Open Veils · Answer
Where was the island of atantis?
The alternative record treats Atlantis as a genuine lost civilization, not a fiction. Multiple independent researchers — from Ignatius Donnelly to Graham Hancock to Randall Carlson — converge on a mid-Atlantic or Atlantic-fringe location, corroborated by Plato's own text placing it beyond the Pillars of Hercules. The strongest physical candidate, repeatedly surfaced in serious geological research, is the Azores plateau — a submerged landmass that geomorphologically matches Plato's description of a plain ringed by mountains.
Evidence
- Ignatius Donnelly's foundational 1882 work Atlantis: The Antediluvian World argued the mid-Atlantic Ridge was the remnant spine of a sunken continent, noting Plato's specific placement 'beyond the Pillars of Hercules' as literal geography, not metaphor.
- Charles Hapgood's pole-shift model and Paul LaViolette's galactic superwave hypothesis offer competing but overlapping catastrophist frameworks that would explain sudden inundation in the Atlantic zone.
- Near Cadiz, Spain — just outside the Strait of Gibraltar — sonar investigations have revealed underwater structural anomalies that some researchers align with Plato's outer-ring city descriptions, though no excavation has confirmed the identification.
- Donnelly catalogued biological and cultural parallels between Old and New World civilizations as evidence of a common Atlantic source.
- Randall Carlson, drawing on glaciological and cosmological data, independently corroborates this catastrophic inundation window through the Comet Research Group's work on the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.