“THERE occurred violent earthquakes and floods…the island of Atlantis disappeared in the depths of the sea.” That was how Greek philosopher Plato described the destruction of the legendary city. Now new evidence suggests that he was writing about a devastating tsunami.
In 2001, some geologists suggested that Spartel, an underwater island in the Strait of Gibraltar close to the region mentioned by Plato, might have been the site of Atlantis. A rising sea could have slowly submerged the island (New Scientist, 22 September 2001, p 17).
But this does not match Plato’s accounts of what happened 12,000 years ago, says Marc-André Gutscher of the University of Western Brittany in Plouzané, France, who has been mapping Spartel. “Plato describes destruction in a single day and night – not over a week, not over a century – pointing to one catastrophic event. He talks about violent earthquakes and flooding, implying there was a tsunami.”
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Gutscher has now found an active subduction zone in the region and evidence in the sedimentary record of massive earthquakes and tsunamis about once every 2000 years. Plato also described muddy shoals in the region that halted ships. Gutscher has found a coarse-grained sedimentary deposit, between 50 and 120 centimetres thick, that dates to around 10,000 BC and could have been left behind after a tsunami (Geology, vol 33, p 685).
Floyd McCoy of the University of Hawaii in Kaneohe, a volcanologist who has studied the possible destruction of the Greek Minoan civilisation by a tsunami, likes Gutscher’s approach. “This puts mythology back into scientific awareness and that’s a good thing,” he says. “Myths are the way that information about mega-events is transmitted by the human race through the ages.”
But it’s not all good news for Atlantis-hunters. Gutscher found no evidence of any geometric structures or indeed anything unusual that suggests a city once existed on Spartel. Moreover, the underwater maps show that Spartel is much smaller than previously thought.
“This makes it less likely that there would have been enough of an island for humans to inhabit 12,000 years ago,” says Gutscher. But he adds that the island could have been higher and larger in the past, and its present state reflects the effects of multiple large earthquakes over the centuries. “I haven’t shown that this place is Atlantis, or that Atlantis existed,” says Gutscher. “But I have shown that it is feasible that Spartel could be Atlantis.”
McCoy has a word of hope for those searching for the lost city. “There are serious questions about Plato’s figures for the large size and age of Atlantis,” he says. “Maybe we shouldn’t expect to find a match with Plato’s account, simply because Plato was wrong.”
