Theory Thursday: What is Bimini Road?
Natural wonder? Or man-made relic of an advanced human race lost long ago?
Certain discoveries can easily be written off as “hoaxes” or illusions. As humans, especially when looking at the past, we tend to look for the most dramatic and fantastic explanation, even when the boring, obvious answer lies right under one’s nose.
Sometimes, however, the true explanation shatters every pre-conceived notion or belief that lie at the bedrock of human understanding. They say the truth can be stranger than fiction, and the true explanation for Bimini Road, if ever discovered, will likely be stranger than any theory ever postulated.
Bimini Road, sometimes also referred to as Bimini Wall, is an underwater rock formation near North Bimini Island in the Bahamas. The name stands to reason considering the location of the site. The origin, however, remains a mystery.
Bimini Road consists of a half-mile long “road” composed of rectangular limestone blocks. Most of the blocks appear to have been originally cut with right angles, although time underneath the ocean’s unforgiving surface has eroded them into a rounded shape. It runs northeast to southwest, with a pronounced bend at its southwest end. The rectangular limestone blocks range from 9 to 12 feet in width, with the average size being between 6 and 9 feet. The road lies underwater, affixed to the ocean floor, so it’s no surprise that the road has been seriously eroded over time. So much so, in fact, that there’s virtually no way that any tool marks or inscriptions would remain to be discovered. Thus, the road’s true origin remains shrouded in uncertainty.
The structure was first discovered on September 2nd, 1968, by a group of divers. While diving roughly 18 feet beneath the ocean’s surface, Joseph Valentine, Jacques Mayol, and Robert Angove were astonished to spot a structure resembling “pavement” lying on the ocean floor. Since the initial discovery of Bimini Road, numerous geologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, and similarly situated scientists and researchers alike have plunged into the crystal clear waters lying off the Bahamian coast in search of answers. Despite their best efforts, though, a clear explanation for Bimini Road’s origin has yet to be established.
Even though an agreed-upon origin has yet to be established, various scientists throughout the 20th century have estimated Bimini Road’s age through a variety of complex systems of dating. These systems include radiocarbon dating of the stones composing Bimini Road and uranium-thorium dating (say that 5 times fast) of the marine limestone lying underneath Bimini Road.
In 1978, researchers from the Department of Geology at the University of Miami dated samples from a core collected from Bimini Road. Through the use of radiocarbon dating, and collective interpretation of the date-ranges produced through the dating, scientists established that the stones and shells composing Bimini Road are roughly 3,500 years old.
However, according to Gifford and Ball, two researchers who visited the structure and conducted uranium-thorium dating on it, argued Bimini Road’s true age to be no younger than roughly 15,000 years old. This date is highly criticized by others in the scientific community, due to the fact that Gifford and Ball conducted their tests on a whole-rock sample of the marine limestone that lies underneath Bimini Road, rather than a piece of the structure itself.
While the credible scientific consensus remains that Bimini Road is a natural rock formation, having been created through thousands of years of water erosion, opponents of this position point to various anomalies as proof that the structure was, in fact, man made. Robert Marx, a professional diver, routinely visited Bimini Road. On one such occasion, Carl Holm, the then-president of Global Oceanic, tagged along to see what all the fuss was about. Upon getting a close look at Bimini Road, Holm states that there was “no doubt” that the massive stone blocks were cut by people.
Various other researchers and scientists across a wide variety of focuses have visited Bimini Road and claim the existence of multiple layers of stones composing the structure point to a man-made origin. Amateur historian and author Galvin Menzies, in his controversial book 1421: The Year China Discovered America, claimed that Chinese Admiral Zheng He stopped at Bimini while his fleet was in the process of circumnavigating the globe. According to Menzies, half of He’s fleet was caught in a hurricane near Bimini and later built Bimini Road as a makeshift platform to haul damaged ships ashore for the purpose of repairing damage sustained from the hurricane.
Aside from random theories proposing a forgotten, lost craftsman as the architect of Bimini Road, one theory seems to pique one’s interest a great deal when examining the bizarre structure: The lost city of Atlantis. Suspend your disbelief as we venture into the unknown.
Notwithstanding the structure’s eerily perfect formation, since its discovery proponents have argued that it must be an Atlantean relic. Apart from the oceanic nature of the structure, as well as all millennial/gen Z children’s inherent love for Disney’s Atlantis, there are few, if any, pieces of hard evidence linking Bimini Road to Atlantis. Thankfully, however, I love examining pieces of soft evidence.
In 1938, American mystic and self-proclaimed prophet Edgar Cayce predicted the future discovery of a road that led to ancient Atlantean temples.
“A portion of the temples may yet be discovered under the slime of ages and seawater near Bimini…” He said. “Expect it in ‘68 or ‘69 - not so far away.”
Cayce, an avid believer that Atlantis would one day be uncovered, gave hundreds of prophecies regarding the long-lost city of wonders. In fact, Cayce spoke of “visions” of Atlantis no fewer than 700 times over a span of 20 years. So maybe he was slightly biased, who knows? I’ll leave that to you to decide.
What I find most peculiar about Bimini Road is the seemingly masterful precision used to “cut” and “lay” the rectangular stones in conjunction with each other. The obvious signs of erosion, combined with the uncertainty around attempts to date the structure, as well as the eerie accuracy of Cayce’s prediction, all point to a strange origin story. If one day, we gain conclusive proof that Atlantis did exist, and Bimini Road was in fact an Atlantean structure, would you believe it?
For more context on Cayce’s theory, or why anyone would attribute a Bahamian structure to ancient Atlantis, you’ll need to conduct some research on the subject. I’ll cover Atlantis and all related theories in the future, but there are many. The main crux of the theory lies in Plato’s Timaeus, where Plato learns of the tragic fate suffered by Atlantis roughly 9,000 years prior to his time. The truly incredible part about this date, which would set the year of Atlantis’ destruction to 9,600 B.C. (Plato was writing at the date of 600 B.C.), is that it lines up with theories regarding the Younger Dryas impact, which is theorized to have caused a mass-extinction event due to the melting of glaciers as the result of devastating meteor impacts.
So while there is much to analyze, research, and digest when dealing with the possibility of Atlantis existing as a physical location, rather than mere allegory, there’s one thing we must consider.
That constant, inescapable fact that sometimes, the truth is stranger than fiction…