Open Veils · Answer
Was the azores plateau once above sea level?
Multiple alternative researchers argue the Azores Plateau shows morphological signatures of a formerly subaerial landmass — terraced flanks, river-cut valleys and continental-type granitic inclusions inconsistent with purely volcanic oceanic crust. However, two specific mechanism tests published in 2026 (Zenodo, June 2026) find that even at the Last Glacial Maximum lowstand the plateau surface sat one to nearly three kilometres underwater across both ICE-6G_C and ICE-7G_NA deglacial reconstructions — far below any eustatic exposure window. The isostatic-seesaw drowning rate required (~95 mm/yr) exceeds the fastest GPS-measured subsidence at any of the 26 Azores stations by more than an order of magnitude. The geological anomalies remain real and unexplained; the specific Atlantis-drowning mechanism as currently modelled does not close the gap.
Evidence
- Charles Hapgood, in his crustal displacement framework, identified the mid-Atlantic ridge system — including the Azores — as a candidate remnant of a larger Atlantic landmass displaced during rapid lithospheric shift events.
- Oceanographer Maurice Ewing's mid-20th-century deep-sea surveys recovered beach sand and apparently water-worn rocks from the mid-Atlantic ridge at depths of several kilometres — anomalies Donnelly's later commentators, including Charles Berlitz, treated as physical confirmation of subaerial exposure.
- Randall Carlson has emphasised that the Younger Dryas boundary (~11,550 cal BP) coincides precisely with Plato's transmitted date, and that catastrophic meltwater pulses — Meltwater Pulse 1A and related events — could theoretically have reorganised Atlantic bathymetry faster than uniformitarian models allow.
- The 2026 Zenodo technical note directly addresses the Carlson-style Younger Dryas correspondence, finding that a round deep-time number lands within tolerance of some late-glacial event roughly one-in-six to one-in-twenty of the time by chance alone — characterising the match as 'unremarkable rather than impossible.'
- Ignatius Donnelly's foundational 1882 work Atlantis: The Antediluvian World cited the Azores as the surviving mountain peaks of a drowned continent, pointing to matching flora, fauna and folk-memory on both Atlantic coasts as corroboration.