This category contains anything related to the classical story of Atlantis contained in Plato. Plato is the sole extant ancient source of the Atlantis story. Speculations about no longer extant ancient sources he may have used or which may have been current in his time are pointless at best. Plato placed Atlantis in the Atlantic, he spoke of the continent that lay beyond (both American continents) and the other islands which lay between, of the sudden destruction, of the shoal mud that impeded navigation for thousands of years after the submergence, and gave the dimensions of the great Atlantean island which seem to match at least one of the submerged plateaus, information Plato could not have gained the way we have (modern electromagnetic technology). Another suggestion of the basic truthfulness of Plato's tale is the aridification of the Sahara.

See the Atlantis section in the Bookshop.

New Scientist had this little article which I saw in a post on Delphi. Of course the size of the island is too small, but it's great to see that someone is considered this submerged archipelago. It's easily found on any of those seafloor maps put out by National Geographic Society.

Sea level study reveals Atlantis candidate
by Jon Copley
map

Collina-Girard was interested in patterns of human migration from Europe into North Africa at the height of the last ice age, 19,000 years ago. To see if Palaeolithic people could have crossed the strait, he made a map of what the western European coastline looked like at that time, when the sea level was 130 metres lower than it is now. His reconstruction of the area reveals an ancient archipelago, with an island at the spot where Plato described Atlantis.

This is related to Mary Settegast's idea.

	Plato Prehistorian by Mary Settegast

Here's a story that didn't get far from the occultist circles. There's an obvious connection with Cayce's supposed trance state ramblings, but he said nothing about Cuba. Clearly the Flem-Ath's success with their Antarctica model has led to a lot of such stuff. So has the twenty or more years of undersea exploration by Robert Ballard and others. Looking for human habitation below sea level is becoming respectible, as it should have been right along.

Looking For Lost Riches In Cubas Seas
Underwater surveyors say they may have found sunken city

Advanced Digital Communications, a Canadian marine exploration firm, has discovered, at a depth of about 2,200 feet (700-800 meters), a huge land plateau with clear images of what appears to be urban development partly covered by sand. From above, the shapes resemble pyramids, roads and buildings. ADC is excited but reluctant to speculate until a joint investigation with the Cuban Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society takes place early this summer.

There is an interesting story from 1958, A Voyage To Atlantis? by Lawrence D. Hill in the recent book Out of Time and Place edited by Terry O'Neill, which is available in the Bookshop. In the 1880s a freight ship, the Jesmond, charted and briefly visited a transitory volcanic island at 25 D N 23 D 40' W, about 800 land miles from the Azores, 500 miles from the Cape Verdes, 340 miles from Ferro in the Canaries (the book has 2.5 D and 2.3 D, respectively, which is in the Sahara, and based on the other coordinates given in the same paragraph, can be judged to be a typographical error). In the sea floor debris that had been swept up by the eruption were found flint arrowheads and knives, spear and axe heads, metal rings, a yellow metal sword, stone and pottery figures of birds and animals, jars with bone fragments, a human cranium, and a roughly carved bas-relief statue. Eventually the New Orleans newspaper which originated the story recanted the whole thing.

My own recent (June to December 1998) reading around here has been non-Atlantean, but at least some has been catastrophist. I was at the library in mid-December looking for something else and noticed they had a copy of Otto Muck's The Secret of Atlantis . I've checked this out of the local branch libraries about four or five times over the past 15 years and have never read it. I've read portions referenced in the index, and read the first sixty pages or so along with the introduction by Peter Tompkins so I'm familiar with the thesis, but have never managed to finish it. It predates the Alvarez theory and foreshadows it in eerie ways, but obviously purports to describe events that were almost 65 million years after the K-T boundary event. My intent to finish the book went unfulfilled this time as well due to holiday tasks as well as a continuing search for new employment.

William Corliss' Science Frontiers has two brief reports from the 1980s regarding an apparent submerged ruin and changes in seafloor elevation.

Catastrophical Scenario for Discontinuities in Human History by Emilio Spedicato University of Bergamo - "that Atlantis was Minoan Crete, destroyed by the tsunami which followed the collapse of the volcanic chamber in Santorini... requires so many substantial changes to the Platonic text, that it is equivalent in our opinion to rejecting the text" I couldn't agree more. Having just edited out the HTML crud from the saved file version of this April 7, 1997, my only objection would be that the paragraphs were way too long, but that could be an artifact of my search and replace efforts. Spedicato puts Atlantis on Hispaniola - recommended

Viatcheslav Koudriavtsev's Hypothesis on Plato's Atlantis. Last time I checked this site (March 1999) the expedition page had not been updated. That's at least a year since I first visited. Koudriavtsev puts Atlantis on the Celtic Shelf, i.e., under the North Sea.

Timaeus (http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html)

Critias (http://archon.lib.umn.edu/critias.htm)

Pictures of Atlantis? (index) - underwater near Bimini

Plato Lecture Hall message board... and ...my posting there

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