University of East AngliaMother nature managed to trick some excited divers into believing they’d discovered the remains of an ancient sunken city just off the coast of a Greek island – but things weren’t as they seemed.
The underwater explorers were thrilled when they found ‘paved floorings’, ‘colonnades’ and even ‘circular column bases’ in the seas surrounding the holiday island of Zakynthos back in 2013.
It was believed that these structures must be the remains of a lost city which had been destroyed when a tidal wave flooded the island, The Huffington Post reports.
University of East AngliaStrangely however there were no signs of life in the city, like pottery or other artefacts, and now researchers believe they’ve found the truth behind the ‘lost city’.
New research published by the University of East Anglia (UEA) has shown that rather than being man made these formations were actually created by nature itself.
University of East AngliaProfessor Julian Andrews, from UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences, said:
The site was discovered by snorkelers and first thought to be an ancient city port, lost to the sea. There were what superficially looked like circular column bases, and paved floors. But mysteriously no other signs of life – such as pottery.
We investigated the site, which is between two and five meters under water, and found that it is actually a natural geologically occurring phenomenon.
University of East AngliaThe strange column formations are apparently rarely found in such shallow waters but are a natural occurrence which were basically formed by an ancient gas leak on the sea bed.
I bet the diver’s hopes sank when they heard the news…
More of a concept than a journalist, Tom Percival was forged in the bowels of Salford University from which he emerged grasping a Masters in journalism.
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