Some people believe that the atlantis myth has some truth in it, and that it refers to the island of santorini. It´s a volcanic island in the mediteranean sea, close to crete and belonging to greece. There used to be an ancient civilisation on it, thousands of years ago, before the island literally exploded in one of the greatest natural disasters in the history of mankind. A nice detail is that archeologists have found not just ancient buildings, but also clay pots with honey in it, that was still edible (nice, when you´re doing excavations and you get hungry...you always have something edible at hand).

When the island exploded, it destroyed not just the civilisation on the island itself, but also the minoian civilisation by causing a huge tsunami that swept away everything on the mediteranean coast (some people even believe that this event is what caused the parting of the nile, instead of moses). The entire core of the island vanished into the sea, leaving only the outer rim intact.

Today, the island has a crescent moon shape, as it´s a huge volcanic crater. You can get there by plane, but it´s nicer to get there by boat. There are boats going there everyday from the cretan port of heraklion. It´s a realy impressive sight to fare into the hollow core.

Hey polytrip - I just went to Crete, Santorini and Rhodes. Visited the volcano too, it was amazing to see smoking vents and to smell sulphur in the air.

We went swimming in a hot spring right next to the volcanic island and all the water was a rusty brown and the water was very warm. Generally a really beautiful place, the touristy areas are to be avoided - nothing of any value there except for expensive bars and restaurants that offer scenic views of the volcanic island.

If anyone is planning on visiting, send me a holla and I'll let you know more. Peace.





View from volcanic island.



Active vent on volcanic island - smells like sulphur here





Lichen







View of volcanic island from santorini - sunset



View of volcanic island from Santorini - daytime

Wow amazing the terrain they built that town on. What a cool looking place.

Beautyfull, the typical greek white & blue.

However I don't find Santorini a likely candidate for being the location of what once was atlantis.
From the little that has been written about atlantis, the location is said to have been "beyond the Pillars
of Hercules"(Gibraltar), somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.

Also Atlantis sunk into the sea. Had an explosive eruption, that blew half the island skyhigh, taken place
in Atlantis (as did in Santorini) surely this would have been recorded in the myths. But the Myth specifically
mentions the city sinking under the sea, leaving behind a mirky, shallow sea. I've never come across any mentions
of explosions or eruptions in what I've read about atlantis.


There are many theories that asume atlantis to be in another location than the descriptions of Plato & Solon, like
the Black Sea, beyond the Bosporus(as indeed signs of ancient civilisations have been found on the bottom there).
But if Plato's account of Atlantis is one of the few descriptions(if not only?) that have ever been written about
atlantis, why assume Atlantis isn't in the atlantic ocean, beyond Gibraltar, as plato described?


Also...have no scientists investigated the atlantic ocean's floor, on Atlantis' supposed location?
If a massive island sunk into the sea there, surely the piece of ocean floor that was once the island
would still be somewhat elevated nowadays. So has no archeological research been done yet on that location?
Or have such research yielded nothing?

NOAA, has mapped the planets ocean floor almost completely . Here's their website http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/

They Giveth...

And they taketh away...

The grid system was found in an area known as the Madeira Abyssal Plane, off the coast of Morocco
Left of the Canaries...

Interresting cyb! I somehow completely missed that.

I have allways suspected that islands & archipellagos like The Canary Islands(Spain),
the Azores & Madeira could have once been the peaks of the highest mountains on Atlantis.
Considering Atlantis used to be "bigger than Libya(North African Magreb region) & Asia Minor
(The bigger, Asian half of Turky), most of the sea between Madeira, the Azores & the Canary
Islands could have once been a massive body of land, including the area where the grid system
was found on the ocean floor.

This land mass would indeed match the description of being bigger than Libya & Asia Minor combined.

All these clues would place the island very close to the Mind-Atlantic Ridge. If the North-
American Plate pushed the Eurasian plate down low enough during an earthquake, indeed Atlantis
would have been quite swiftly submerged below the ocean surface.

I was looking at the grid pattern again, on Google Earth, and noticed there are more, far bigger grid patterns nearby. If you look at the grid pattern from that link, in Google earth, then you can see 3 eerily straight, diagonal lines moving away from the grid-structure into the NorthEastern direction.

It seems like they're going to cross eachother just about where Madeira is, but if you look closely, you'll notice that the top line continues on to madeira while the bottom line stops earlier to end in another, huge rectangular grid-system, comprised of smaller rectangles.

If you look around you'll see more and more of these long, unnaturally straight lines:
-A bit North from the 2 diagonal lines I mentioned earlier runs another amazingly
straight diagonal line, about parallel to the 2 below.
-Starting about half way in between the Canary islands' most western 2 Islands(La Palma & Frontera),
running almost horizontally to the West is another of these lines.
-Starting from in between the Canary Islands Tenerife & Gran Canaria running diagonally into the
NorthEast is another of these lines.
-Starting from the South-SouthEast of Madeira running Diagonally down into the SouthWest to end at the
North-Eastern most Island of the Canary Islands(La Palma)

I'm sure I'll discover more and more of these long straight lines. Surely they were man made. What I wonder:
Would these lines on Google Maps represent ditches, deeper than the surrounding ocean floor?
Or would they represent Walls, extending higher up than the surrounding ocean floor?

Remaining walls would make sense if once there stood a mighty, fortified city.
Fascinating.

What do you mean by mapped? Maybe the large scale structure of the ocean floor, but I have trouble believing that a detailed small scale model of the ocean floor exists. Most the stuff I found says we have very little of the ocean floor mapped. There are probably billions of dollars worth of missing shipwrecks on the ocean floor, if it was all mapped they would have been found by now.




"even today, scientists estimate that only about 10-15 percent of the ocean has been mapped in any detail"
http://www.huffingtonpos...ap-ocean_b_1826410.html

"Only about 5% of the world’s seafloor have been mapped in some detail."
http://www.schmidtocean.org/story/show/1457

I didn't read all posts, so this may have been addressed but i think personally that Atlantis is, as almost all ancient writings are, allegorical.
I think its far more likely Atlantis refers as an abstract, or at least templative description of a previous civilisation that was close to global.

That aside, if there were to be a candidate for Atlantis proper, i think it'd be the Azores. There's a book that makes a very good case for this, but i can't think of the title right now..
It may have been The Atlantis Blueprint, but i think it was another book i was reading at the time to be honest, so its not help haha.

New evidence of atlantis? http://www.voanews.com/c...ntic-ocean/1656308.html

I cant answer that question in detail since im not an oceanographer. Google earth is a good example of the type of mapping done by sonar with naval and NOAA ships. I doubt its in the kind of detail your asking about, every nook and cranny ext. We know about the mountain ranges, subduction zones, trenches ext. Where do you think Google got these images from? As you can see on programs like google earth there are blank areas where no mapping has been done. We can also see the magnetic lines in the ocean floor forming very clear striping patterns from the changing poles over millions and millions of years through other types of sea floor mapping.

Laymens guess would be when statements like only 5% of the sea floor has been mapped in detail is just that. Its referring to greater detail than just the large formations, trenches, and mountain ranges but a sunken continent I would think should be visible in the type of mapping done since the cold war and before.

There was one night I spent reading all about atlantis and possible locations after being intriqued by those grid patterns from google earth (which were quickly dismissed).

One belief is that the heroic society was merely a fictional story made up by Plato... another that Plato traveled to Egypt where he learned of the story Atlantis as an ancient island nation recorded by the Egyptains. In this case, it was said that Atlantis was somewhere off the coast of Africa either in the Atlantic Ocean or Mediterranean sea.

IMO if Atlantis was indeed real and had been swallowed up by the ocean in a seismic event off the coast of Africa, it is no suprise that we cannot find it to this day even with all of our technology, because the Sahara winds blow sand off the coast of Africa for hundreds of miles into the ocean. Given the sinking of Atlantis happened so long ago (9000 b.c?), it could very easily have been buried in sand over thousands of years under the ocean and obscurred from the view of today's sonar mapping.

Im certainly no Atlantian expert but its always felt as if far to much stock was placed in Platos account of the advanced ringed city which wasnt even eye witnessed but passed down legend or at best second third or even 20th hand information. Who knows I'm sure many other civilizations have existed we will never know about so I kind of agree with the idea that the word Atlantis means just that. Cities or land masses no longer evident today. Whether one was actually called Atlantis imo is un likely.

There an interesting gap in known civilizations prior to places like Lumeria, and Mesopotamia that seem to be the earths limit on giving up its secrets of pre history. I think some just call these unkown places Atlantis and why not, its just a name.

I just thought I'd quickly add that Graham Hancock has come across some interesting underwater structures off of the coast of Yonaguni... so far it has not really been agreed on whether they are man made or not. personally I think they sort of speak for themselves..





more images here

..its interesting to note the number of flood myths in many cultures around the world too.. we see them for example in India, China., Australia, Egypt, Greece, Babylon, Lao... Plato's account of atlantis I believe was passed down to him by the ancient Egyotians who were adamant that they were the legacy of a much older culture and that much of their knowledge was in fact passed down (interesting too that the ancient egyptian architecture got worse as time went on.. their earlier monuments were far more advanced than their later ones). the water weathering findings of the shpinx by Dr Robert Schoch seem to support this idea. Some of the ancient maps are interesting too.. the Piri Reis map for example which depicts Antarctica far before it was meant to be discovered-and was based upon much older source maps-and uses accurate latitude and longitude (longitude was not discovered until the 1400s as far as I know)

i'll post more later bit busy at the moment

^ its also interesting the egyptians stored a very ancient sea-faring boat within the great pyramid itself

i dont know if yonaguni in particular is man made, but there is some curious features about it and many of the other sites he's explored. In any case, i highly recommend reading hancocks books fingerprints of the gods, and underworld

i highly doubt its a coincidence that sea level has risen, in dramatic bursts, some 350+ feet in fairly recent time, covering millions of square miles of the most habitable and fertile coastal lands, and that worldwide in coastal cultures we happen to see see "myths" of great floods that overcame settlements that are- they claim- now buried beneath the waves. I'm not saying "atlantis is real", i'm saying that there is a good amount of evidence that there was probably many coastal places that were lost during the periods of rapid sea level rising. They went by many names, because there was probably many of them..just example (ignore sensationalist headline) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1768109.stm .

Sea level didn't just rise gradually over time either. There was huge shifts in sea level overnight when giant lakes of melted ice on top of the glaciers would burst free and race across entire continents and into the ocean. This has all been verified. The sudden displacement of weight also seems to have caused massive earthquakes and huge shifts in the geology of parts of the earth..Not to mention the mounting pile of evidence suggesting there were several significant meteor impacts within the last 20k years. There was probably a number of cataclysmic events going on. For some reason people get surprised by this. But realize that in just the past decade we've seen tsunami's and hurricanes that have ravaged entire populations of us "advanced" people...A lot happens over a period of thousands of years.

I saw adocumentary on these, what i would call ruins and I have a hard time accepting the focus of said documenatry that these are naturally formed masses. especially after spending so much time seeing the ruins of the Inka. There is a similarity that struck me right away.

In the documentary one reason to refute these being man made was their seeming total randomness. I.e., stairs going to nothing, channels with no obvious inlets or out puts, ext.

Well here are a few examples of such randomness that we know were created by a civilization only 500 years ago and IMo are even more vague or look more like what could be produced naturally especially if you picture them under crystal blue ocean waters. same thing, stairs going leading solid rock faces or no where, channels cut into the rock for no apparent reason ext.

In these structure's off the coast of Yonaguni are also perfectly circular drilled holes in patterns that are hard to believe are natural forming. I understand a pebble can sit in small crevice and with the current and time swirl in a circular pattern and create 360 degree holes in stone but the pattern of the holes in Yonaguni, from my memeory, quite linear and close to equal distances.

There is also an easy to see although worn down face carved into one of the larger stones.
i don't know why but it seems Oceanic archaeologists were quick to close the book on this set of ruins as simply naturally formed ocean floor. As a child could see they dont look natural in the slightness.

interesting photos oly.. what site is this? ...I think its also good to remember that the architectural needs of past civilisations would have differed a lot from ours today, perhaps due to a difference in mindset and thus a difference in relationship to the surroundings. what we may see as random and illogical may actually have had a very specific purpose that we have not quite gotten to grips with in our more modern mindset

Theres just a helluva lot of resistance whenever someone (especially someone outside of mainstream academia) brings up information that could partially re-shape the current accepted worldview... in whatever academic field. There's especially been a lot of resistance to all sorts of ideas about the ancients being in any way more advanced that we thought at an earlier period... but then sites like gobekli tepi emerge and they have to give up their ossified position.

They are my photos from the past 6 months. i have been living in the Sacred Valley of Southern Peru until just a few days ago learning and visiting the ruins of the Inka.

If your interested I posted many more in the real world travel sub forum.