At some point or another, we have all heard of a mythical continent that was said to be located west of the Pillars of Hercules( Straits of Gerbralter), and home to a people of vast knowlege and technology, and in a single day and night, said to have been completly swallowed by the sea. Was this place actual fact and not myth? And how could a whole continent be swallowed by the ocean in one day? How could a whole race of people go unnoticed throughout history? And could this be an actual account of a phenominal geologic occurence? A whole bunce of people, including me, want answers to these questions, but lets look at actual accounts before we delve into theory.Here's what Dr. Iain Stewart of http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/greeks/atlantis_01.shtml thinks. Plato, that famous greek philosopher we all know and love, wrote two accounts, Timaeus and Critias, and he described the continent " bigger than Asian and Libya combined," in the Atlantic Ocean, and the continent's control expanded to Eygpt and Tyyrhenia (Italy). It was home to a people descended from Poseidon, God of Seas and Earthquakes. So with all these "god-like" descendents, the lineage was bound to be diluted by "mortal stock," and this dillution lead to the Atlanteans going to war with their former ally, the Athenians(Athens).In the reference above, Plato is describing the Athenians trying to invade Atlantis, but failing to do so and being killed by the swallowing of the entire continent into the sea, as if Poseidon was having some return policy with his race....So, if there are a lot of accounts about who and what these people were, why isn't there a where? Even Plato wasn't getting into too much detail about the location, since that description was only a few hundred words, according to Dr. Stewart, and there are a lot of theories of where it might have been. Some of them are that the continent lay near the Caribbean, South China Sea, near Antartica, and even French Polynesia. Some people even think these Atlanteans were actually the Minoan society of the island of Thera, completly devestated by the Thera eruption, said to have occurred in the second millenium BCE, with an explosivity of 6 or 7. The Santorini volcano is in fact a marine one (from http://www.minoanatlantis.com/Minoan_Catastrophe.php) with its magma chamber close to sea level. It is part of the Hellenic Volcanic Arc, on the convergent plate boundry of the African and Eurasia plate. The Minoan city of Akrotiri was completely engulfed in ash and pumice from the explosion, and even evidence of a major tsunami swept away many Minoan settlements and a large earthquake was thought to have preceded the Thera eruption. Could this be the fabled civilization described by Plato in his accounts? Here's some pictures of the island and the fallout excavation. (FYI, Thera is the ancient name of the island we know as Santorini, just in case you got confused!!)
The island of Thera, with the volcano , submerged in the middle (from http://www.minoanatlantis.com/Minoan_Catastrophe.php)
The excavation of a settlement in Akrotiri. (from wikipedia.org)So before we get into another theoretical location, you might be wondering when this could have happended. Well, Plato wrote Timaeus and Critias in 360 BC, and he stated in Timaeus that this event occured 9,000 years before the time of Solon,a famous Athenian lawmaker, dating it about 9,600 BC.
Here's another cool theory about the mythical location:
On http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42072469/ns/technology_and_science-science, a group of U.S scientists think they found it's location off of Spain, near its mud flats, due to a tsunami. The team looked at satellite imagery of north of Cadiz, Spain, and believe this metropolis is buried in the marshlands of Dona Ana Park.
A scientist by the name Richard Freund lead this group of geologists and archaeologists in 2009-2010, all using state-of-the-art tech such as underwater mapping and deep ground radar. Interestingly enough, he and his group found a series of "memorial cities built in Atlantis' image by its refugees after the city's likely destruction by a tsunami. Here's a satellite image of what these submerged structures look like:
Freund claims that these concentric rings of land may have existed during Atlanis' "hey-day", and comparing to Plato's descriptions in his writings in 360 B.C, it seems quite possible for this structure to have existed. Freund even took into account of the Minoan Catastrophe Theory on the Island of Santorini/Thera. He states that tsunamis in this region are quite well documented, compared to evidence of one 1755, in Libson. He and his team of experts plan to further investigate these geologic structures and hopefully discover and date more artifacts. If you guys want to see the whole journey, check out National Geographic's special, Finding Atlantis. Here's what artists think the memorial cities may have looked like:
So, what does this mean in terms of geology? Did Poseidon really reclaim his tainted people? Or did a catastrophic earthquake, volcanic eruption, AND a tsunami nearly wipe out a mythical city? Hungry for more, I went to http://www.atlantisquest.com/Geology.html, to find out what may be the case here. The plethora of geologists and experts quoted on this site, such as Dr. Malaise of Sweden, believe that the submerged continent is in fact a "large mid-Atlantic plateau known as the Azore Plateau," with a total area of 300,000 square miles (pretty big!). A lot of these experts didn't accept the idea of the "rising of the sea level by 5,000 feet," but what about a continent sinking? They give examples of sunken continental crust such as that of New Zealand and New Caledonia, saying that they were part of a bigger area of continental crust, now below sea level. They also quote the theory of sea-floor upheaval, the idea that a whole continent could be "submerged due to tectonic forces," seems to make sense right, since this plateau is in almost the exact place Plato described? Well, one scientist by the name of Hamish Cambell states that this is possible, yet only in the event that "this happened over a period of a million years." Well, now this whole thing seems to be debunked, since Plato stated Atlantis sunk in one day and night! But many still believe this is not the case for the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, claiming to be the "most intensely active area," and things "tend to happen faster in that segment of the earth's crust." Back in the time Pangaea was breaking apart, the Azore Plateau had remained eats of the ridge, but was constantly battered by "seismic turmoil, appearing and dissappearing more than once," and the uplifting of crust due to the " rotation of the plates, vulcanism, subduction, ect." Another debunker stated by other experts claim " the Mid-Atlantic ridge is made of basaltic material, it can't be a part of a continent!" John Speicher, another expert, states that " plate tectonics were the enemy of Atlantis; it created and destroyed it." More claim that this continent could have been habitable in a "mere thousand years" it could have "developed a collection of flora and fauna." Here's some picture of what the Azore Plateau looked like as an island:
And how it looked in the formation of Pangaea before the breakage:
After an amount of core drillings and other experiments, let's go back a little further to some earlier expeditions, revealing some interesting occurences of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge:
In 1936, Charles S. Piggot and the U.S Geological Survey did a series of deep core soundings that discovered that the ridge was indeed above sea level from 10,000 to 20,000 years ago! Almost around the time that Plato stated the island above water 9,000 years from his past! The sediment deposits around the ridge suggest that it had two different currents running in opposite directions and heavy volcanic ash on the sides of the slope, dating around 12,000 years ago. Of all I have discussed, this piece of evidence seems to tie all this in: The writings, the disaster, the memorial cities, the plateau, all of it.
There is a lot more to discover, but I've sated my taste for adventure and understanding for now! I think it's absolutely mind-blowing, the lengths people go to to prove and discover evidence of this lost piece of myth and legend only described in a few hundred words. If you want to find out more evidence, head onto atlantiquest.com, or watch the NatGeo special Finding Atlantis that may come on TV soon, or go on your own research adventure online or in the library, or elsewhere.
However, I still thought the Disney movie was awesome!
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