Ever since the famed Greek philosopher Plato first wrote of a fabled continent called Atlantis

more than two thousand years ago, scholars have been locked in fierce debate as to whether such
a place truly existed. While a few rare individuals have taken Plato’s words seriously, most scoff
at the idea that an advanced civilization could vanish as completely as if it had never existed

Did Atlantis exist, and if it did, where could it have been? While no one can answer that question
with any degree of certainty—though some attempt to—there are quite a few competing theories
out there to consider. Some of them are more plausible than others—and a few even have some
support from the scientific community—but all of them are just guesses. So now, without further
ado, here is my list, in no particular order, theories regarding the lost continent of Atlantis.

1)The traditional position maintained by most scientists and historians over the years is that
Plato’s account of a fabulously wealthy city as told in the Critias and Timaeus was merely a
fictional story designed to both entertain and enlighten his readers as to the dangers of hubris and
turning one’s back on the gods, and was never intended to be interpreted as an account of a real
place or real events. Evidence for this is suggested by the fact that Plato tells us the island was
given to the Greek god Poseidon, who fell in love with the beautiful daughter of Atlantis’ first
king—named, not coincidentally I suspect, Atlas—and begat numerous children by her, to whom
he promptly parceled out parts of the island to. He also tells us the Atlanteans were defeated by
an alliance of Greek and Eastern Mediterranean peoples around 12,000 years ago—thousands of
years before the earliest civilizations even emerged in the region—making the entire story
unlikely to say the least. The question, then, is that if we are compelled to take any of the story as
true, aren’t we logically obligated to accept everything—including a procreating god and a
skewed timeline—as true as well?
2) An increasingly popular theory concerning the true nature of Atlantis—and one that has some
acceptance within the scientific community—is that Plato was referring to a people native to the
modern Greek island of Crete known as the Minoans, who were largely wiped out when the
nearby volcanic island of Thera (known today as Santorini) erupted in 1600 BCE, producing
tsunamis large enough to obliterate a number of Minoan coastal cities and do considerable
damage around the entire Mediterranean basin. Such a spectacular and massive catastrophe,
obviously at the hands of displeased Gods, would have been remembered in the annals of
Egyptian history to ultimately find its way into the mythology of Plato’s day over a thousand
years later. The hypothesis, then, is that Plato was referring to that very catastrophe in a
somewhat idealized form, the descriptions of Atlantis’ vast resources and power unavoidably
exaggerated or embellished with the retelling over the years and innocently passed on by the
Greek philosopher

3) Another theory that has been recently postulated—and again has some support among
scientists—is that Atlantis and the “great Deluge” told of by Plato was a mythologized account
of another historical event that took place thousands of years before Plato was born: the
breaching of the Bosporus by the Mediterranean Sea and the flooding of the Black Sea around
5,600 BCE. It has been demonstrated that a number of civilizations may have flourished on the
shore of the Black Sea (then a fresh water lake half its present size) at the time, only to find it all
immersed under hundreds of feet of sea water in a fairly short time (some estimates placing it at
less than a year). Such an event would have likely had a traumatic effect on the people of the
region, who would have been scattered by the event. As they escaped the rising waters and
emigrated to other regions, each would have carried with them their own highly mythologized
account of the flood that came upon them practically overnight, creating the inspiration for
Plato’s story.

4) The controversial suggestion by the late Charles Hapgood that the Earth’s crust may have
suddenly shifted some twelve thousand years ago (he maintained that the Earth’s crust floats
upon a magma of molten rock like the skin of an orange and periodically shifts over the
millennia due to subterranean and gravitational pressures) has caught the imagination of many an
Atlantis buff over the years. According to Hapgood, because of this shift, at one time the
continent of Antarctica was much further north than it is now—and temperate and populated by
an advanced civilization to boot—and that this was what Plato was referring to as Atlantis. Its
sudden and catastrophic shift to its current icy position, then, destroyed the Atlanteans and made
Antarctica the uninhabitable ice box it is today. Though the idea has its supporters, the premise
that the Earth’s crust could shift so dramatically and suddenly has no support within the
scientific community. Further, Hapgood presented his theory before science came to fully
understand the nature of plate tectonics, which did much to exile his “sliding crust” hypothesis
to the realm of “fringe beliefs” where Plato’s continent is concerned.

5) Mu is the name of a hypothetical continent that allegedly existed in either the Atlantic or
Pacific Ocean, depending on who you listen to. In either case, it was thought to have disappeared
at the dawn of human history, its survivors emigrating to other continents to serve as the
foundation for a number of later civilizations throughout the world. Today, scientists generally
dismiss the concept of Mu and of other lost continents like Atlantis or Lemuria (see above) as
physically impossible, since a continent can neither sink nor be destroyed by any conceivable
catastrophe, especially not in a short time. Additionally, the weight of archaeological, linguistic,
and genetic evidence is contrary to the claim that the ancient civilizations of the New and Old
Worlds stemmed from a common ancestral civilization.

6)If one looks at the geography of the planet at the height of the last Ice Age, they will notice the
ocean levels were over two hundred feet lower then as a result of so much water being taken up
in the massive ice sheets that covered most of North America and Europe. As such, you can see
that the island archipelago we know today as Indonesia was then a complete continent nearly as
large as western Europe that stretches from Australia to the Indian subcontinent (which also
extends hundreds of miles further out to sea). Temperate, sub tropical, and massive, it would
have made a perfect place for an emerging civilization—perhaps even one as technologically
advanced as our own today—to take root. Could such a global civilization have emerged then,
only to perhaps find itself destroyed by its own technology and all evidence submerged by the
expanding ocean as the ice caps melted? Certainly, this would account for many of flood and
advanced civilization mythologies maintained by many diverse cultures around the globe and
explain many of the similarities between parallel structures (pyramids, obelisks, stone carvings)
seen around the world today.