Hi Kat

it was me!

The expedition was run by the Dorset based Scientific Exploration Society in 2002 and the leader of the expedition was Monty Halls (if you're in the UK the guy who seems to have a cosy gig with the BBC being sent to nice and remote places in the UK, Thursday BBC2), and was run with the <a href="[www.nio.org] NIO</a> (National Institute of Oceanography). Also I'm trying to organise a 10 year reunion next year... but none of you guys want to hear about that.

I'm firstly going to apologise to Roxana here as I chose the name of the expedition, which was India Atlantis. We used the term Atlantis loosely, not as Plato's Atlantis, but as a term for forgotten submerged civilization. I now accept this may have been a mistake (although a damn site easier to spell than the locations we were exploring).

The expedition was 3 weeks long and Graham was with us for all that time, though he had been there previously I'm not sure for how long, I don't think he had done any measurements or studies, he may have been since but I don't know. The first 2 weeks were spent investigating the U shape structure at Poompuhur and the last week was at Mahabalipuram diving on the coast (VERY close to shore) city that stretched for MILES.

Trevor, one of the guys off the expedition was planning to go back to Mahabalipuram the year after, with NicK Flemming (Cities in the Sea), but sadly that part of the world became a whole lot less politically stable and the expedition was cancelled.

As for what we did at the U shape in Poompuhur we made a detailed map of the structure using techniques advised by an underwater archaeology group based in the UK. I can't remember who they were but if anyone is interested I'm still in touch with one of the guys who thrashed out what we were doing out there with them so I can find out. This needed doing before any excavation so, had we found anything we'd have actually known where we found it. We did successfully map the structure but we did not get time to do any excavation (to be fair we didn't think we would). It must sound pretty lax of us 'only' to have got this mapped in 2 weeks, but when you consider the depth (which from memory was about 25m making the max dive time about 22-25 mins...without decompression) , AND the fact we only had once tank of air each per day, we did well to get through that. I'm proud to say, at the time this was the deepest structure mapped around the Indian subcontinent.

Mahabalipuram was different again. The city was at a depth of less than 10m, which means our dive time was mostly limited by the amount of air in our cylinders, and we had so little time there we were literally just finning around in awe. I saw a submerged temple! I wish we'd had more time there as frankly Poompuhur was boring compared to that. However, it would not have rewritten any history books because the date of its inundation is actually known.

Anyway I'll read through the rest of the thread and comment if relevant!

MikeS