When America was discovered, it was frequently identified with Atlantis, in spite of the obvious objection that it was clearly dry land and had not been submerged.

Such errors and inconsistencies did nothing to discourage the renewed interest in the lost continent. The quest for the historical Atlantis had begun. A bewildering proliferation of theory and counter-theory culminated, in the 19th century, in the birth of a new ’science’ – Atlantology.

An early eminent Atlantologist was the American politician and member of the US Congress Ignatius Donnelly. In 1882 Donnelly published his masterwork, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, which became a best-seller and the bible of Atlantology.

Donnelly’s thesis was based on certain similarities he observed between the pre-Columbian civilisations of America and ancient Egyptian culture. Among these he cited the building of pyramids, the art of embalming, the development of a 365-day calendar and the tradition of the Flood.

He believed that the two civilisations had a common origin, a continent which existed between the Old and New Worlds before the Flood. After the continent sank, two cultures developed, one in the East, one in the West.

Donnelly borrowed wholesale from contemporary science in constructing his theory. Archaeology, mythology, linguistics, ethnology, geology, zoology, botany – they were all brought in and mixed, with considerable literary skill and remarkable erudition, to support his argument.

This scientific hodge-podge was to have a brilliant future, providing an enduring source for a long line of disciples.

Donnelly’s supporters had an arsenal of theories to bolster up their case. Atlantology appeared to provide the answers to so many hallowed enigmas. The mysterious breeding habits of eels, for instance, which make a long and perilous journey from Europe across the Atlantic to lay their eggs in the Sargasso Sea, were explained by past experience in the rivers of Atlantis.

Atlantis was said to be the original home of the Basques, who are racially and linguistically different from all other Europeans, and of the scattered tribes of white Indians who were occasionally found in places such as Venezuala. The Guanches, cave-dwelling aborigines of the Canary Islands who were wiped out in the Spanish conquest of the islands, could only have been descendants of the Atlanteans. They were white-skinned, tall and had an indecipherable written language.

The bearded, white pre-Columbian god who was called Kukulcan by the Mayas, Quetzalcoatl by the Toltecs and Viracocha by the Incas brought civilisation over the sea from the east – could he have come from anywhere but Atlantis?

How do Donnelly’s theories hold up in the light of modern science, especially of oceanic geology which has become so much more sophisticated in the past 30 years?

Many of the analogies Donnelly drew were disturbing enough to draw furious controversy at the time; but today it is clear that his scholarship was riddled with errors. He attempted to show that every enigma and puzzle was in some way related to Atlantis and, in trying to prove everything, laid himself open to the criticism that he had proved nothing.

The fundamental base on which all Donnelly’s theories are constructed – that Atlantis was in the mid-Atlantic – has now been substantially refuted. Oceanographic studies of the sea-bed and the formation of continents show that nowhere in all the Atlantic’s 93 million square kilometres is there evidence that a cataclysm on the scale of Atlantis has ever occurred or that any such continent has ever existed.

There is an enormous submerged mountain range which runs approximately 20,000 kilometres from north to south, emerging at the Azores. But although this is a volcanic range, it is ‘in expansion’ – rising towards the surface – whereas Atlantis would be subsiding.

The doomed Atlanteans are a convenient contrast to the ancestors of Solon and Plato himself. These Athenians of old were the people whom Plato calls ‘the upright men’, who created something like the ideal state the philosopher projects in his Republic. The story of the corruption of Atlantis is a backcloth against which the virtues of this philosophical state stand out more clearly.

Some classical writers, however, did not take Plato’s parable very seriously. His pupil Aristotle held that it was no more than a poetic fiction, invented to enhance the narrative, and that Plato had created Atlantis simply in order to sink it conveniently at the end of the story. Many other writers adopted the same attitude.

But other scholars had doubts. Crantor, who lived some time around 300 BC and was the first commentator on Plato’s works, maintained that the account of Atlantis was accurate in every detail. It is believed that Crantor even went to Egypt to check Solon’s sources at first hand. A few centuries later the Stoic philosopher and scholar Posidonius (c. 135-50 BC) cited Plato’s belief that the story was not a pure invention.

Truth or fiction? It is an argument that has raged for some 23 centuries, that has stimulated the most extravagant fantasies and given birth to numerous and elaborate pseudo-sciences. Atlantis has become the happy hunting ground for the promoters of bogus religions, for occultists and black magicians, for spiritualists, clairvoyants and science-fiction writers. It has also engaged the attention of serious archaeologists.

What is the eternal fascination of Atlantis, the lost continent? It is the stuff of many myths: an idyllic land lying to the west, in the path of the setting sun … the Garden of the Hesperides where the apple trees bore golden fruit … the Elysian fields … the land of the Hyperboreans – all these were located in the vast Western Sea that was thought to have swallowed Atlantis.

In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the legendary Happy Islands, the Islands of the Blessed and St Brendan’s Island were similarly situated. When geography is a product of the imagination, the possibilities are boundless and the pre-modern mind filled the oceans with fabulous islands, lands of milk and honey where the living and the dead were reunited in eternal bliss.

History and legend contain many accounts of islands that were swallowed by the sea – King Arthur’s mysterious Isle of Avalon is an example. And the idea is not entirely fanciful. Volcanic islands which rise out of the sea and then disappear do genuinely occur in the Atlantic, particularly in the Azores and near Iceland.

Plato is clear that Atlantis was in the Atlantic, and a number of the more serious investigators have searched for it there, believing that there was once a vast continent in the middle of the ocean. According to this theory, the Azores, the Cape Verde Islands, the Canaries and Madeira were the mountain peaks of Atlantis and are all that remain visible of a lost continent.

Read about the obsession with Atlantis in modern times, and the birth of Atlantology »

What were the circumstances under which he wrote it and what was its purpose?

Only 100 years ago, the cities of Troy and Mycenae were considered as mythical as Atlantis. Scholars were convinced that the Iliad, Homer’s epic poem about the siege of Troy, was based purely on legend and imagination.

But the lonely quest of a self-taught German, Heinrich Schliemann (1822-90), was to upset all the official dogmas. Convinced that the Iliad was based on historical fact, Schliemann used it as his guide to the lost world of Troy. His great adventure has become a model for many champions of Atlantis.

In the words of Prince Michael of Greece: “The rehabilitation of Homer and the belated but definitive victory of those who believed him may give food for thought to those who doubt the existence of Atlantis.’

But can Plato be vindicated in the way Homer was?

The story of Atlantis differs from that of Troy in on important respect: it was not part of any ancient oral tradition. It was not a legend passed down, by word of mouth, from generation to generation, over the centuries. It was the work of one man, Plato.

The story appears in two of Plato’s celebrated Dialogues – Timaeus and Critias. These Dialogues were, in essence, transcriptions from the philosophical debates in which the intellectual citizens of Athens constantly engaged.

The driving force behind these question-and-answer discussions had been Plato’s master, Socrates. The subjects ranged from the Immortality of the South to the Ideal City.

Plato used to liven up the discussion of these dry, abstract ideas by presenting them in the form of allegories, parables and other literary devices. He invented a wealth of stories to make his logical arguments more palatable and more vivid.

Is it not possible, indeed likely, that the tale of Atlantis was just one of these fictions, dreamed up to illustrate a philosophical point?

In the Dialogues, the narrator of the Atlantis story is Critias, Plato’s cousin and, like Plato, a follower of Socrates. On three separate occasions Critias stresses that the story is true, and Socrates himself is quoted as having said it had ‘the very great advantage of being a fact and not a fiction’.

Critias also claims that he heard the story fro his great-grandfather Dropides and that Dropides in his turn had heard it from none other than Solon. If this is true, then here is a source to make even the most sceptical pause, for Solon was famous throughout Greece for his honesty.

The most celebrated law-giver of classical times, he was regarded as the wisest of the Seven Sages of Greece. He lived from about 640BC to 558 BC, two centuries before Plato wrote down the Atlantis story – not a particularly long period for such a tale to be kept alive by word of mouth.

Solon did not claim that the story was original. He himself heard it during a trip to Egypt in about 590 BC. In Sais, an ancient city in the Nile Delta, he met the priests of the goddess Neith. They were highly educated men and Solon, always eager to learn new things, questioned them about ancient times.

One old priest recounted the heroic deeds of his own Athenian ancestors 9,000 years before, and the tragic fate of the island of Atlantis. Solon was astonished by the story and translated it into Greek, intending to turn it into an epic poem, for he was a distinguished poet as well as a statesman. But he did not live long enough to achieve this ambition.

It seems to have been the Egyptians then, those meticulous historians obsessed with the past, with their tablets and sacred archives, who had preserved the story of Atlantis. Given that Atlantis really existed, this Egyptian connection is important: it means that the Egyptians had not only heard of Atlantis but also perhaps that they had extensive trade relations with the island power.

If this link with ancient Egypt is valid, it would appear that the issue has been clouded by Plato himself. The likelihood is that the great philosopher handed on the legend very much in the form that he himself had heard it, adapting and altering it according to purely literary demands, as he was perfectly entitled to do.

Read about how Plato intended his story of Atlantis to be taken »

Plato’s Atlantis was as kind of paradise – a vast island ‘larger than Libya and Asia put together’ – with magnificant mountain ranges, lush plains which teemed with every variety of animal, including elephants, and luxuriant gardens where the fruit was ‘fair and wondrous and in infinite abundance’.

The earth was rich with precious metals, especially the one prized most highly by the ancients, the fabulous, iridescent orichalc, an alloy of copper, perhaps brass. The capital of Atlantis, built in the very centre of the island, was remarkable for the scale and splendour of its public buildings which were designed in an architecturally harmonious blend of white, black and red stone.

Even more extraordinary, perhaps, was the plan on which the city had been laid out. It was arranged in five zones built in perfect concentric circles. Its various ports were served by a system of canals. Plato says that the capital’s canal and its nearby port were ‘full of vessels and merchants coming from all parts, who, from their numbers, kept up a multitudinous sound of human voices, and din clatter… night and day’.

At the heart of the city were the great palace and the temple, which was in more sumptuous: ‘All the outside, with the exception of the pinnacles, they covered with silver, and the pinnacles with gold. In the interior of the temple the roof was of ivory, curiously wrought everywhere with gold and silver orichalc; and all the other parts, the walls and pillars and floor, they coated with orichalc.

In the temple they placed statues of gold: there was the god himself standing in a chariot – a charioteer with six winged horses – and of such a size that he touched the roof of the building wih his head; around him there were a hundred Nereids riding on dolphins…’

This charioteer was none other than the God of the Sea and Shaker of the Earth, Poseidon. When he and his divine brothers Zues and Hades divided the world between them, Atlantis fell to Poseidon’s lot. He became the all-powerful lord of the island which he peopled with his sons, a virtuos race touched with divinity.

The ten kings of Atlantis were immensely rich and powerful but ruled wisely over the enormous colonial empire they built. Numberless generations of Atlanteans lived in peace under a system of laws which had been handed down to them by Poseidon and whose justness comanded universal admiration. These laws were ‘inscribed by the first kings on a pillar of orichalc, which was situated in the middle of the island, at the temple of Poseidon’.

But in the end, Atlantean society began to decay. The people started to worship the false gods of wealth, idleness and luxury.

Plato, ever a pessimist about human nature, write: ‘When the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature gained the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved in an unseemly manner, and to him who had an eye to see, grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest to their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power.’

It was during this era of corruption that the Atlanteans embarked on a war of world conquest, launching huge fleets against other islands and enslaving the inhabitants of the coastal settlements of the Mediteranean. The only power that could stand against them was Athens, the city dedicated to Athena, goddess of wisdom, industry and war. The Atlantean hoplites, or heavy infantry, succeeded in stemming the tide of invasion and won a brilliant victory.

But this setback was not enough. The gods had perpared a terrible retribution for the men who betrayed the ancient faith of Atlantis.

Plato takes up the story: ‘Afterwards there occured violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune… the island of Atlantis disappeared into the depths of the sea.’

According to Plato’s version, all this happened in remote antiquity, some 12,000 years ago. He located Atlantis in the Great Ocean, the Western Sea whose swelling waves rose beyond the Pillars of Hercules which we know today as the Straits of Gibraltar.

Many of the arguments that have subsequently raged about the existence and geographical position of Atlantis stem from this space-time location.

Read about the origin of Plato’s story »

The swallows streak through the sky, darting and wheeling in the blaze of the setting sun. The branches of the olive tress quiver in the light evening breeze.

The island’s harbour is quiet, now that the business of the day is over. The fisherman are going home with their shining, silvery catches. The narrow streets begin to fill with people , laughing and talking. In the doorways of the little houses women sit gossiping and from dozens of tiny workshops all over the town comes the cheerful whirr of the potter’s wheel. In the orchards and vineyards, the men are strolling home after the day’s labour.

The shadows lengthen as night comes. Then a strange choking heat engulfs the town. The sea turns to the colour of lead. From deep within the earth comes a muffled rumbling, intermittent at first but soon continuous.

Panic seizes the islanders. They sense that the great volcano, whose 1,500-metre peak dominates their lives, is about to erupt and that the god who controls the earth-shaking forces inside the volcano has awoken from his long sleep.

What they could not have known, as they stumbled from their houses clutching a few frantically snatched treasures, was that their town, their island and ultimately their whole civilisation was about to be destroyed by what, according to evidence gathered by volcanologists and seismologists of a later day, has come to rate as one of the most violent volcanic cataclysms the world has ever seen.

First came a choking plume of dark smoke. Then a terrible rain of blazing pumice stone, followed by ash, poured down in between explosions blasting up from the cone. At the height if the cataclysm, the volcano itself exploded under enormous internal pressures.

With a bang that was heard from one end of the mediterranean to the other and must have sounded like the end of the world, most of the island was blasted into dust.

Finally, the magma chamber beneath the volcano emptied, spewing out millions of tonnes of solid rock and, as a result, the great volcano collapsed in on itself, forming a steep-sided caldera or crater, 60 kilometres in circumference. Into this void poured the sea, bringing even more horrors in its wake.

These were the giant tsunamis, tidal waves which are set off by earthquakes or volcanic eruptions and are perhaps the most terrifying forces in nature. Waves as high as 200 metres radiated from the island to strike nearby coasts with a force that has never been equalled.

This is how scientists today see the sequence of events that the island 3,500 years ago. An explosion that they estimate produced a destructive force equivalent to 500-1000 atomic bombs.

A terrible darkness, caused by the thick fall of ash, descended on the Aegean, plunging the whole area into a night that was to last for weeks. The ash itself continued to fall for some time and today deposits of it, called tephra, lie more than 60 metres deep on what remains of the island which the Greeks call Kalliste.

Scientists now believe that what happened to Kalliste might be the solution to a riddle that has perplexed historians and geographers since the days of the Greek philosopher Plato (427-347 BC).

Read about Plato’s Atlantis »

The story of Atlantis was first told by the Greek philosopher Plato as a parable to show how heaven punishes those who worship false Gods.

But at the same time he hints that the story is true — the memory of a terrible cataclysm passed down by word of mouth for hundreds of years.

Myth or reality, the legend of Atlantis has inspired a search that echoes down the centuries.

• A vision of the destruction of Kalliste (modern Santorini)
• Plato’s Atlantis
• The origin of Plato’s story
• Plato’s Intentions
• The birth of Atlantology

The outbreak began in Mexico, with evidence that there had been an ongoing epidemic for months before it was officially recognized as such. The Mexican government soon closed most of Mexico City’s public and private offices and facilities to contain the spread of the virus. As the virus quickly spread globally, clinics were overwhelmed by testing and treating patients, and the WHO and the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) eventually stopped counting all cases and focused instead on tracking major outbreaks. In early June 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak to be a pandemic, but also noted that most of the illnesses were of moderate severity.

The illness is generally mild, except in some cases for people in higher risk groups, such as those with asthma, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, pregnancy, or have a weakened immune system. In addition, even in people who were previously healthy, secondary infections, such as those caused by bacterial pneumonia or a relapse of the illness with worse symptoms, are considered very serious and require medical treatment.

Like other influenza viruses, novel H1N1 influenza is spread by coughing, sneezing, or touching contaminated surfaces and then touching the nose or mouth. Symptoms, which last up to a week, are similar to those of seasonal flu, and can include fever, sneezing, sore throat, cough, headache, and muscle or joint pains.

Use the power of the wind to sail across the desert on a land sailing adventure in Nevada’s mysterious Area 51. This small group tour is the perfect escape from the bright lights and busy streets of Las Vegas for those looking for a little adventure.

With expert narration on the history of Area 51, your 90-minute drive from Las Vegas will be filled with stories of the strange goings-on of the mysterious desert location. Hear the rumors, myths and conspiracy theories which have long surrounded the area.

On arrival at the emergency landing site of the X-15s (the world’s fastest and highest flying winged aircraft), your instructor will give you a brief introduction to the equipment and how to safely navigate your land sailer. After a few practice runs sailing across the desert sands you can join the group for a mini-regatta – you may even win a prize! Before returning to your Las Vegas hotel there will be time for a picnic-style lunch and snacks including cold beverages.

Your Area 51 Land Sailing Adventure includes lunch and transportation by air-conditioned minivan. With a maximum group size of 10, all participants are assured of a personal tour and land sailing experience.

Duration

8 hours

Departs from

Las Vegas, Nevada

Price

Starting from $217.53 per person

Another possibility was that lighting was not sufficient for adequate photography, and would result in the need for image processing to increase clarity. The depth of Cabeus could be too great. This may be confirmed from Laser Ranging data collected previously by Chandrayaan-1, and preceding data from KAGUYA.

Hubble Space Telescope co-investigator Alex Storrs said: “A preliminary analysis of the STIS spectra do not show any clear evidence for hydroxyl, but further analysis is needed.”

A data handling unit (DHU) collects the information from each instrument for transmission back to LCROSS Mission Control. Because of the schedule and budget constraints, LCROSS takes advantage of rugged, commercially available components.

The individual instruments went through a rigorous testing cycle that simulated launch and flight conditions, identifying design weaknesses and necessary modifications for use in space, at which point the manufacturers were allowed to modify their designs.