For 20 centuries and more, the legend of the lost Atlantis has had a powerful hold on the human imagination. In his dialogues, Plato described Atlantis as an island "confederation of marvelous power" located near the Straits of Gibraltar, somewhere in the Atlantic. In Timaeus, he declared that one day the whole population "sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea." Plato dated the disaster as 9,000 years before the time of Solon, the Athenian statesman who lived in the 7th century B. C. But modern oceanographers can find no trace of Atlantis—was Plato wrong?
Perhaps not. Last week a U. S. oceanographer announced that what may be a completely intact Minoan city was unearthed recently on the Aegean island of Thera, now called Santorin. The discovery could well substantiate the most intriguing of all Atlantis theories—that Plato was right but simply mislocated Atlantis, which was actually an island kingdom comprising Thera, Crete and other Aegean islands.
Divide by 10. That theory was proposed in 1960 by University of Athens Seismologist Anghelos Galanopoulos, who believes that Plato misread by a factor of 10 the dimensions of Atlantis and the date of its destruction given in an Egyptian manuscript. Dividing by 10, Galanopoulos came up with an area roughly encompassing Thera and Crete; similarly reducing Platos date to 900 years before Solon, he moved the destruction of Atlantis forward to about 1490 B. C. At about that time, a well-documented volcanic eruption plunged large portions of Thera into the sea, rained lethal vapors and debris on Crete 75 miles to the south, and generated 160-ft. tidal waves that battered Crete and perhaps Egypt as well.
All this fascinated U. S. Marine Geologist James W. Mavor Jr. of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who sailed to Thera last year in the institute's research vessel, Chain. When his seismic profiles of the island showed geophysical conformations that seemed to match Plato's description of Atlantis, Mavor organized a full-fledged expedition headed by Greek Archaeologist Spyridon Marinates and including Professor Emily Vermeule, research fellow at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Shortly after the diggers arrived, they detected artifacts buried in a 2,500-ft. swath across the island. Digging nine trenches, the group unearthed indications of a city half a square mile in size that had once held an estimated population of 30,000. "The find was so astonishing," said Mavor, "we were unequipped to handle it."