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What is the Lost City of Atlantis? |
History
The first mention of the Lost City of Atlantis can be traced back to a famous Greek philosopher, writer, and mathematician named Plato. In approximately 360 BC, Plato wrote about an amazing city built on an island in the Atlantic ocean 9,000 years earlier, filled with great thinkers, engineers, and advanced technology. This was Atlantis, and it seemed like a wonderful place to live until it just disappeared into the ocean over the course of one day and one night, as if it had never existed at all!
Because Plato's stories were so detailed and unique, some people thought that they were based on fact. Others thought the opposite, since being detailed and unique is exactly what you do when you're writing fiction! And in the 1960's, a Greek archaeologist named Angelos Galanopoulos published a theory that a volcano eruption that happened around 1,500 BC may have either inspired the myth of Atlantis, or been Atlantic itself!
What do you think?
Because Plato's stories were so detailed and unique, some people thought that they were based on fact. Others thought the opposite, since being detailed and unique is exactly what you do when you're writing fiction! And in the 1960's, a Greek archaeologist named Angelos Galanopoulos published a theory that a volcano eruption that happened around 1,500 BC may have either inspired the myth of Atlantis, or been Atlantic itself!
What do you think?
Did you know?
In 2009, a U.K. tabloid reported that a pattern that looked like the remains of a city had been found on the ocean floor using the computer program Google Earth. Because the marks were located off the west coast of Africa, rumors quickly started that it could be proof that Atlantis had existed! Instead, as Google spokespeople eventually pointed out, the marks came from a process called "echosounding," which is when a ship uses sound waves to determine how deep the water they are on is.
Google also mentioned that if this really was the remains of a city, then according to the map measurements the city blocks would have been eight miles long — that's fifty times the size of a New York City block!
