Among the headlines this week, the ones about Atlantis clearly stands out. Atlantis is, as most of you will know, the sunken country mentioned by the philosopher Plato.

Most likely he referred to the ancient Minoan civilization on Thera/Santorini, but that has not stopped people from looking where Plato said it would be, in the ocean named after the mythic island.

And now Google Earth comes to the rescue. Google’s map and satellite imagery software now includes scans of the ocean floor.

For the first (and probably last) time we will include a link to Britain’s infamous Sun newspaper, which apparently was the first to run the story.

Aeronautical engineer Bernie Bamford has studied the ocean floor off the Canary Islands using Google Earth and found a pattern that reminds you of a city grid. Google says, however, the undersea grid lines are data artifacts rather than sunken streets.

“[W]hat users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process,” a Google spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement. “Bathymetric (or sea-floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data. The fact that there are blank spots between each of these lines is a sign of how little we really know about the world’s oceans.”

Here’s a short video showing you the images:

See also: Briefing: Atlantis from the UK Sunday Times