It made headlines recently, the fact that New York city is sinking. It is because of all the massive amount of weight contained in all those high buildings. But various parts of the city are sinking at different rates.
Counter intuitively, all those highest buildings aren’t sinking at all. Why? Because they go down to the bedrock. And so far, bedrock hasn’t been found to sink at all.
Still, Parts of Manhattan and the other boroughs are sinking by between 1 and 4 mm a year. This, combined with the rising of sea levels mean that eventually these parts will be beneath the waves.
Could this possibly mean there was an Atlantis with incredibly high and heavy buildings that already sunk beneath the waves? It’s a possibility. However, I doubt the world could support a continent sized city with massive skyscrapers all over. Still, maybe Atlantis was only an island. If the island had no bedrock, with skyscrapers it could easily have slipped beneath the waves.
But Atlantis is so depressing. Why couldn’t there be a continent that rose above the waves?
There kind of is an Anti-Atlantis. The lands reclaimed from the ocean in the Netherlands are a kind of Anti-Atlantis. The idea is simple enough. Build dikes higher than the water that completely contain an area, then pump out the water and keep pumping through any rainfall. What you get is fully reclaimed land from the sea. For centuries the unceasing pumping was done with windmills which made that an iconic symbol of the Netherlands.
I did wonder what kind of crops can grow on land that has been in the briny deep. Lands with salt tend to be infertile, but not to all crops. Just by growing salt tolerant crops, in a couple decades or so, most of the salt will be out of the soil, and more normal crops will be able to be grown in that soil.
So, as long as the Dutch don’t decide to build skyscrapers on their reclaimed land, they have successfully pulled off the Anti- Atlantis trick.
