Spanish researchers revealed this week how a series of ancient islands that look as though they sank beneath the ocean several million years ago could be the long-lost islands of “Atlantis.” The researchers, as revealed by the Live Science journal, discovered a series of ancient islands on top of an underwater mountain known as a “seamount” in the Canary Islands.
Luis Somoza, who headed up the project originally intended to study volcanic activity in the area, told Live Science that he believes the mountain “could be the origin of the Atlantis legend.”
Somoza and his team found that the seamount in question is made up of three inactive volcanoes. Roughly 50 kilometers in diameters, the underwater mountain has a base that descends roughly 2.3 kilometers beneath the ocean. The researchers were so amazed by the size and the shape of the mountain that they dubbed it “Mount Los Atlantes.”
In a statement issued by the team, researchers described how the mountains were “islands in the past” that have sunk and are “still sinking” – just as the legend of Atlantis has always said.
The scientists say that Los Atlantes was still a series of islands between 56 and 34 million years ago. As soon as the volcanoes stopped erupting and became inactive, however, the lava became gradually more dense and the islands eventually collapsed into the ocean. Many of the features of the old islands, however, remain. Scientists said that they have identified old beaches, sand dunes, cliffs, and even a flat summit that could have been used as a platform on which an ancient civilization built structures.
The story of Atlantis dates back to the time of Plato, a philosopher who was born in 428 BCE. In his writings, Plato described an island that had sunk into the oceans and had been talked about by humans for millennia. Plato described Atlantic as being a technologically advanced civilization beyond the “Pillars of Hercules,” which is today understood to be a reference to the Gibraltar Strait. Historians cannot determine, however, whether Plato was telling a story that had been passed down by word of mouth through the generations, or if the story of Atlantis was simply a moral allegory designed to illustrate the dangers of moral decay.
Researchers have previously theorized that the concept of Atlantis, even if it was an allegory, could have been based on a real pace. Some suggest that the lost civilization may be situated close to Crete, on the island of Santorini, or further away in the Americas.
