Robert Sarmast

Robert Sarmast is a Persian American architect who claims to have found the legendary city of Atlantis on November 14, 2004, saying that by using sonar scans he was able to find man-made walls that matched Plato's description of the structures. The site lies 1,500 meters deep in the Mediterranean Sea between Cyprus and Syria. Sarmast's theory is that Cyprus was once a larger island, connected to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea by a land bridge, and that Atlantis was on the part of Cyprus that is now beneath the Mediterranean. He believes that Atlantis and the Garden of Eden are one and the same. Sarmast's research over the last fifteen years targeted the location of Atlantis, and his evidence was first reported in his book "Discovery of Atlantis: The Startling Case for the Island of Cyprus."
In 2004 he founded First Source Enterprises, LLC, to promote more extensive research near Cyprus, which led to the world's first scientific Atlantis expedition.
Criticism
A documentary, which is titled Atlantis: New Revelations 2-hour Special and contains a lengthy segment about the second expedition, aired on the History Channel on January 17, 2007. The documentary was broadcast as the season premiere two-hour long episode of the History Channel series Digging For The Truth. Interpretation of reflection seismology data that was shown being gathered and interpreted by a geologist in this episode indicated that the underwater formations that Robert Sarmast believed were man-made structures of Atlantis were actually tectonically deformed ocean floor sediments. Investigations of the salt tectonics and mud volcanism within the Cyprus Basin, eastern Mediterranean Sea, specifically demonstrated that the features which Sarmast interprets to be Atlantis consist only of a natural compressional fold caused by local salt tectonics and a slide scar with surficial compressional folds at the downslope end and sides of the slide.
Sarmast argues a much smaller Mediterranean Sea was flooded thousands of years ago when the Atlantic Ocean burst through the Pillars of Hercules and that Seneca and other ancient writers knew about this. Quaternary and marine geologists and oceanographers interpret the age and stratigraphy of sediments blanketing the bottom of the Cyprus Basin from sea bottom cores containing Pleistocene and older marine sediments and thousands of kilometers of seismic lines from the Cyprus and adjacent basins as clearly demonstrating that the Mediterranean Sea last dried up during the Messinian Salinity Crisis between 5.59 and 5.33 million years ago. For example, research conducted south of Cyprus as part of Leg 160 of the Ocean Drilling Project recovered from Sites 963, 965, and 966 cores of sediments underlying the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea at depths as shallow as 470, 1506, and 1044 meters (1540, 4940, and 3420 ft) below sea level. Thus, these cores came from parts of sea bottom of the eastern Mediterranean Sea that either lie above or at the depth of Sarmast's Atlantis, which lies at depths between 1460 and 1510 meters (4820 and 4950 ft) below mean sea level.
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