A terraced sandstone mass 26 metres down off Japan’s westernmost island, 100 km from Taiwan, and the argument about it has been running since 1986. Masaaki Kimura, a marine geologist, reads it as man-made stepped monoliths and has dated it anywhere from 10,000 to 2,000 years old. Robert Schoch reads the same rock as natural: Early Miocene sandstones and mudstones about 20 million years old, full of well-defined parallel bedding planes and crossed by sets of parallel vertical joints, in a region where earthquakes crack stone into regular blocks. Similar formations sit above water on Yonaguni’s northeast coast. Wolf Wichmann came to the same conclusion in 1999 and 2001, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs does not recognise it as a cultural artifact. Dive it in winter, with operators who know it; the current is strong.
Yonaguni, Okinawa, Japan
See it on the map
