formed by flowing water.
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: It's just air acting like a fluid on a huge scale.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: It is absolutely amazing how our eyes can trick us. Yeah,
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: we are so primed to see patterns. We want them
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: to mean something human.
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: We are patterns seeking machines. It's a survival trait. But
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: sometimes we see patterns where there's just geology and the Sahara,
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: I mean, the Sahara is just full of patterns that
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: look completely artificial if you don't know the geological context.
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about that context for a minute. Because the
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: richet gets all the fame and all the YouTube views,
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: but it's not the only bizarre thing out there in
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: the desert. In our research for this, we found some
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: of its neighbors that are just as strange, if not stranger.
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely, the reach out is weird, but it's not
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: uniquely weird for the Sahara. If you go just a
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: four hundred and sixty kilometers south of the Resha, near
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: a town called Garu, you run into something called the
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: black Maces.
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: These things look incredibly ominous from space. Describe them for
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: the listeners.
• 31:45
  Speaker 2: Imagine these huge, long, linear ridges of rock rising up
• 31:49
  Speaker 2: out of the bright orange sand dunes. But the ridges
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: are pitch black, I mean a shiny, oily jet black.
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: From a satellite. They look like a fleet of alien
• 31:59
  Speaker 2: ships that have and are half buried in the sand.
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: And they aren't actually made of black rock, are they.
• 32:04
  Speaker 2: No, that's the craziest part. If you were to crack
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: one open, underneath, it's just normal pale sandstone. The black
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: is just a coating. It's a thin layer called rock varnish.
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: Rock varnish. I'm assuming that's not something you buy down
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: at the hardware store.
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: No, it's a microscopic coating of manganese and iron oxides
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: mixed with clay particles and it takes thousands and thousands
• 32:24
  Speaker 2: of years to form. What's really cool is that it's
• 32:27
  Speaker 2: actually created by bacteria. There are microbes that live on
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: the rock surface, and their life process involves pulling manganese
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: and iron out of dust from the air and cementing
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: it onto the rock face.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: So you're telling me that bacteria are slowly painting entire
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: mountain ranges black.
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: That's basically what's happening. And these black maces, because they're
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: so prominent, they create these incredible wind patterns. NASA actually
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: studies the Garu masas because they are a near perfect
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: analog for features they see on the surface of Mars.
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: The wind hits the Mesa, it has to speed up
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: to go around it, and it scours the ground behind it,
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: creating these long barren streaks. It's fluid dynamics on a
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: planetary scale.
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: So if you're out there looking for weird lines in
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: the desert to prove some ancient civilization, well, nature is
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: really really good at making them all.
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: By itself, incredibly good. Or you know, look at the
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: Haruja volcanic field in central Libya. It's this massive black
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: splotch on the map. Seventeen thousand square miles.
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: It looks like mordor just a total wasteland of black rock.
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: It's basalt. It's a massive field of lava flows from
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: over one hundred and fifty extinct volcanoes. It looks incredibly
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: destructive and chaotic. And again, if you didn't know about volcanoes,
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: you might look at that and think a nuclear war
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: had happened there.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: Or the Door to Hell. Yeah, I know that's not
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: technically in the Sahara. It's over in Turkmenistan, but it
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: fits the vibe of these weird geological anomalies.
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: The Darvaza gas crater, Yeah, a giant burning pit in
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: the middle of the desert that's been on fire for decades.
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: And the story there is that it's man made righting accident.
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, even that story is a mix of myth
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: and reality. The popular tale is that Soviet geologists were
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: drilling for natural gas there in nineteen seventy one. The
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: ground collapsed into a gas filled cavern, and to prevent
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: the methane from escaping, they decided to light it on fire.
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: They figured it would burn out in a few weeks, and.
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: It's been burning for over fifty years.
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: Now, right but more recent investigations suggests the crater might
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: have actually formed naturally back in the sixties and was
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: lit on fire later. The point is, even with something
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: that happened in living memory, we create myths. We want
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: a simple, dramatic story.
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: And that brings us perfectly to the So what of
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: this whole conversation? Why do we want the rich had
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: to be atlantis so badly? I consider myself a pretty
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: rational person. I believe in the scientific method, but when
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: I watched that first video, I felt that pull I
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: wanted to believe it. Why is that impulse so strong?
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: I think it comes down to the psychology of hidden knowledge.
• 34:55
  Speaker 2: There is a deep, fundamental thrill in thinking that you,
• 34:58
  Speaker 2: a regular person with an Internet connection, know something that
• 35:01
  Speaker 2: the so called experts don't.
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: The emperor has no close effect.
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: Exactly When Jimmy Corsetti or other alternative historians say things
• 35:09
  Speaker 2: like geologists are blind or academics are gate keeping the truth,
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: it sets up a powerful hero narrative. You, the viewer,
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: are the hero who is helping to uncover this lost
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: truth that the establishment is trying to hide.
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: It makes you feel smart, It makes you feel like
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: you're part of a secret rebellion against a stuffy orthodoxy.
• 35:28
  Speaker 2: And let's be honest, the scientific reality is often kind
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: of boring, or at least it sounds boring. It's a
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: cretacious era alkaline magmatic intrusion differentially eroded by Aolian processes.
• 35:40
  Speaker 2: Is a dry, academic mouthful, whereas.
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: It's the lost capital of a gun king civilization destroyed
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: by a comet from outer space.
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: It's a blockbuster movie. Our brains are fundamentally wired to
• 35:51
  Speaker 2: prefer the movie.
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: I saw this exact dynamic playing out on Reddit threads
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: while we were researching. There was this intense, almost personal
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: hostility towards geologists, people saying things like they just don't
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: want to have to rewrite all the history.
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: Textbooks, which is so funny, because any geologist who actually
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: discovered the real Atlantis would become the single most famous
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: scientist in modern history. They would win every prize imaginable,
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: they would get book deals, movie deals. They would absolutely
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: love to be the one to rewrite the textbooks.
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: That's such a good point. There is zero incentive for
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: any scientist to hide a discovery that magnitude none.
• 36:27
  Speaker 2: But I think the deeper issue here, the really philosophical
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: one is that as a culture, we've kind of lost
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: our sense of wonder for the natural world itself. We've
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: come to think that for something to be truly cool
• 36:39
  Speaker 2: or mysterious, humans.
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: Have to be involved. We have to make it about us.
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: We always make it about us. We look at a
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: forty kilometer wide bullseye that was formed by the continents
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: ripping apart one hundred million years ago, a process that
• 36:51
  Speaker 2: involved weird magmas and diamonds from the mantle and was
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: witnessed by dinosaurs. And we look at all that and say, yeah,
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: that's neat, But was there a city there?
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: We are cosmic narcissity just a little bit.
• 37:01
  Speaker 2: We miss the majesty of deep time. The story the
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: rich At tells is the story of the Earth's engine.
• 37:07
  Speaker 2: It's about how the planet itself breathes and moves and changes.
• 37:11
  Speaker 2: That story, to me, is infinitely more spiritual and on
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: inspiring than a myth about a squabble between ancient Athens
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: and some fictional empire.
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: You know, I think you might have actually converted me.
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: I still love the Atlantis story as a story as
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: a myth, but I think I can finally look at
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: the rich at structure now and see it for what
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: it truly is. A scar, a beautiful, incredible scar on the.
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: Face of the Earth, one hundred million year old blister
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: that got its top scraped off.
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: Let's stick with scar. Blister is still a little gross,
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: fair enough scar it is. So, as we wrap up,
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: if we stop looking for Atlantis and Moretania, where should
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: we look? Or is the ultimate lesson here that maybe
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: we should just stop looking for Atlantis altogether.
• 37:50
  Speaker 2: Well, Plato did say it was an island in the Atlantic.
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: Maybe we can go back to checking the Azores or
• 37:56
  Speaker 2: the Canary Islands. But maybe, just maybe, the real lesson
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: is to accept that Atlantis was a brilliant philosophical thought
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: experiment about hubris and societal decay, and that the real
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: lost worlds are the geological chapters of our own planet's
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: history that we are only just beginning to learn how
• 38:14
  Speaker 2: to read.
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: I really like that the Earth has better stories to
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: tell than we do. We just have to learn the
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: language precisely.
• 38:20
  Speaker 2: The rocks don't lie.
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: Well, that just about wraps up our investigation for today.
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: We went from low earth orbit to the center of
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: the Earth, from ancient Greece to the Cretaceous period. It
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: has been a wild wild ride.
• 38:32
  Speaker 2: It always is when you're dealing with deep time.
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: And if you enjoyed this journey into the geological history
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: of the Sahara and you want to support this kind
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: of independent, reality based storytelling, please, and I'm asking you
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: one last time, take a moment to rate the show
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: five stars, leave a review, or even better, tell a friend,
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: tell us what geological mystery or internet theory we should
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: ruin for you next.
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: We are very good at ruining them in the most
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: enlightening way possible.
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: We are thanks for listening to be beyond infographics. Keep
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: looking at the ground beneath your feet, because it's always older, weirder,
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: and way cooler than you think.
• 39:07
  Speaker 2: See you next time.