Bimini Road

The Bimini Road is a roughly 800-metre-long formation of large, flat, sub-rectangular limestone blocks lying just below the surface of the seabed off North Bimini in the Bahamas, arranged in a line with a noticeable J-shaped bend. It was discovered by divers in 1968 — the same year that the American psychic Edgar Cayce had, decades earlier in a series of trance readings during the 1930s and 1940s, predicted that a portion of the lost civilisation of Atlantis would be discovered near Bimini "in '68 or '69," a prediction that gave the formation its alternative name, the "Atlantis Road."

Geologists who have studied the formation, including a series of investigations published from the 1970s through the 2000s, have concluded that the blocks are beachrock — a naturally occurring sedimentary rock formed when sand and shell fragments are cemented together by calcium carbonate near the shoreline, which characteristically fractures along joints into roughly rectangular blocks resembling paving stones. Radiocarbon and other dating methods place the formation's origin at between roughly 2,000 and 4,000 years ago, far too recent to correspond to Plato's account of Atlantis (which, if taken literally, would place its destruction around 9,600 BCE), and the rock composition matches local geology rather than any imported or worked stone. Proponents of an artificial origin point to the apparent right angles and uniform thickness of some blocks as evidence of human shaping, a debate that remains unresolved in the popular imagination even as it is considered settled by mainstream geology.