Explorers Comb Cuban Seas
for Treasure, Mysteries
Monday May 14, 2001
11:59 AM ET
By Andrew Cawthorne
HAVANA (Reuters) - Barely touched since the colonial era of piracy and shipwrecks, sea bottoms around Cuba are an underwater fantasy world promising treasure-laden sunken ships, insights into times gone by -- and maybe even a lost city.
"It's a new frontier,'' enthused Soviet-born Canadian ocean engineer Paulina Zelitsky, from British Columbia-based Advanced Digital Communications, poring over video images of hitherto unseen seafloor taken by underwater robots.
ADC has also been exploring a string of underwater volcanoes about 5,000 feet deep off Cuba's western tip, where millions of years ago a strip of land once joined the island to Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.
LOST CITY OFF WESTERN CUBA?
Most intriguingly, researchers using sonar equipment have discovered, at a depth of about 2,200 feet, a huge land plateau with clear images of what appears to be urban development partly covered by sand. From above, the shapes resemble pyramids, roads and buildings.
ADC is excited but reluctant to speculate until a joint investigation with the Cuban Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Geographic (news-websites) Society takes place early this summer.
"It is stunning. What we see in our high-resolution sonar images are limitless, rolling, white sand plains and, in the middle of this beautiful white sand, there are clear manmade large-size architectural designs. It looks like when you fly over an urban development in a plane and you see highways, tunnels and buildings,'' Zelitsky said.
"We don't know what it is and we don't have the videotaped evidence of this yet, but we do not believe that nature is capable of producing planned symmetrical architecture, unless it is a miracle,'' she added in an interview at her office at Tarara, along the coast east of Havana.
ADC's deep-water equipment includes a satellite-integrated ocean bottom positioning system, high-precision side-scan double-frequency sonar, and remotely operated submarine robots. They plan to add two submersibles to take people down.
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