Note for those who may have missed the news: “Atlantis” is bunk. Almost certainly made up by Plato as a device to let him expound on his nonsensical notions for a perfect society. However, there have been at least two true “lost continents.” Sci-fi and fantasy authors, take note. But also take note of the timescales.
A small volcanic continent (about 3 times the size of Japan) formed in the southern Indian Ocean about 130 million years ago, it sank beneath the waves about 20 million years ago.. and is now one to two kilometers deep.
Zealandia: a full-fledged continent under what is now New Zealand. 3.5 million square kilometers in area, it began to sink about 60 million years ago, and was largely sunk by about 23 million years ago, leaving just New Zealand and some scattered mountaintops as islands.
5 Responses to “The Lost Continent”
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Thera has a pretty good good claim at being the inspiration for the origin of the Atlantis legend, considering that at the same time the volcano on it blew big time, the advanced Minoan civilization on Crete pretty much vanished overnight in the ensuing tsunami, and that the description of Atlantis says that it had superb harbors inside of its rings-inside-of-rings geography with a volcano on its central island.
Read between the lines on that, and what you have is a giant volcano that blew up in a super-sized Krakatoa-like blast, leaving a circular island chain around its collasped lava chamber in prehistoric times, grew up again from the center of that like Anak Krakatoa is presently doing, exploded again in a less violent eruption, leaving another, smaller, crater rim of islands inside the first like a bulls-eye, did that yet again in a third yet smaller eruption, went dormant long enough that the fourth volcano slowly rising from the center of the original big blast crater got settled by people …then went off big time again, wiping out the whole works and just leaving Santorini and the ruins of the Minoan settlements that have been found on it.
In fact there has been speculation that Thera, not Crete, was the place the Minoan civilization originally evolved at, and from there it spread southwards to Crete…certainly Thera, with its encircling mountain chain(s) around it would have made a superb anchorage, protected from storms, and the artistic remains found on its remnants dating from before the volcanic cataclysm that destroyed it show a very high order of skill in their execution:
http://dienekes.awardspace.com/pictures/thera/
Now if we could just find the remains of a temple to Poseidon on it, plated with “Mountain Copper” (Orichalcum)… 😉
Unfortunately, most of the art of Thera got turned into red-hot dust hovering around at about 100,000 feet one day back around 1,600 BC*:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_eruption
…but what little was left shows that they could paint like nobody’s beeswax:
http://www.imagekind.com/Minoan-Minature-Frieze-Fresco-Thera-Closeup-art?IMID=d94f8ae2-0607-4d7b-b308-f66b2b0a89ae
http://www.molon.de/galleries/Greece/Athens/Aegean/img.php?pic=14
How they started finding the ruins of Thera’s civilization was when people on Santorini reported that livestock, and sometimes even people, would be walking along, and suddenly just vanish into the ground, never to be seen again… they were falling into buried rooms under the volcanic ash deposits.
*And no, I’m not going to call it “BCE” and “CE”, which I think is some sort of Jewish plot to denigrate Jesus.
I’ve had quite enough of that shit already after noticing that our calenders end the week on Saturday, and not Sunday, which the Holy Bible Book says is the last day of the week.
Helen Thomas is right; when they’ve got you by the calenders, they’ve got you by the balls. 😉
An Italian retired admiral suggested the hypotesis that Antarctica could be at least the lost Atlantis. If you look at the Earth by south pole it matches with Plato description, a big island in the center of a vast, unique, ocean.
Later the same idea was (wrongly) insipired by Piri Reis map (that actually represented South America more than Antarctica) and by the novelist Clive Cussler for one of his Dirk Pitt’s adventure (“Atlantis”).
P.S. I Love Clive Cussler book and I have all the Dirk Pitt series in my library (of course in Italian translation), ok it’s my weakness but….
I am much more interested in the first 120m of ocean. You see, we had our modern brains during the last iceage. In fact, we spent 2x mich time under ice age conditions than we have out kf them. When that melted, all the oceans rose 120m from the glacier melt. Assuming people lived along the shore, (valid and true) it would mean that a substantial (2/3rds) amount of human history is under water. What we see in messapotmia and Egypt is probably not the most advanced civilization of the day, just the ones that stayed above the waves…
@pat: the Latin calendar starts on Mondays. And I muchnprefer it to this split bookend weeekend.