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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

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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

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