Do you believe in the City of Atlantis? Where do you believe it is located?

Question

Do the tectonic plates have an effect on where many of the world's famous sites have disappeared?

Answer 1

People have speculated that the site of the lost continent of Atlantis was in many places around the world. Though I don't know all of the proposed sites of Altantis, I have always thought of the Carribean area or Antarctica.

Many sites document in some degree of detail that location.
For example:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6568053.stm - a BBC news site that offers the possibility that an ancient tidal wave in the Med. Sea could have contributed to the legend of Atlantis.

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/6396/lightfall057.htm - a site suggesting that Atlantis was located in Antarctica.

http://www.crystalinks.com/atlantislocations.html - A site listing some of the locations of Atlantis.

Take a look at some of these for yourself. These are only a few of the many sites on the web that discuss this subject. Have fun!

Answer 2

The island of Santorini which someone else mentioned has the ruins of a civilization which existed in 2700 B.C. The ruins are called Akritiri and the island was once a volcano known as Thera.When it exploded it sent tsunamis 800 ft high to the surrounding regions in the Mediterranean. Some have speculated that the eruption was the reason for the plagues in Eygpt and the so called parting of the Red Sea. Before the tidal wave rushes in the water rushes out. Anyway this is is a fascinating subject,there is no end to research that can be done. Hopefully someday we'll have answers to this kind of thing. Maybe someday we'll know what was in the Library of Alexandria too. The latter was not a myth but real.

Answer 3

For what it is worth, I believe Atlantis existed. If you'll excuse the expression, the smoke could not have lasted this long without the fire having been somewhere, at some time. It's hard to say where Atlantis was exactly, but I would suggest somewhere in the Mediterranean where a remnant land mass may still remain. Chances are Atlantis vanished in the flood. It may not have been an island either, but it's remnants may be islands. Try Greece as a possible starting point. Plato seems to have known something of the subject.

Answer 4

I understood Atlantis was a continent - beyond the pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) - i.e. in the Atlantic Ocean - according to Plato's account. It is supposed to have disappeared about 9000 BCE - which coincided roughly with the end of the last ice age. Did the disappearance of a huge land mass in the atlantic allow the warm waters from the Gulf of Mexico to warm up northern Europe?
Every now and again someone claims to have found ruins off the coast of Florida or Cuba, but after the initial excitement you never hear of it again.
Atlantis - the evidence is either non-existent or inconclusive, but I would keep an open mind on the subject.

Answer 5

I believe in the City of Atlantis, although I don't know where its located. I've heard it's in many places, usually around the Mediterranean, but I also heard it could be Cuba (or whatever is left of Atlantis is Cuba). I once saw that there was a group that claimed they found Atlantis (a clip that showed them scuba diving somewhere), but they said they would not reveal where the location was because they didn't want the government to claim everything there or something. But who knows, it's always cool to wonder about it.

Answer 6

The story of Atlantis is based off the flood of Noah and the global flood, just the Greek version of it. Science would call it an ice age, but Atlantis, Noah's Ark, and the Epic of Gilgamesh are all just dramatic portrayals of it. Atlantis wasn't an actual city. The name Atlantis comes from the words At, lan and tis. "lan" is a word meaning people (it could also mean land but it is more accurately translated people), tis is the Greek word "of" and At is a Hebraism. The Hebrews or Jews did not have vowels at the time and the Greeks loved vowels, but At is a Greek Hebraism for the name "Adam". So Atlantis means "people of Adam", Adam being a word to describe the Jews who traced humanity back to Adam.

Answer 7

No, I don't believe in the existence of a real place called Atlantis.

But even if it did exist, it would be too young to have been chewed up by the earth's tectonic plates. Convergent plate boundaries do chew up and digest old pieces of plates, but it happens so slowly that it couldn't have already eaten a city/island that was only supposed to have disappeared ten thousand or so years ago.

Edit: In response to samantha, No, it is not a matter of fact. In fact I would be very surprised to hear of one legitimate historical scholar who actually believes that Atlantis existed as Plato described it. The story may have its origin in some little island in the Mediterranean or another, but as for all the details...fantasy.

Good fantasy, but fantasy nevertheless.

Edit: A couple of extra tidbits:

Plato's two documents, Timaeus and Critias, are the ONLY extant documents that we know of that ever mention Atlantis. It's not as if it was somewidespread myth that Plato "seemed to know a little bit about". He's the only person, as far as we know, to mention it. Ever.

There are, as historians see it, two possibilities for Atlantis: either it was based on a real place that underwent a real disaster at some point in history, and the story just got warped way out of proportion (why wouldn't it have been? It had to be passed through half-a-dozen people or so, over thousands of years, before it allegedly got to Plato),

OR Plato just made it up to prove a point about a utopian civilization that gets too big for its britches. On the one hand, Plato himself says that the story is not made up--on the other hand, if we take him at his word, the Greek gods Athena and Poseidon had parts to play in the tragedy, so we must accept them as well...

Finally, we humans have a handy device called sonar now; it allows us to effectively "take pictures" of the ocean floor, so we can see what the topography looks like down there. As a result we find NOT a sunken continent in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, but a Mid-Atlantic Ridge instead, where two tectonic plates are diverging (so if Atlantis was there, it would not have been destroyed, just slowly torn apart, as is happening to Iceland).

Furthermore, because of sonar we know there's no hidden sunken continent lurking in the Mediterranean, or in the Gulf of Mexico, or for that matter anywhere else we look.

And on top of that, it is, scientifically, simply impossible for a continent to "sink" as Plato describes. Continents are made out of rock that's less dense than the rock that underlies them, so they "float" on the heavier rock. Nothing that I know of short of two heavenly bodies colliding could "sink" a continent.

Answer 8

i believe in the lost city of atlantis.i think it's almost impossible to predict where the city could be but i believe that it is located somewhere deep on the surface of the earth and on the bottom of the atlantic ocean. But if the Myth of Atlantis really was true i think the only way for the city to completly disapear would be to a major eartquake

Answer 9

I actually do believe Atlantis was once a city and disappeared. Considering how long ago it was. I kinda believe it's over by Cyprus since that region is where civilization began.

I still kinda believe it could be near Santorini but more than likely it's was near Cyprus. Since that is near Italy and Greece where all those philosophers were from

Answer 10

No. Truly, Plato was the only source for this story in antiquity. He was the origin, and it appears to be only a tool used to describe one of his arguments. All other older references are to his use of it.Spiritualist have exploited this myth more fragrantly in the Last hundred years.

Frankly, we know that there was no prehistoric civilization. We can see Man developing very basic skill like agriculture and metal working. These things would have survived from earlier peoples, if such had lived. There is no evidence of any vastly, or even mildly, advance peoples.

Construction of ancient monuments like the pyramids are not at all mysterious. We have found the prototypes. We have seen how the Egyptians slowly went from dirt mounds to the pyramid of Giza. Each mound, then mastaba, and lastly pyramid being better engineered.

The story of man is wonderful, filled with fabulous achievements, and great mysteries. There is no need to add to this with misconception from a handful of Plato's references.