New evidence points to a cataclysmic meteor impact off the Greek coast which led to destruction, possibly remembered in the story of Atlantis.
WORDS Glyn Thomas
You may recall that in the May edition of Tomorrow, Vaughan Willmore examined links between Portugal and the legend of Atlantis. Like most people, I regarded the legend of Atlantis as just an interesting myth – until I started digging!
The earliest texts we have referring to Atlantis are from three Greek writers, Herodotus, Plato and Plutarch, who all quoted an older source – Solon. Solon (c630 BC to c560 BC) was a remarkable general who led the city-state of Athens to many victories and then transformed its society into the first democracy. Retiring as leader, he toured Mesopotamia and Egypt, where in 600 BC he visited the Temple of Sais, whose priests explained their understanding of ancient history including the story of Atlantis. Solon is quoted as writing that the priests of Sais told of a cataclysm that had occurred exactly 9,000 years earlier from which only a few survived including a ship of sailors from Atlantis.
This claim triggered my interest, as 9620 BC is the central estimate of an event marking the end of the Younger Dryas Period when global average temperatures suddenly rose by 10oC. Could there be a connection, I wondered?
My research across many disciplines reveals tantalising evidence of what exactly occurred around 9620 BC and how it might be linked to the most plausible evidence of Atlantis.
Three aspects are worthy of consideration. Firstly, Solon’s description of Atlantis: a maritime city with concentric harbours and docks, with splendid gardens and hot springs, flanked on both sides with extensive fertile plains, a navigable estuary on the south connecting to the ocean and high mountains visible in the far north.
Secondly, a French pilot discovered an extraordinary site in Mauritania in the 1930s – see the photograph. Referred to as the Richat Structure and the Eye of Africa, this site is 40km in diameter. The site lies in an area where the landscape has been scoured down to the bedrock by massive flows of water – but coming from the northeast – out of the Sahara desert. The typography is reminiscent of the Channeled Scablands of Washington state – judged to have been created by massive outflows of melted ice cap.
Thirdly, the very recent discovery of a double meteor impact just off the Greek coast near Kefalonia – which created impact craters 25km and 50km wide. The dating of this impact is underway, as shown by the analysis of nano-diamonds and micro spherules found in chevrons (crescents of sand) around the Mediterranean coasts. The impact created a tsunami estimated at 800m high. Evidence of such a tsunami penetrating 1,000km deep into North Africa around 10,000 BC has also been found in Chad. Such a tsunami could flow over low lying Tunisia, be channeled between the Atlas and Ahaggar mountain ranges, and surge down the dried up Tamanrasset river valley directly over the site of the Richat Structure. The maximum elevation of this route is 250m, easily breached by a tsunami 800m high.
The records of the Temple of Sais have been lost to us, but records of another Egyptian temple, Edfu, have been the subject of much research. Excavated by a French expedition in 1860, Emile Chassinat devoted her life to documenting the incredible volume of inscriptions covering every surface of the temple. For the past 20 years, the Academy of Sciences at Göttingen in Germany has undertaken an even more thorough cataloguing of the inscriptions, trying to assemble them in chronological sequence. This work reveals a similar record of a catastrophic inundation of the entire Nile valley wiping away a civilised culture leaving a few survivors to start again.
I was puzzled by the dramatic climatic events referred to as the Dryas Periods – three short-lived disruptions in the normal progressive warming after the last ice age maxima around 20,000 BC. Each Dryas period saw average global temperatures drop very suddenly by up to 10oC, followed around 1,000 years later by equally sudden temperature rises. What could cause these dramatic events – my conclusion is only large meteor impacts or mega-volcanic eruptions.
More details of my research may be found in a recent publication: Prequel – The Younger Dryas meteor impacts, The Flood and Atlantis.
Originally from London, Glyn lived in Zug and Hong Kong before moving to Portugal in 2020. He studied Economics, became an accountant and worked for businesses in a wide range of industries (manufacturing, chemicals, media, telecoms, travel & retail). He was drawn to writing because he saw many amazing discoveries about our past which were being ignored because they did not fit conventional views. “Acknowledged experts tend to work in very narrow chimneys – whilst I rove across many disciplines – cosmology, nuclear physics, terraforming, volcanology, geology, climatology, archaeology and its newer twin – astro-archaeology. Using multi-disciplines helps both to debunk crazy ideas and to corroborate other ideas.” Glyn now has two grandchildren and in his spare time, he plays golf, is an oenologist (wine producer) and is trying to learn Portuguese.
