An A-Z Guide To The Search For Plato's Atlantis

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    NEWS October 2024

    October 2024 Hi to everyone I’m taking a break during the first two weeks of October, so there will be minimal activity on the site apart from the ongoing project of replacing broken links. Back Soon, Tony     September 2023. Hi Atlantipedes, At present I am in Sardinia for a short visit. Later we […]Read More »
  • Joining The Dots

    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 »
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Randall Carlson

Moon, The *

The Moon and its origin have been the subject of speculation for centuries, examples of which are reviewed below. Professor Robert M. Hazen of George Mason University tells us in The Origin and Evolution of the Earth(ad) that “three competing theories—the fission theory,  the capture theory,  and the co-accretion theory—were all in contention prior to 1969, but the treasure trove of Apollo Moon rocks provided the answer: None of the pre-1969 theories worked……….The Moon is now thought to have formed as the result of an epic impact with a Mars-sized planet that was competing for the same solar system real estate as Earth. Earth was bigger and won, but the Moon was formed from the debris of the impact.”

The impact theory received a boost from the results of a study carried out at Durham University involving the use of a supercomputer for modelling(ag).

Irrespective of the controversies surrounding the formation of the Moon, what is less contentious is that for prehistoric man, the moon was a readymade calendar. An article(ap) by Rebecca Boyle has the following introductory paragraph.

The sun’s rhythm may have set the pace of each day, but when early humans needed a way to keep time beyond a single day and night, they looked to a second light in the sky. The moon was one of humankind’s first timepieces long before the first written language, before the earliest organized cities and well before structured religions. The moon’s face changes nightly and with the regularity of the seasons, making it a reliable marker of time.”

The Moon has little connection with Plato’s Atlantis story apart from the more extreme speculations of some writers. One of the wildest is that the Atlanteans had established a research facility on the Moon(a), an idea rivalled by that of Alan Butler & Christopher Knight in their book, Who Built the Moon[0937], in which they propose that the Moon was ‘constructed’! This idea has now been revived by Rob Shelsky[1584]. In 1965, the Umland brothers[833] proposed that the Moon was a communications relay station for the Maya to make contact with their home planet!

In his recent book, Dead Men’s Secrets [1910.299], Jonathon Gray suggested that ancient texts support the idea that man has visited the Moon in the distant past! This is available as a pdf file(ac).

In 1970, Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov, of what was then the Soviet Academy of Sciences, advanced a hypothesis that the Moon is a spaceship created by unknown beings(k). These ideas inspired the title of Don Wilson’s 1976 book, Our Mysterious Spaceship Moon [1704].

In 2018 and in a number of previous editions of Ancient Aliens, David Hatcher Childress endorsed the daft idea that our Moon is hollow and artificial. Jason Colavito noted that this idea has been going around for the past half-century, based on a piece of Russian propaganda from the 1960s aimed at Western audiences. Childress alleged that aliens created the moon by inflating an asteroid. Yes, really. “Like a glass blower blows glass, you go out into the asteroid belt, get yourself an asteroid, and with your alien technology you superheat that asteroid. Then you blow into it to make a giant space station,” he said. That seems like rather a lot of work to avoid showing yourself to the humans(ao).

In 2023, Shane Leach tried to resuscitate this daft idea. He also recycled the suggestion that the Martian satellite, Phobos, was an alien construction. However, neither he nor Butler & Knight can claim originality as the idea of artificial moons was floated decades ago by the Russian I. S. Shklovskii(g) among others mentioned above.

Some years later Arnold L. Lieber published The Lunar Effect [1888] in which he put forward his theory of ‘biological tides’ that proposes that the Moon affects human behaviour. This seemed to reinforce the popular belief that aggression and even suicides were affected by the phases of the Moon. Commenting on Lieber’s theory at the time, astronomer Dr Nicholas Sanduleak debunked his claims(aa).

The idea that the Moon was to some extent hollow was given impetus in the 1970s when a study of moonquakes revealed that the Moon ‘rang like a bell’ (i). Now, nearly half a century later, Wallace Thornhill, a leading Electric Universe proponent, has endorsed the hollow Moon idea and seems sympathetic to the idea of a hollow Earth. This was expressed at a recent EU conference and be viewed at the 40-minute mark of a YouTube video.(j)

Neal Adams, a respected graphic artist(s), is probably best known for his work on the DC Comics characters Batman and Green Arrow. He is a vocal supporter of the Expanding Earth Hypothesis(t), but, he has gone further and also proposed a growing Moon as well(u)(r). Not content with that, he has extended his expansion investigations to other bodies in our Solar System, such as Mars, Ganymede & Europa(v). Adams considers the term “Expanding Earth” a misnomer and has named his proposed expansion process ‘pair production’!

The origins of the Moon have also been the subject of extensive controversy with one side claiming that it had been ‘captured’ moonby the earth, while the other extreme argues that it had been ‘expelled’ from our planet. The expulsion theory posits(b) that a collision with another celestial body tore material from the Earth, which in time became our Moon(h). Nils Olof Bergquist writing in the 1940s supported the expulsion scenario and had his original Swedish book on the subject translated into English as The Moon Puzzle[0786].

Aloys Eiling (1952- ) is a German researcher who has offered a variation on the Moon capture theory, suggesting that it took place when our planet was already populated – somewhere between 40,000 and 13,000 BC. He notes(ab) that “the capture of the Moon caused worse than a flood; it changed the geography of the world. Earth’s surface was devastated, millions died, and life in total was brought to the brink of extinction. In the collective memory of mankind, the event indelibly remained in the myths about a Deluge.”

The most radical of the captured moon school was Hanns Hörbiger, who proposed that there had been a series of Moon captures. Many of his ideas were adopted by H.S. Bellamy, who added that the capture of our current satellite had destroyed Atlantis. Kurt Bilau has also proposed a moon capture theory that incorporates two near encounters before finally becoming our current satellite(ah)(ai).

Georg Hinzpeter was influenced by the Moon-capture ideas of Hanns Hörbiger, with whom he had personal contact. However, when he suggested some modifications he fell foul of the Nazis and was informed “that his work was no longer going to be supported by the regime because it deviated from Hörbiger’s original theory.” (an) 

After the war, he contributed to Sykes Atlantis magazine, where, like Bellamy, he theorised that the destruction of Atlantis coincided with the capture of our present satellite, an event that he claimed to have taken place around 11,500 years ago(am).

Nikolay Bonev, the astronomer, caused a stir in 1961 when he expressed the view that our Moon had once been an independent planet(d) that had experienced violent volcanic eruptions that were powerful enough to have produced a ‘recoil’ effect, which nudged it towards our Earth’s orbit and was eventually captured as our satellite.

In 1948, an amateur astronomer, L.C. Suggars, endorsed the idea of the Moon as a captured planet, based on its diameter/density ratio, which was consistent with that of the other minor planets (Mercury, Mars, Venus & Earth).(w)

More recently Emilio Spedicato expressed similar ideas(c) and in another paper(aj) he wrote “we consider the Sumerian tradition of a planet, called Nibiru, claimed to approach Earth every 3600 years. We argue that the real period was 20 years and that a close passage of that body near  Earth around 9500 BC ended the last Ice Age and the Atlantis civilization. Moreover, Earth a satellite of Nibiru became our Moon, in addition to the previous satellite, that was Mars. We discuss ancient statements that the Moon originally looked bigger and brighter than now and that the period of about 2400 years when there were two satellites explains the myth of Isis and Osiris. We argue that Nibiru around 6900 BC disappeared in a giant impact on Jupiter.

Stuart L. Harris has proposed(m) that the planet Nibiru had a close encounter with our Earth in 9577 BC that destroyed Atlantis, followed by another visit in 9417 BC during which it lost one of its satellites, which became our Moon!

Immanuel Velikovsky wrote a short paper(af) reviewing the three most popular theories regarding the origins of our satellite and concluded that “Since mankind on both sides of the Atlantic preserved the memory of a time when the Earth was without the Moon, the first hypothesis, namely, of the Moon originating simultaneously with the Earth and in its vicinity, is to be excluded, leaving the other two hypotheses to compete between themselves.” I think it noteworthy that Velikovsky makes no reference to the theories of Hörbiger in this paper. In 2020, Velikovsky’s unfinished book, In the Beginning [1956], promoted as a prequel to Worlds in Collision, was finally published, where he returns to the matter of the Earth without its Moon.  

John Ackerman, a keen follower of Immanuel Velikovsky claimed that there were two catastrophic events related to “the capture of the Moon into its current orbit,” marking both the beginning and the end of the Younger Dryas period(p). Although Ackerman was an admirer of Velikovsky’s work, he was also critical of some of his conclusions(x).

The Moon controversies continue with the recent suggestion by Erik Asphaug, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who claims that originally the Earth had two moons that coalesced into a single satellite (n)! A few years earlier, Dr Martin Jutzi from the University of Bern, Switzerland put forward a similar theory involving a smaller second moon that had a slow-motion collision with the larger satellite. He proposed that this event explains why the near side of the Moon – the one visible from Earth – is flat and cratered while the rarely-seen far side is heavily cratered and has mountain ranges higher than 3,000m.”(z) Jutzi thought that samples from the far side of the Moon might confirm the theory.

Gary Gilligan, a catastrophist, also supports the concept of moon capture but dated this event to as recent as 2000 BC(f) and then later advanced it to 1200 BC(g). He claims that he can “show that the moon could not have existed during prehistory as evidenced by the absence of the moon in Neolithic artwork and artefacts.” A comment that ignores the maxim ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’

Researcher, Mark Andrew commenting on Gilligan’s claims wrote that Although Gilligan promises more evidence to come, his theory has to contend with the varied evidence of an earlier Moon, including the earliest known written myth of the Moon’s death and rebirth, the epic poem Descent of Inanna (dating from 1750 BC), and also the oldest known map of the moon (dating from 2800 BC).”(l)

Ticleanu, Constantin & Nicolescu in their paper delivered to the 2008 Atlantis Conference very briefly touched on the origin of the Moon. They claim that our Moon, a former planet, was captured by our Earth sometime within the last 40,000 years [750.368].

Two American commentators, Kevin A. & Patrick J. Casey maintain that a globally catastrophic event occurred 13,000 years ago(ae). The kernel of their theory is that originally the Earth had two moons that at some later point collided, producing our current Moon, while the remnant of the second one eventually exploded over North America kick-starting what we refer to as the cooler Younger Dryas period. They are adamant that it was not a comet or asteroid that caused the devastation, and so clash with the conclusions of Richard Firestone and his colleagues. They refer to this as the 13K Event, which is also known as the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH).

The moon could have formed immediately after a cataclysmic impact that tore off a chunk of Earth and hurled it into space, a new study has suggested. Since the mid-1970s, astronomers have thought that the moon could have been made by a collision between Earth and an ancient Mars-size protoplanet called Theia; the colossal impact would have created an enormous debris field from which our lunar companion slowly formed over thousands of years.

But a new hypothesis, based on supercomputer simulations made at a higher resolution than ever before, suggests that the moon’s formation might not have been a slow and gradual process after all, but one that instead took place within just a few hours. The scientists published their findings on October 4, 2022, in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters(al).

Unexpectedly, the orbital speed of the Moon appears to vary on its trip around the Earth(e).

Some of the ideas above regarding the origin of the Moon are extremist and are far more radical than a recent theory regarding the Sun proposed by Ev Cochrane, a comparative mythologist, in a YouTube clip(o), where he offers evidence that the Sun as observed in ancient times seemed quite different to how we see it today. This is borne out by the related mythologies and petroglyphs from our ancient past and shows a global consistency that cannot be explained by imagination.

Professor Neil F. Comins of the University of Maine challenged his students with the question ‘what if the Moon didn’t exist?’ The responses were interesting (no eclipses) and amusing (a new word for ‘lunatic would be required), but not always correct (no tides). One important consequence would be an eight-hour day(q).

Even more challenging are recent comments from Randall Carlson in an exchange between Carlson and Jesse Michels(ak).

JM  “Do you believe that there are survivors of ancient Atlantis among us, perhaps with underwater bases or bases on the Moon and advanced technology!”

RC  “Now there’s a loaded question, Jesse.” [pause] “I would say, a very provisional – Yes!”

Unfortunately, Michels did not pursue the matter in the clip available.

(a) See: Archive 3334

(b) https://www.q-mag.org/moon-mars-impacts-and-collisions.html

(c)  https://aisberg.unibg.it/retrieve/handle/10446/316/1369/WPMateRi05%282008%29SpedicatoPetruzzi.pdf

(d) https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2229&dat=19611112&id=VQIzAAAAIBAJ&sjid=7QAGAAAAIBAJ&pg=4738,1928190&hl=en

(e)  The Clockwork Moon | MalagaBay (archive.org)

(f) https://grahamhancock.com/earth-capture-the-moon-gilligan/

(g) https://www.gks.uk.com/moon-origin-egyptian/

(h) https://www.q-mag.org/moon-mars-impacts-and-collisions.html

(i) Wayback Machine (archive.org) 

(j) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gouqy4OghyY

(k) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Moon

(l) https://web.archive.org/web/20160710150837/https://atlantisrisingmagazine.com/article/late-arrival/

(m) https://www.academia.edu/37216933/Sinking_of_Atlantis_by_Nibiru_in_9577_BC_Part_3_Nibiru_sinks_Atlantis

(n) When the Earth Had Two Moons – Issue 74: Networks – Nautilus (archive.org)  

(o) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eAwUiadZHY

(p) Firmament and Chaos (archive.org) *

(q) https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/what-if-the-moon-didnt-exist-the-fun-of-counterfactuals-in-science/

(r) Neal Adams: 01 – The Growing Earth | MalagaBay (archive.org)

(s) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Adams

(t) https://www.naturalphilosophy.org/site/dehilster/2014/09/22/is-the-earth-expanding-and-even-growing/

(u) Neal Adams: 02 – The Growing Moon | MalagaBay (archive.org)

(v) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy3_sWF7tv4

(w) Atlantean Research, Vol.1, No.2, September/October 1948

(x) Velikovsky’s Mistakes | Acksblog (cycliccatastrophism.org)

(z) Earth may once have had two moons – BBC News  

(aa) SCIENCE WATCH – The Moon and Lunacy – NYTimes.com (archive.org)  

(ab) https://grahamhancock.com/eilinga2/ 

(ac) Dead men’s secrets : tantalising hints of a lost super race : Gray, Jonathan, 1933- author : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive 

(ad) The Origin and Evolution of Earth: From the Big Bang to the Future of Human Existence (archive.org)

(ae) https://www.academia.edu/38380799/13k_Theory_Atlantis_Revisited.pdf 

(af) The Earth Without the Moon (varchive.org) 

(ag) How did the moon form? A supercomputer may have just found the answer | Live Science 

(ah) The moon capture report according to Daniel and Johannes – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog) 

(ai) The Revelations of John – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog) 

(aj) (99+) Nibiru-tiamat rel 6 June 13 | Emilio Spedicato – Academia.edu 

(ak) Graham Hancock: Aliens, Atlantis & the Apocalypse – YouTube 

(al)  How did the moon form? A supercomputer may have just found the answer | Live Science 

(am) Atlantis, Vol.4, No,4, November 1951 

(an) https://www.academia.edu/16833657/Hitlers_Supernatural_Sciences 

(ao) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/david-childress-aliens-living-in-the-hollow-moon-created-bigfoot-to-serve-as-missing-link-between-humans-and-apes 

(ap) Ancient humans used the moon as a calendar in the sky (sciencenews.org)

Carlson, Randall

Randall Carlson is an architect, geomythologist and catastrophist. He is the Randall Carlsonfounder of Sacred Geometry International(a). Carlson also features in Graham Hancock‘s book, The Magicians of the Gods[1119]. Hancock’s book  focuses on the cometary impact in the 11th millennium BC, proposed by Richard Firestone et al. nearly a decade ago. Hancock returns to the subject again in his latest offering, America Before [1680].

Carlson considers the destruction of Atlantis coincident with the ending of the Last Ice Age and the onset of the Younger Dryas Period(b).

On his GeoCosmicRex website(c) he outlines the early 20th century ideas of J Harlen Bretz and others who sought to explain the American Scablands as the result of the frequent catastrophic bursting of ice dams, with as many as 80 such events.

Since then, new data and new thinking has led many to a dramatic revision of conclusions and a more coherent theory to explain the creation of the Scablands and the sudden return to Ice Age conditions during the Younger Dryas Period. This is a consequence of the Firestone cometary impact theory, which has continued to gather support.

According to the Atlantisforschung.de website, Carlson is sympathetic to the traditional location of Atlantis in the Atlantic, with the Azores as its remnants(d).

>Carlson continues to support this theory in a number of videos presenting his case in a highly plausible but flawed(f)  manner. He suggests that Plato’s text is ‘pure’ and should be taken at face value. For example, he quotes where Plato tells us that the Atlanteans came out of the Atlantic Ocean. This is incorrect, as the original Greek says ‘Atlantic SEA. To the Greeks, ‘ocean’ and ‘sea’ had different meanings. I have demonstrated elsewhere that the term ‘Pillars of Herakles’ has been applied to a variety of locations as a metaphor for the limit of Greek maritime knowledge at any given time as the trading and colonisation slowly moved westward. However, the greatest argument against an Azorean Atlantis is the inability of its proponents to explain why and how would such a civilisation attack Athens located 3,500 km away?<

It’s difficult to tell if that is the full story, particularly when you hear a brief (2023) exchange between Carlson and Jesse Michels(e).

JM  “Do you believe that there are survivors of ancient Atlantis among us, perhaps with underwater bases or bases on the Moon and advanced technology!”

RC  “Now there’s a loaded question, Jesse.” [pause] “I would say, a very provisional – Yes!”

Unfortunately, Michels did not pursue the matter in the clip available.

(a) https://sacredgeometryinternational.com/

(b) See Archive 2720

(c) http://geocosmicrex.com/holocene-mystery/

(d) Randall Carlson – Atlantisforschung.de

(f) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGfa38z46hU *

Deglaciation *

The Deglaciation that occurred at the end of the last Ice Age has attracted a lot of attention from Atlantis seekers because it coincides with Plato’s apparent date for the destruction of Atlantis and provides us with a possible source of the flood that subsequently not only wiped out the Atlanteans but possibly also the Athenians. However, meltwater from deglaciation causes global sea levels to rise very, very, slowly and so is extremely unlikely to have caused the destruction of the Atlanteans or Athenians as described by Plato.

The melting of the ice caps gradually caused the ocean levels to rise over  thousands of years and at times the retreat of the glaciers was halted and occasionally reversed. Although the melting of the ice was relatively steady, the water produced did not always reach the sea in a steady flow. Instead, it was frequently punctuated by enormous discharges of water, particularly where ice dams had retained vast meltwater lakes.

In the 1920s a maverick geologist, J Harlen Bretz (1882-1981), postulated that a huge ice-age flood had harlen Bretzcarved the landscape of Eastern Washington state, in just a few days. In spite of acrimonious opposition from the geology establishment of the day, Bretz persevered with his investigations, which eventually led to the identification of Lake Missoula as the probable culprit. Bretz was finally vindicated in 1979 when, in his nineties, he was awarded the prestigious Penrose Medal for his work(f). There is a beautifully illustrated National Geographic online article that reviews Bretz’s work(i).

These discharges of huge quantities of water are recognisable as relatively sudden spikes in the rate of sea level increases and are referred to as Melt Water Pulses WMP).                  

Lake Missoula in what is today the state of Montana is one of the best-studied of these glacial lakes. The regular discharges from Lake Missoula, following ice dam collapses, were responsible for the creation of the dramatic Scablands of the North-Western United States. Studies have revealed that between forty and eighty such floods were released from Lake Missoula alone.

However, an alternative to Lake Missoula as the cause of the scablands has been recently proposed(g), namely, the younger-dryas comet impact event. This event was highlighted by Richard Firestone and his colleagues in The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes[0110]. My problem with the idea of the comet impact is that it was a single event, whereas the Missoula discharges were according to some authorities quite numerous!

Lake Missoula and its flood path

Lake Missoula and its flood path

The power of fast-flowing water was recently highlighted by a report published(c) in the journal of America’s National Academy of Sciences, where a study of Iceland’s unpronounceable Jokulsargljufur canyon indicated that this huge feature was created in a matter of days. In Iceland, such glacial outburst floods are known as Jökulhlaups(d).

It has now been estimated by scientists that around 6200 BC the ancient glacial Lakes Agassiz and Ojibway discharged into the Atlantic Ocean. These lakes were more than twice the size of the Caspian Sea and on their own are estimated to have raised sea levels by up to 4 feet. The freshwater flow is calculated at between 25 and 50 times the flow of the Amazon River and recent studies suggest that this sudden inflow of fresh water brought the Gulf Stream to a halt for more than a hundred years. A 2016 report(e) from CAGE (Center for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Climate and Environment) suggests that the Gulf Stream was not interrupted during the Ice Age.

Graham Hancock, in his Magicians of the Gods [1119], reviews, at length, the theories of J Harlen Bretz and after a shared field trip and lengthy discussions with Randall Carlson, concluded that Bretz had probably only revealed part of the Scablands story. Hancock has pointed out that Bretz was unaware of the cometary impact identified by Richard Firestone et al., which coincided with the start of the Younger Dryas period 12,800 years ago. This impact theory continues to amass confirmatory data, but the opposition has not abated yet. The cometary impact, the creation of the Scablands and the start of the Younger Dryas cooling period all seem to coincide temporally to a degree that strongly suggests an interconnection.

Nick Thom has suggested[776] that an even more dramatic consequence of the discharge from Lake Agassiz was the tilting of the Earth’s axis leading to the biblical Deluge and recorded around the world in hundreds of flood myths!

Similar meltwater lakes across Northern Europe retained by ice dams produced equally dramatic discharges as the dams periodically broke. One of these occupied what is now the Baltic Sea and was 30 metres above the then ocean level before bursting into the North Sea around 10,000 BC. Less well known is the flooding that took place further east resulting in the creation of a vast inland sea of which the Black and Caspian Seas were just a small part. Ronnie Gallagher has written a revealing paper on the subject(a).

It is worth noting that, although on a smaller scale, two-thirds of the thousands of Himalayan glaciers contain glacial lakes, which because of global warming today are growing at risk of bursting with consequent catastrophic results. As these glaciers retreat, apart from the damage to people and property, the discharges will gradually reduce the downstream flow of water to rivers such as the Ganges.

Concurrent, with these huge meltwater lake discharges, were the Heinrich Events, named after lake_agassiz_big

paleoclimatologist, Hartmut Heinrich, as recently as 1988 published evidence that there had been at least six massive discharges of icebergs from the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the last Ice Age. These discharges could have contained millions of cubic kilometres of ice and must have caused substantial sea level rises. This Laurentide Ice Sheet was an enormous mass of ice that stretched from the Arctic through eastern Canada to the northern half of the United States that covered over 5 million square miles. The weight of this ice sheet was so great that it has been calculated that it depressed the earth’s crust by nearly half a mile. A recent paper contends that it was the collapse of this ice sheet, 8000 years ago causing a sea level rise that led to the breaching of a ridge damming the Bosporus and the inundation of the then freshwater Black Sea, which flooded over 73,000 square km of land.

In the southern hemisphere, it was discovered a few years ago (Science, Dec.22, 2000) that the River Amazon had experienced a doubling of its outflow between 9800 BC and 9700 BC, probably as a consequence of the melting of Andean glaciers and perhaps increased rainfall during this period. The dates proposed are very close to the 9600 BC date provided by Plato for the submergence of Atlantis.

All these worldwide discharges must have resulted in the inundation of low-lying landmasses, such as the Celtic Shelf or Sundaland, in fits and starts forcing the inhabitants of these regions to regularly migrate to higher ground.

Since it is reasonable to assume that a large percentage of human settlements were then, as now, located along coasts, particularly at river mouths, the consequence for these embryonic cultures must have been catastrophic. It is very easy to see how legends of sunken civilisations probably have a very sound basis in fact. Two books by Graham Hancock[274] and Stephen Oppenheimer[004] have covered this idea in greater detail, lending credibility to the idea of a sunken island such as Atlantis.

However, it can be reasonably argued that the effects of deglaciation are not what Plato described. He spoke of earthquakes and a flood that overwhelmed both the Athenians and the Atlanteans. This would more closely match the aftermath of a large seismic or tectonic event that generated enormous tsunamis rather than the gradual rising of sea levels, which even at its most dramatic could never have produced the effect of sinking Atlantis overnight.

However, the waters of tsunamis eventually flow back to the sea, but Plato’s account describes the event resulting in the creation of muddy shallows. To me, it sounds more like liquefaction which occurs in soil with particular characteristics when subjected to an earthquake(b), similar to the destruction of the cities of Canopus and Herakleion near Alexandria.(j)

A website that comprehensively explains, in a slideshow format, all aspects of deglaciation from Lake Missoula to Milankovitch Theory is worth a look(h).

Furthermore, although the threat is nothing like the scale posed by glacial lakes at the end of the last Ice Age, it has been estimated that even today around 15 million people are at risk from flooding by outbursts from dammed lakes and half of them are in just four countries, India, Pakistan, Peru and China(k).

(a) Wayback Machine (archive.org) 

(b) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20160316063736/https://www.ce.washington.edu/~liquefaction/html/why/why1.html

(c) https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31356229

(d) Jökulsárgljúfur Canyon | Visit North Iceland *

https://geology.about.com/od/flooding/a/aa_041397jokul.htm

(e) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160219134816.htm

(f) https://www.detectingdesign.com/harlenbretz.html

(g) https://atavisionary.com/tag/atlantis/

(h) https://slideplayer.com/slide/2808821/

(i) How Did the Channeled Scablands Form? (archive.org) 

(j) Science Notes 2001: The Sunken Cities of Egypt (ucsc.edu)

(k) Millions face threat of flooding from glacial lakes – BBC News