Bimini Road

[1] On September 2, 1968, while diving in 5.5 meters (18 feet) of water off the northwest coast of North Bimini, Joseph Manson Valentine, Jacques Mayol and Robert Angove encountered what they called a "pavement" of what later was found to be noticeably rounded stones of varying size and thickness.

[4][5] The Bimini Wall and two linear features lying shoreward of it are composed of flat-lying, tabular, and roughly rectangular, polygonal, and irregular blocks.

The highly rounded nature of the blocks forming the Bimini Road indicates that a significant thickness of their original surface has been removed by biological, physical, and chemical processes.

David Zink[7] states: Most of the blocks were now clearly resting on either the underlying bedrock or on smaller stones on the sea floor.This led him to conclude: ...this fact had an important archaeological consequence: it meant that the idea (held by some Atlantologists) that the blocks now visible were only the top of a more complex structure was likely incorrect.In addition, early studies of the Bimini Road, i.e. Gifford and Ball[5] and David Zink,[7] report taking numerous samples and cores for examination.

Scientific sampling and souvenir hunting would have left behind modern "tool marks" on the various blocks composing the Bimini Road for later investigators to find.

In 1978, the radiocarbon laboratory operated by the Department of Geology at the University of Miami dated samples from a core collected by E. A. Shinn in 1977 from the Bimini Road.

Both these dates and interpretation are consistent with the detailed research by Davaud and Strasser[11][12] that concluded that the layer of beachrock composing the Bimini Road formed beneath the surface of the island and was exposed by coastal erosion only about 1,900 to 2,000 years ago.

Proponents of the Bimini Road being a manmade feature argue that these radiocarbon dates are invalid because they were obtained entirely from whole-rock samples and subject to contamination from younger carbon.

[18][19][20] As a result, the location from where Gifford and Ball collected the sample of limestone was between 90 and 95 metres (295 and 312 feet) above sea level at the time indicated by the uranium-thorium date of 14,992±258 BP (7132-19/2).

[21][22] The consensus among geologists and archaeologists is that the Bimini Road is a natural feature composed of beachrock that orthogonal and other joints have broken up into roughly rectangular, polygonal, and irregular blocks.

First, a complete beach sequence of shallow subtidal, intertidal, and supratidal carbonate sediments accumulated as the shoreline of North Bimini built seaward during part of the Holocene.

Once the deposition of these sediments built the North Bimini's shoreline seaward, freshwater cementation of the carbonate occurred at some depth, possibly even a metre or so below sea level, beneath the island's surface.

The downward movement of large, solid objects by scour and settling processes has been documented by Jesse E. McNinch, John T. Wells, and other researchers.

[28][29] They concluded that large, heavy objects could sink into the sea bottom by several metres without significant lateral movement as the result of scour and settling processes if an erosion-resistant layer of sediment were not encountered.

In case of the beachrock blocks composing the Bimini Road and other pieces underlying it, the erosion-resistant layer that limited how far they were dropped downward by scour and settling processes is the Pleistocene limestone on which they now rest.

[34] Natural beachrock pavements that are identical to the Bimini Road have been found eroding out of the east shore of Loggerhead Key of Dry Tortugas and submerged beneath 90 metres (300 feet) of water at Pulley Ridge off the southwest coast of Florida.

"[40] Others who consider the Bimini undersea formation to be man-made, as opposed to natural beachrock, are Joseph Manson Valentine, zoologist;[2][3][4] Graham Hancock, pseudoscientific writer; Charles Berlitz, linguist;[42] Greg Little, psychologist;[43] R. Cedric Leonard, anthropologist;[44] and Dimitri Rebikoff, French marine engineer.

[47] In his debunked pseudohistorical book 1421: The Year China Discovered America,[48] amateur historian Gavin Menzies falsely claimed that when Chinese admiral Zheng He's fleet was in the process of circumnavigating the globe in 1421–3, it stopped at Bimini.