It was Plato, around 360 B.C., who first described an ancient, exotic island kingdom catastrophically buried beneath the sea when its once-virtuous people angered the gods with their pronounced tilt toward sin and corruption.
Since then, creative souls ranging from Jules Verne to Kirk Morris, Maria Montez, Fay Spain, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Michael J. Fox, and Walt Disney have sought to explain and exploit the terrible fate that befell Atlantis.
Scientists and scholars, meanwhile, for 2,000 years have mulled the tale recounted by Critias in Plato's Dialogues in hopes of finding clues as to whether Atlantis actually existed, and, if so, where it was, and how exactly it vanished.
This fall, French geologist and prehistorian Jacques Collina-Girard presented research suggesting that Atlantis was a real placea small mid-channel island sitting in what is now the Strait of Gibraltar.
Lost Cities and Floods
Its doom was sealed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, when rising seas swamped it along with six other nearby islands, Collina-Girard said.
Today the islands are shoals crouched anywhere from 175 feet to 410 feet (53 to 125 meters) below the ocean's surface along the coasts of Spain and Morocco.
Collina-Girard said the legend of Atlantis likely grew as storytellers embellished it on its way to Plato and Athens 9,000 years later. He compared the story to Noah's flood, an idea that he said probably arose after the rising Mediterranean overran the Bosporus 7,600 years ago to cascade into what is now the Black Sea basin.
"It is the same thing," Collina-Girard said. "Everywhere in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia people have stories that speak of the time when the sea came in.
"Atlantis is another discrete story of the flood."
End of the Ice Age
The world has not lacked for theories about Atlantis, whose location has been placed anywhere from the Atlantic abyss to waters off the Americas or even the South China Sea. The most popular current view among scholars is that Atlantis was probably the Aegean island of Thira, about 70 miles (112 kilometers) north of Crete, destroyed by volcanic eruptions in 1470 B.C.
The flaw here, Collina-Girard said, is that the Thira story ignores Plato. "The trouble up to now has been that geologists are not generally interested in Atlantis, while the people who are interested in Atlantis are not geologists."