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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 »
Terra Australis
Terra Australis
Terra Australis meaning Southern Land was an early concept of the ancient Greeks, who imagined a large landmass in the southern hemisphere. Cartographers from the 15th century onwards included this hypothetical land on their maps of the world. When Australia and Antarctica were eventually discovered by European explorers it was seen as justification for the earlier.speculation.
Riaan Booysen, a South African researcher contends that these early maps reflected geographical realities, namely Australia and Antarctica,but goes further and locates Plato’s Atlantis close to Australia. He bases much of his theory on his interpretation of Johann Schöner’s 1515 globe, which he discusses on his extensively illustrated website(a).
>Booysen has now (Nov 2023) developed his Atlantis theories further and self-published them in book form, Atlantis Revealed [2079] explaining that “I have since (end 2022) decided to revisit and thoroughly study and expand, where necessary, my Atlantis theory once more, with the intent of having it formally published. My latest studies include significantly more information than previously available on my website, and several additional hypotheses about the fate of the Atlanteans after their continent had been ‘sunk’. This occurred when a comet glanced off the face of the earth ca. 11,600 years ago, knocking a dent of around 8,000m in its crust and thereby ‘sinking’ Atlantis (parts of Terra Australis are clearly visible on NASA’s submarine topography maps of the world).”
In the promotional blurb for the book he adds “During my research into the gods of antiquity, it was inevitable that I would come across Plato’s legend of Atlantis. Plato introduced Atlantis to the world around 360 BCE in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias, quoting Solon of Athens who had visited Egypt between 590 and 580 BCE. According to Solon, the mighty civilisation of Atlantis existed and perished about 9,000 years before his time, thus about 11,600 years ago. He described Atlantis as an ‘island’ that sank beneath the ocean in a single day and night, along with, apparently, the rest of the civilised world. However, this ‘island’ was larger than ancient Libya and Asia together: an enormous continent. I also became familiar with the massive ‘imaginary’ continent called Terra Australis Incognita (the Unknown Land in the South), which had – apparently out of the blue – appeared on practically all medieval maps of the world. (link broken seeI recall quite clearly: I almost immediately realised that, as it no longer exists (having disappeared beneath the waters?), Terra Australis would be a prime candidate for Plato’s Atlantis.”<
(a) http://www.riaanbooysen.com/terra-aus (link broken – See (b))
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