It's hard to imagine there are hills like this, and mountains like the Sierra Maestra in Cuba, only 90 miles away from a VERY flat state in the U.S.
I'm not sure there's even one hill anywhere in Florida! Easy to see why some of the "exiles" who moved away have felt so tied to their homeland. It's truly beautiful.
Also, it boasts some rare species of flora and fauna, including the world's smallest frog. I think I've read they even have crocodiles (not aligators like Florida) in Cuba. Oh, yeah. They've discovered a fascinating ant-eating critter, like some small opposum or something, no one has ever seen before.
The ocean around attracts tons of deep sea divers, as well as scuba divers from all over the world. It's supposed to be extremely interesting, including the appearance of a sunken city at a vast depth which National Geographic has gone to study, which has also been the object of scrutiny of some Russians who remained to study these structures.
Posted on Fri, Oct. 11, 2002
City-like shape a sunken mystery
It may not be Atlantis, but it's big, 2,000 feet down and not natural
KEVIN SULLIVAN
Washington Post
HAVANA - The images appear slowly on the video screen, like ghosts from the ocean floor. The videotape, made by an unmanned submarine, shows massive stones in oddly symmetrical square and pyramid shapes in the deep-sea darkness.
Sonar images taken from a research ship 2,000 feet above are even more puzzling.
They show that the smooth, white stones are laid out in a geometric pattern. The images look like fragments of a city, in a place where nothing man-made should exist, spanning nearly eight square miles of a deep-ocean plain off Cuba's western tip.
"What we have here is a mystery," said Paul Weinzweig, of Advanced Digital Communications, a Canadian company that is mapping the ocean bottom of Cuba's territorial waters under contract with the government of President Fidel Castro.
"Nature couldn't have built anything so symmetrical," Weinzweig said, running his finger over sonar printouts aboard his ship, tied up at a wharf in Havana harbor. "This isn't natural, but we don't know what it is."
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http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/4259131.htm(Charlotte Observer requires free registration)
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Scientists Probe 'Sunken City' Civilization in Cuba
HAVANA, Cuba
Scientific investigators said that they hope to better determine later this year if an unusual rock formation deep off Cuba's coast could be a sunken city from a previously unknown ancient civilization.
"These are extremely peculiar structures... They have captured all our imagination," Cuban geologist Manuel Iturralde said at a conference after a week on a boat over the site.
"If I had to explain this geologically, I would have a hard time," he told
reporters later, saying examination of rock samples due to be collected in a few months should shed further light on the formation off the Guanahacabibes Peninsula on Cuba's western tip.
Iturralde, research director of Cuba's Natural History Museum, has joined Canadian exploration company Advanced Digital Communications (ADC) in efforts to solve the mystery of the smooth, geometrically shaped, granite like rocks. They are laid out in structures resembling pyramids, roads and other structures at more than 600 meters deep (2,000 feet) in a 20 km square (73/4 mile square) area.
ADC has suggested they might belong to a civilization that colonized the American continent thousands of years ago, possibly sitting on an island that was sunk to great depths by cataclysmic earth movement such as an earthquake.
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http://www.centralamericaweekly.net/188/english/science.html~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Thanks for the photo of the small cattle critter. I was really trying to form a mental image of what it should look like. Very beautiful. Have never even heard of these beasties.