Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (28 page)

Juan Villarias-Robles, the Spanish historian and anthropologist whose multidisciplinary team investigated Kühne’s hypothesis
(Courtesy of Juan Villarias-Robles)

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 destroyed Portugal’s capital and echoed Plato’s description of Atlantis’s end—massive tremors followed by devastating floods.
(Courtesy of the Jan T. Kozak Collection, NISEE)

George Nomikos on the island of Santorini, sometimes known by its former name, Thera
(Courtesy of George Nomikos)

Santorini’s unique bull’s-eye shape and deep caldera have led some to believe the volcanic explosion that created it inspired Plato’s story.
(Courtesy of George Nomikos)

Santorini’s ancient city of Akrotiri, discovered in 1967 under several meters of volcanic ash, bears striking similarity to Plato’s description of Atlantis.
(Courtesy of the author)

For a brief period in the 1960s, the search for Atlantis was treated as legitimate scientific news.
(
The New York Times
, September 4, 1966)

Dr. Anton Mifsud believes he has found a twenty-three-hundred-year-old source that proves Atlantis was located in Malta.
(Courtesy of Anton Mifsud)

The enormous canals Plato described in Atlantis may have been modeled on Malta’s mysterious ancient cart ruts.
(Courtesy of the author)

The Strait of Gibraltar, which the ancient Greeks called the Pillars of Heracles—the end of the known world
(Courtesy of Olaf Tausch/Wikimedia Commons)

The sixth-century BC Greek philosopher Pythagoras discovered the mathematical ratios behind musical harmonies, evidence that numbers were the hidden code of nature.
(Courtesy of the author)

Details Plato gave about the ancient Acropolis in Athens, once believed fictional elements of the Atlantis story, were confirmed by twentieth-century archaeology.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Geophysics professor Stavros Papamarinopoulos, who has analyzed Plato’s use of myth and history in the Atlantis tale for more than forty years
(Courtesy of Stavros Papamarinopoulos)

Papamarinopoulos argues that the concentric rings of Atlantis may have been a natural formation, similar to the Richat Structure in Mauritania.
(Courtesy of NASA)