HELIKE
Near the Gulf of Corinth, the ancient city of Helike fits the Atlantis profile as it was a flourishing city struck down in its prime by an earthquake in 373BC. The city state was the centre of a cult of Poseidon, second only in importance to the Oracle at Delphi. Generations of fishermen in the Gulf have told of snagging their nets on statues of, an apparently wrathful, Poseidon. BBC Horizon claimed to have located the site.
(Plausibility 8)
SANTORINI
Considered by many as the likeliest because Plato's description of a grand civilisation matches what we know of the Minoans whose rule stretched from Crete to the volcanic island of Santorini. Nay-sayers point out that the dates and scale of Plato's story don't match what we know of the violent seismic past of Santorini. However, if Solon, the source of Plato's writings, exaggerated the extent of Atlantis we could be in business - which is what the numerous Hotel Atlantises are on the modern-day holiday island.
(Plausibility 7)
TROY
As if the mystery of Atlantis location weren't enough, the author and geologist Bernhard Zangger has bound it up with the hunt for Troy.
(Plausibility 5)
CORNWALL
The Moscow Institute of Meta-History has avoided the obvious in locating Atlantis about 100 miles off Land's End. The site, at the edge of the Celtic shelf which may have been dry before the Ice Age, is thought locally to be the site of the competing myth of the City of Lions.
(Plausibility 2)
BOLIVIA
If anyone is going to find Atlantis then surely it should be someone with a name like Colonel John Blashford-Snell. Unfortunately, the soldier-explorer has stretched credibility by claiming that satellite images of a site in Bolivia fit Plato's description. "A lot of people laugh at us," said the colonel.
(Plausibility 1)
SOUTH-EAST ASIA
A Brazilian nuclear physicist, Nuñes dos Santos, has told us we've been looking in the wrong places for 30 years. We should be looking in the Indo-Pacific, he insists. This summer a team of well-funded Malaysians deploying remote-sensing satellites will try to prove him right.
(Plausibility 4)
SARDINIA
Sergio Frau, an Italian writer, starts by telling us the Pillars of Hercules are not in Gibraltar but in the SicilianChannel. So Atlantis was really Sardinia. He says its inhabitants were hit by an earthquake and migrated to the mainland to form the basis of what became Roman civilisation.
(Plausibility 3)
SRI LANKA/INDIA
South Asian Atlantis-hunters point out its similarities to stories about the submerged Kumari continent, between Sri Lanka and India.
(Plausibility 2)
FINLAND
A Finnish amateur historian, Ior Block, tells us the lost city is in southern Finland where a community lived in the Ice Age. Inevitably this theory is part of a grander saga of oral history passed down through generations of Blocks dating back to the creation of language itself.
(Plausibility 1)
IRELAND
Combine a Swedish oceanographer and a book called Mapping Fairy Land and what do you get? The revelation that Atlantis was off Ireland.
(Plausibility 2)
CARIBBEAN
The idea that Atlantis is really a submerged island off central America is based on the musings of a Canadian-Hungarian geologist-topographer who called his book Atlantis: The Seven Seals.
(Plausibility 1)
the whole thing ...
Posted by david meadows on Aug-24-05 at 5:41 AM
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