Carl Festin (1957- ) is a Swedish researcher who was prompted by questions from his children to investigate the history of civilisation. His studies led him to conclude that the hundreds of worldwide flood myths involved a catastrophe that involved the biblical story of Noah and Plato’s tale of Atlantis.

In a PowerPoint presentation provocatively entitled Noah, Refugee from Atlantis Festin outlines a new Atlantis theory. He first suggests that a ridge of sediment built up in the vicinity of Gibraltar gradually cutting off the Mediterranean from the Atlantic when sea levels were much lower during the last Ice Age. He posits an island in the eastern Mediterranean, south of Crete, called Basileia, which dominated land around what we now call the Ionian Sea. This nation was known as Atlantis. Around 3,500 BC the Gibraltar ridge broke due to the pressure of the rising ocean levels following the melting of the ice. The influx of cold water into the western Mediterranean Basin created extensive anti-cyclonic rainfall over Basileia (40 days and nights!). The western and eastern Mediterranean Basins were separated by a landbridge at the Strait of Sicily which now broke, inundating the eastern basin. Festin claims that the millions of tons of additional water created earthquakes in seismically fragile central Mediterranean, destroying  Basileia. Survivors included Noah who headed eastward. Others reached both North and South America.

His theories are published in Swedish as Flykting från Atlantis^[753] (Refugees from Atlantis).