The mystery of the Bimini walls
The American medium Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) had predicted in 1900 that in 1968 or 1969, around the Bimini Islands (Bahamas), vestiges of ancient Atlantis would be found. Indeed, in 1969, two American writers, Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley, who had long been interested in paranormal phenomena, began underwater exploration of the seabed located almost a mile off the western coast of North Bimini. Their guide had informed them that strange submerged rocks had been seen lined up in the area, as if they were a kind of wall or even as if they were part of an archaic street.
After several dives, Ferro and Grumley said they found, 5 to 10 meters deep, a series of aligned rectangular rocks, up to 6 meters long and 3 meters wide. The two underwater explorers also reported that the entire formation was about 200 meters long.
Ferro and Grumley wrote a book titled Atlantis: Autobiography of a Discovery, in which they recounted their adventure.
According to them, the walls of Bimini were part of the ruins of the citadel of Atlantis, and were built by a maritime civilization that developed around 15,000 years ago. Also included in the book are some photographs of Count Pino Turolla of Miami, an underwater explorer.
However, what was not specified in the book was the dating method used by the three explorers. Furthermore, it seems that no archaeological evidence was found in the vicinity of the walls of Bimini, such as pottery or remains of fossil charcoal (as, however, was found on the seabeds of Khambat).
On one of his dives, Turolla discovered other fragments of walls on the seabed located at the extreme tip of the island of North Bimini, and this led him to conclude that probably, in ancient times, the wall that stands today submerged it surrounded the entire island.
The writer Charles Berlitz (1914-2003) recounted the discovery of the walls of Bimini in his book Mysteries from forgotten worlds (1972), but attributed the discovery to the archaeologists Manson Valentine and Dimitri Rebikoff, and to the diver and free diving champion Jacques Mayol, in September 1968.
According to Berlitz, the initial discovery occurred a few months earlier, when two pilots flew over the Bahama Banks and they noticed those strange formations from above. Berlitz also claimed that the first underwater sighting occurred in Pine Key, around the island of Andros. On the other hand, this writer was the first to maintain that there was a strange similarity between the blocks of Bimini and the cyclopean walls of Sacsayhuamán, located 3555 meters above sea level, in Cusco, Peru.
Successive studies verified that, in reality, there are two main walls, which converge but do not join. They are about 800 meters long and are made up of rectangular stone blocks that have an average size of 3x2 meters. The blocks are calcareous sedimentary rocks.
In 1978, the Geology Department of the University of Miami proceeded to date with the carbon 14 method some organic elements present in the Bimini blocks, such as remains of mollusks in shells, concluding that they are 3,500 years old, dating back, therefore, to 1500 BC. However, this dating method did not help to elucidate whether the Bimini blocks are natural formations or true walls built by man in the past.
The two researchers John Gifford and Mahlon Ball, whose analyzes appeared in the National Geographic Society Research Report, carried out a much more complex dating of a block of biopelsparite using the uranium-thorium method, according to which it is possible to date tiny fossils that have been formed in the rock. This dating offered a very different result: the microscopic fossils that formed in the rocks would be 15,000 years old, or would date back to 13,000 BC. From this it is deduced that the walls of Bimini were submerged just 13,000 years before Christ, probably after the global cataclysm called the Universal Flood, which produced a rise in the seas of approximately 150-200 meters, for reasons still unknown. (The majority of scholars, however, indicate that the universal flood took place in 10,000 BC).
Some scientists who refute the data of Gifford and Ball assert precisely that, with the sea level being lower than about 150 meters in 13,000 BC, it is not possible that those particular mollusks (now fossils) were found on the walls of Bimini, completely exposed to the sun and, therefore, they indicate that the dating is completely wrong.
The world of archeology and traditional geology does not support the hypothesis that the walls of Bimini were built by man in archaic times, but rather affirms that these formations are completely natural. The most eminent scholar who supports this “natural” hypothesis is Eugene Shinn (US Geological Survey). According to this thesis, the Bimini blocks would be nothing more than calcareous formations that created, over the millennia, a boxed soil, a rare formation generated in the sedimentary rocks found on some ocean shores (for example, in Tasmania). After this natural process, the rock fractured into rectangular blocks that look like pieces of wall.
To this day it remains a mystery whether the Bimini blocks were man-made or if they are just a strange natural formation.
What is true is that no remains of human activity have been found in the area, such as pottery or traces of fossil charcoal, but those who support the “artificial” theory respond to this objection by saying that the force of the sea could have dragged them away.
For this purpose, it would be appropriate to carry out excavation work with air extractors and the stratigraphic method, but the complexity and cost of such a difficult work at 5 – 10 meters depth have not allowed it so far.
YURI LEVERATTO
