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NEWS October 2024
OCTOBER 2024 The recent cyber attack on the Internet Archive is deplorable and can be reasonably compared with the repeated burning of the Great Library of Alexandria. I have used the Wayback Machine extensively, but, until the full extent of the permanent damage is clear, I am unable to assess its effect on Atlantipedia. At […]Read More »
Joining The Dots
I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato’s own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.Read More »
Baffin Island
Canada
Canada was first suggested to have had an ancient connection with the Mediterranean in a lecture(f) to the Albany Institute of Boston in 1893 by Verplanck Colvin (1847-1920), an American lawyer and topographical engineer. He based this idea primarily on his interpretation of Plutarch‘s On the Apparent Face in the Moon’s Face and specifically named the St. Lawrence River as the site of an ancient Greek colony.
Until relatively recently Canada has had little attention from Atlantis seekers. The nearest to such a claim came in 2002, when New Zealander, Ian A. Fox, published[0782] his theory that Atlantis had been situated between Greenland and Canada’s Baffin Island.
A few years later, the earliest specific suggestion of a Canadian connection with Atlantis, that I am aware of, came from Samuel Poe in a truly dreadful book[0847], in which he claimed the east coast of Canada and the United States had been Atlantean.
Then, Brian Johnston, a retailer of precious stones, created a website(a) advocating Ontario as the location of Plato’s Atlantis. He offers a stone circle and what may be other megalithic standing stones along with many photos of the same as evidence. This is all held together by a large helping of speculation. Finally, after describing in some detail a site in Ontario’s Northumberland County, he concludes that the location “might not be Atlantis!”
Nevertheless, the idea that the ancient Greeks had an awareness of America has persisted, with some claiming that they had colonies in Canada. Among these are Lucio Russo, Ioannis Liritzis(b) and Minas Tsikritsis(d). Now Manolis Koutlis has gone one further and claims[1617] that not only were there Greek colonies in Canada but that Atlantis had been situated in the Gulf of St. Lawrence(c). This raises the question of why or how Atlanteans or Greek colonists in Canada would launch an attack on Athens thousands of miles away. In my opinion, neither identification is credible.
At the 2005 Atlantis Conference, Emilio Spedicato also subscribed to the idea of early Greeks in Canada, specifically in the St. Lawrence Region [629.411]. However, he does not refer to Atlantis in this context as he has already nominated Hispaniola as Plato’s lost island.
All these advocates of an ancient Greek presence in Canada are greatly reliant on their interpretations of the writings of Plutarch(g), a matter that has been dealt with by Jason Colavito(e).
>Long after any ancient Greeks came to North America, hard evidence of Pre-Columbian visitors from Europe was confirmed with the discovery in 1978 of an 11th-century Norse settlement at L’anse aux Meadows in Canada. In 2022, the discovery in Newfoundland of a gold Henry VI quarter noble, minted in London between 1422 and 1427 generated some excitement. Unfortunately, coins can remain in circulation for many years, so, without knowing when the coin was lost in Canada, it cannot be claimed with any great certainty that it was misplaced before or after Columbus reached the Americas(h).<
Also See: Henriette Mertz
(a) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20180319084638/https://atlantisincanada.com/
(b) https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/did-ancient-greeks-sail-to-canada/
(f) Atlantis,Vol.23, No.3,May/June, 1970
(g) https://people.sc.fsu.edu/~dduke/lectures/plutarch-moonface.pdf
Greenland
Greenland was first proposed as the location of Atlantis in the 17th century by François de la Mothe le Vayer. More recently some of the more imaginative writers have tried, unsuccessfully, to revive interest in 
this idea. One of these is the American, Dale Huffman, who claims that the outline of Greenland is comparable with Kircher‘s famous map of Atlantis. He has also proposed that while Atlantis primarily consisted of Greenland it also included “the islands of the United Kingdom and Iceland”(h). Huffman ignores the fact that Kircher’s map clearly places Atlantis between the Strait of Gibraltar and America, not between Canada and Scandinavia. Apart from this, Kircher favoured the Azores and Canaries as the remnants of Atlantis.
Another proponent is Mario Dantas who is equally determined to link Plato’s description with the enormous island of Greenland(a) and has submitted a paper on the subject to the 2008 Atlantis Conference in Athens.
More recently Johan Nygren drew attention to the similarities between a map of Greenland and the 17th-century map of Atlantis produced by Athanasius Kircher(m).
>Before that, Riaan Booysen commented on Mercator’s treatment of the Arctic region on his 1569 world map as developed by his son “Virtually all the medieval maps of the Arctic region depict Greenland as free of ice. In order to see if there might be a correlation between Mercator’s transposed map of Greenland and an ice free Greenland, the latter has to be compared to a bedrock elevation map of Greenland. This is done in Figure 30 (see link), which shows an arguably marked correlation between the two maps. If true, it would prove, like the ice free maps of Terra Australis, not only that an ancient, prehistoric map-making civilization once existed, but also that the ice core dating technique is fundamentally flawed, or at least, the interpretation of the ice core data.”. (n)<
Another website(b) advocates the Baffin Basin just west of Greenland, as the Great Plain of Atlantis. This idea developed by a New Zealander, Ian Fox, is based on a reinterpretation of Plato’s text combined with the studies of Charles Hapgood.
In 2014, Antonio Usai published an English translation of his 2011 booklet on the Pillars of Hercules[980] in which he places the original ‘Pillars’ on the Tunisian island of Kerkennah and then unexpectedly proposed that Atlantis was situated in Greenland.
Another proponent of the Greenland location is Stefan Grossmann in his book, Atlantlantean(sic) Philosophy(d), a commentary on the non-existent ‘Emerald Tablets of Thoth’(e), concocted by Maurice Doreal (Claude Doggins).
In October 2011 a team of researchers from the Laboratory of Geology in Lyon may have elevated the importance of Greenland to an even higher level with their claim(c) that life on earth may have originated there 3.8 billion years ago.
In 2013, Lucio Russo, an Italian mathematician and science historian, located Thule on the coast of Greenland, having identified errors in Ptolemy’s geographical calculations[1060].
In 2014 Antonio Moreno Checa published La Atlántida. El mito hecho realidad (Atlantis. The myth comes true) [1063] in which he also locates Atlantis in Greenland. Gennaro Anziano, an Italian writer, has also located Atlantis in Greenland(g) in his 2001 book, Atlantis – Discover the land of the gods[1072].
David Chase Taylor, journalist and conspiracy theorist, published, Greenland Theory: Apocalypse Now, which placed Atlantis in Greenland. However, he is more concerned with the location of the CIA, which he continually repeats has its headquarters under CERN in Switzerland(j)!!! An April 2020 review gives a flavour of the wide-ranging nonsense to be found within this book(k), with little to advance our knowledge of Atlantis.
Marco Goti published The Island of Plato[1430] in 2017 and offered another failed attempt at identifying Greenland as Atlantis.
Leaving aside any suggested connection with Atlantis, there are other features of the vast island that deserve attention. There are a number of raised beaches that clearly indicate that “the whole of this large island has been raised, or the sea has sunk, in post-glacial times” and that “the upheaval has been greater in the north”. Their height above sea level varies from 325 and 480 feet!
In 2018 a huge impact crater was discovered under Greenland’s Hiawatha Glacier. It was initially thought that this impact had been the cause of the Younger Dryas cooling 12,000 years ago, but this idea has now been discounted as the crater is now thought to be 58 million years old.
(a) https://www.a7lan7is.blogspot.com/
(b) https://www.angelfire.com/film/atlantis_1/Page001.html
(e) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/the-emerald-tablets-of-thoth-a-lovecraftian-plagiarism
(g) Svelato il mistero delle Piramidi (archive.org)
(i) Greenland – Raised Beaches – I | MalagaBay (archive.org)
(j) https://archive.org/details/GreenlandTheory/mode/2up
(k) https://americanloons.blogspot.com/2020/04/2324-david-chase-taylor.html