The Legend Of Atlantis

One of the most widespread and popular stories in the world is the legend of Atlantis. The story originated in ancient Greece and is about a lost continent that had hosted a great civilization, until it sank into the sea. When I was a child there was a song about Atlantis, by Donovan, on the radio.

A number of places have been suggested as possibly being the inspiration for the story, such as Port Royal the notorious hangout for pirates until it was buried under the sea by a terrific earthquake. But the story actually originated with Plato, more than two thousand years ago.

There is something amazing about Atlantis that I have never seen anywhere and that is what I want to discuss today.

What is so amazing is that Plato gave the time of Atlantis sinking as "Nine thousand years ago". Since Plato lived more than two thousand years ago that means, from our time, the sinking of Atlantis into the sea happened more than eleven thousand years ago.

That is just about exactly the time that the last ice age ended. I cannot see that this has ever been referred to.

An ice age happens periodically when, as we might expect, the temperature on earth gets colder. The real beginning of an ice age is when it gets cold enough that the snow of one winter hasn't melted when the snow of the following winter begins to fall. The snow piles up year after year, and century after century. The end result is a vast sheet of ice across the land, more than a kilometer in altitude. The limiting factor in the growth of these ice sheets, known as glaciers, is the altitude of the clouds from which the snow falls. 

These sheets of ice are pulled toward the equator by the centrifugal force of the rotation of the earth, as they move they shape the landscape. As glaciers move away from where they were formed more glacial ice forms to take their place. At the peak of an ice age maybe 30% of the earth's land area is covered by glaciers.

But what the formation of glaciers on land does is to take water out of the sea. Water evaporated from the sea that falls as precipitation on land ordinarily finds it way back to the sea by the drainage system of rivers. But that does not happen during the ice ages and much water remains locked up in ice on land.

The result is that sea levels drop across the world during an ice age, even in the tropics that are far away from the glaciers. The seafloor in relatively shallow areas is exposed and becomes dry land for the several thousand years that an ice age might last. This is how the ancestors of the native Indians in the western hemisphere came across from Asia, the Bering Strait became dry land. It is also how people migrated from mainland Asia to Japan.

What that means is that there was large areas of sea floor that became dry land and then, when the ice age ended and the glaciers covering the land melted, were submerged in a great onrush of water.

Eleven thousand years ago was before what is generally considered as the beginning of civilization. But people did live in settlements and Plato gets it just about exactly right when he gave the date of the Atlantis submergence as nine thousand years before his time.

Atlantis is not the only story of destruction in the past by an onrush of water. The Book of Genesis is not the only source for the story of a great destructive flood. Another well-known source is the Babylonian "Epic of Gilgamesh". Could there be a connection between these two stories?

All that would be required for this destructive onrush of water would be the relatively sudden end of the last ice age, with the melting of the glaciers covering the land. On the seafloor it would permanently submerge any settlements under water. On land it would result in a destructive, but temporary, submergence.

In the Book of Genesis, Chapter 2, four rivers are listed, including the Euphrates. But today, the Euphrates River is all that there is.

Glaciers move during the ice ages, pulled toward the equator by the centrifugal force of the earth's rotation and, when the ice age ends, the melting glacier breaks apart and pieces of it slide across the land, from higher to lower terrain. A moving glacier typically obliterates the drainage pattern of the land, which forms anew after the end of the ice age. 

One example of this can be seen at Niagara Falls. The river from the warm period before the last ice age can be traced and is called the St. David's River. It was filled in and erased by the moving ice during the ice age but the present Niagara River, including the falls, formed after the end of the last ice age.