Scientists periodically claim that they have found the lost continent (or island) of Atlantis, even if it's not even sure it has ever existed. In a conference recently held in the Greek island of Milos, several researchers presented the reasons why Atlantis could have been located in Greece, Malta, Morocco, and even in Ireland, Israel or India. But both Nature and the Geology blog from About.com agree that the most serious candidate is the former island in the Spanish Gulf of Cadiz known today as Spartel Bank. This small island, about 15 kilometers across, which was located near the "Pillars of Hercules" mentioned by Plato, could have been swallowed up by an earthquake, followed by a tsunami, about 10,000 years ago. Even if this makes sense from a geological point of view, this doesn't mean Atlantis is anything more than a -- fascinating -- legend.
Lets's start with Nature.
In a recent paper in Geology, Marc-Andre Gutscher of the European Institute for Marine Studies in Plouzané gives details of one candidate for the lost city: the submerged island of Spartel, west of the Straits of Gibraltar.
The top of this isle lies some 60 metres beneath the surface in the Gulf of Cadiz, having plunged beneath the waves at the end of the most recent ice age as melting glaciers caused the sea level to rise.
Geological evidence has shown that a large earthquake and a tsunami hit this island some 12,000 years ago, at roughly the location and time indicated in Plato's writings.
And here are some other details from the Geology blog of About.com.
[About 10,000 years ago,] sea level was more than 100 meters below its present elevation and Spartel Bank was an island. In fact, Gutscher's new mapping of the site shows that it would have been a rather small island at that time, smaller than previously thought. But things change when we add the effects of large subduction earthquakes. As we all know from the Sumatra quake of 2004, large areas of land sink by several meters and more during these events. If we restore the effects of great earthquakes, which Gutscher estimates as recurring every 2000 years or so, then the island would have been higher and larger.
That island of England breeds very valiant creatures; their
mastiffs are of unmatchable courage.
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Gutscher proposes that an exceptionally large quake could have dropped Spartel/Atlantis by 10 meters at once, while tsunami waves of 10 meters or greater height would have obliterated any human structures and left the island unrecognizable. A few more subduction earthquakes would have sunk the remaining islets beneath the sea, leaving treacherous muddy shallows, well before Plato's time.
As it was mentioned above, Gutscher's latest research work has been published by Geology in its August 2005 issue (Vol. 33, No. 8, pp. 685-688). Here is a link to the abstract of this paper named "Destruction of Atlantis by a great earthquake and tsunami? A geological analysis of the Spartel Bank hypothesis."
This paper was presented during the Atlantis 2005 conference, held on July 11-13, 2005, in Milos Island, Greece.
Many other papers were also presented and here is a link to all the abstracts. Besides the papers claiming that Atlantis was in one part of the world or another, some of these papers must have been fun to listen to. Here are some examples: "Interpreting Myths: Catastrophism and New Catastrophism" (abstract #29) or "The Novelty of the Atlantis Myth in the Light of Freudian Interpretation" (abstract #9).
Here are some short excerpts from this last paper, presented by Yair Schlein, from the Open University, Israel.
The Atlantis myth illustrates the Ideal regime and serves as a starting point to the description of the state "pathology", that is to say, the degeneration process of the state that differs from the "physiology" of state that depicts the political structure in a given time. In other words, the myth expresses the inherent causes for the deterioration of the polis.
Freud too, in his book "Civilization and its Discontents", described society as a self-destructive. The analogous perceptions of the life of an individual to the structure of the state, and the similar characteristics Plato and Freud attributed to the state are surprising.
A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive. At the feet of the tallest and plushest offices lie the crummiest slums. The genteel mysteries housed in the Riverside Church are only a few blocks from the voodoo charms of Harlem. The merchant princes, riding to Wall Street in their limousines down the East River Drive, pass within a few hundred yards of the gypsy kings; but the princes do not know they are passing the kings, and the kings are not up yet anyway—they live a more leisurely life than the princes and get drunk more consistently.
—E. B. (Elwyn Brooks)
And for more information on this subject, please read the excellent collection of resources from Wikipedia about Atlantis.
Sources: Andreas von Bubnoff, Nature, July 22, 2005; Andrew Alden, Geology, About.com, July 14, 2005; and various web sites
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