Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City

by Mark Adams

  The name of the waters the Israelites crossed, according to Galanopoulos, has traditionally been mistranslated; it was not the Red Sea but the Sea of Reeds, a coastal lagoon “to the east of the Nile Delta.” Typically before a tsunami makes landfall—such as following the 1755 Lisbon earthquake—the sea briefly withdraws from the shoreline. Galanopoulos argued that as the sea receded following Thera’s post-eruption tsunami, the Israelites sprinted across a five-hundred-yard-wide gap to dry land. The waters then returned with explosive force as the Egyptians attempted to pursue them.

  Not satisfied with connecting Atlantis to just one of the Bible’s most important events, Galanopoulos also proposed that all ten of the plagues of Egypt described in the book of Exodus could be traced to the Thera explosion, especially the darkening of the sky (from the ash cloud), the violent hailstorm (a meteorological product of rapidly falling temperatures), and the Nile turning to blood (“iron oxide in the ash would dissolve in the waters and color them red”).

  As Juan Villarias-Robles had explained to me in Madrid, the 1960s were the dawning of what’s sometimes called the New Archaeology, a shift away from hunting for relics and interpreting old tales and toward using more scientific methods. Willard Libby received the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on radiocarbon dating, also known as carbon 14 dating, which as the Nobel Committee’s citation correctly predicted, soon revolutionized the fields of “archaeology, geology, geophysics, and other sciences.” It was inevitable that the methods of the New Archaeology would also make their mark on the less reputable science of Atlantology.

  James Mavor, a research specialist at the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Cape Cod, met Galanopoulos by chance in 1965 while on vacation in Athens. At that time Mavor was working on what he called “the most exciting project of my career,” helping to design and build a deep-sea research submarine named Alvin. Mavor was entranced by Galanopoulos’s hypothesis and offered to help procure the latest scientific equipment to prove it.

  A year later, in August 1966, The New York Times published a story under the headline ATLANTIS SEARCH SHIFTS TO AEGEAN. Mavor had arranged for the 210-foot research vessel Chain to visit Santorini to take geophysical soundings of the caldera that might prove Galanopoulos’s hypotheses about a man-made channel and naturally formed rings. The results were inconclusive but promising. The press seemed to have gotten a different impression. A follow-up story in the Times quoted Galanopoulos as saying that “most convincing proof” had been located in the form of what the reporter described as “the outline of a wide moat . . . 1300 feet underwater in the submerged part of Thera Island.” Mavor, though not an archaeologist, also did a bit of searching on land and found what he later described as “unmistakably Minoan” potsherds and walls.

  Mavor prepared for a 1967 return to Santorini expecting to lead a multidisciplinary team that would include two superstars. Jacques Cousteau, the dashing red-capped, cigarette-puffing French oceanographer planned to bring his research vessel Calypso to aid in the underwater exploration of the caldera. The other big-name specialist was Spyridon Marinatos, whose controversial essays about the Thera eruption and its possible connection to Atlantis had fired Galanopoulos’s imagination. By this time, the charismatic Marinatos was one of the world’s preeminent archaeologists. But though he was attached to the promising Santorini project, Marinatos was actually more interested in Helike. This important Golden Age Greek city south of Athens had vanished overnight in 373 BC due to a well-documented earthquake and flood. This similarity to the lost island described by Plato—who was living in Athens at the time—made Helike a perennial candidate as a proto-Atlantis. For Marinatos, the allure of finding an entire intact city was irresistible. He was indeed about to make such a discovery, just not at Helike.

  • • •

  Mavor’s follow-up expedition seemed at first to be cursed. Perhaps the grandiose name he chose, the 1967 Helleno-American Multi-Disciplinary Scientific Investigation of Thera and Quest for the Lost Atlantis, was an act of hubris too great to escape divine punishment. In April, the Greek military raised a coup and took control of the country. A few weeks later, Cousteau was forced to drop out when the Six-Day War erupted between Egypt and Israel, closing the Suez Canal. Ten days before work was scheduled to begin in Santorini, Mavor admitted to his partners that he had been unable to obtain any of the backing that he had promised. (“No ship, no submarine, no scientists, no equipment, no money,” one member of the team drily recalled.) He had been able to procure a sophisticated seismograph and magnetometer but was unable to get accurate readings from either.

  Meanwhile, Marinatos surveyed an ash-covered field near the fishing village of Akrotiri, saw something in the landscape that looked promising, and said, “Dig there.” His laborers almost instantly began to recover Minoan-style architecture and pottery. During six extraordinary days of excavation, diggers found large storage jars filled with remnants of wine and oil, kitchen utensils, loom weights, animal bones, frescoes, stone walls, and holes where disintegrated wooden beams had once held up two- and three-story buildings. An absence of human remains led to a working hypothesis that the residents of the buried city that came to be known as Akrotiri—or if Galanopoulos and Mavor were correct, Atlantis—had heeded seismological warnings and escaped doomed Thera before its final cataclysm. But indisputably Marinatos had found a wealthy maritime city of unknown proportions, a “Bronze Age Pompeii.”

  The American media eagerly credited Mavor with the discovery of Plato’s lost city. “Two years ago, I couldn’t find a single archaeologist interested in the Atlantis story,” he told Time magazine in an article that, like most international news coverage, didn’t mention Marinatos. “Now several admit there may be some connection.” Greek newspapers reprinted information from the American press. Marinatos, whose friends in Greece’s new military junta had promoted him to inspector general of the Antiquities Service, was not pleased; not only was his work at Akrotiri going unsung, but also Mavor was using his preliminary findings as solid proof that Atlantis had been discovered. Marinatos was willing to suggest that Thera’s explosion might have inspired Plato’s myth, but to claim the islands were one and the same was “irresponsible,” he said. A few months later The New York Times published a final, short news story headlined U.S. SCIENTIST LET OUT IN DISPUTE OVER THERA DIG. Mavor had been informed by letter that his services were no longer welcome on Santorini.

  When the psychic Edgar Cayce prophesied that Atlantis would rise again around 1969, he was in a sense correct. Mavor, Galanopoulos, and the Trinity College classics scholar John Luce all published books that year, each using the finds at Akrotiri to argue for the Minoan Hypothesis in a slightly different way. (Cayce may also have foreseen the singer Donovan’s top-ten single “Atlantis,” with its goofy lyrics inspired by Ignatius Donnelly’s diffusionist ideas, which was also released in 1969.) Even the august New York Review of Books weighed in with two extensive (and dismissive) reviews of this Atlantis literature, a sign of the Minoan Hypothesis’s popularity.

  The momentum from this burst of publicity carried forward in the following decades. Jacques Cousteau finally made it to Santorini and in 1978 released a documentary titled Calypso’s Search for Atlantis. (Guess what? He didn’t find it, either.) Many more documentaries and books ensued, all of them following to some degree the story line that the Thera explosion had ended the Minoan civilization on Crete, which inspired Plato’s story. Here, within an area that Plato would have been familiar with—the island was a likely stopping point on voyages he made to Crete and Egypt—was a scientifically documented occurrence of a sophisticated island civilization disappearing almost instantaneously due to a natural disaster.

  These versions tended to accentuate the generally positive—the bulls, the tricolor stones—while sweeping inconsistencies under the rug. I found Galanopoulos’s argument for the Pillars of Heracles to be particularly weak, and his numbers theory w
asn’t entirely convincing, either. There was also a problem with chronology. Further excavations on Crete showed that the Minoan empire had survived, in an ever-diminishing state, for a couple of centuries after the Thera blast before its sudden disappearance around 1200 BC, when the chaotic events of the Late Bronze Age collapse—war, famine, earthquakes—snuffed out one great Mediterranean society after another, including the Mycenaean Greeks.

  In his book Voyage to Atlantis, Mavor expressed his faith “that in due course all manner of artifacts will be laboriously collected” from the ruins of Akrotiri, and the evidence would prove Galanopoulos’s Minoan Hypothesis once and for all. Some fascinating buildings and relics had been discovered there in the half century since, enough to inspire new speculations about Atlantis, but archaeological work tended to progress glacially. For now there was one irrefutable fact: the explosion of Thera. Somewhere under all that ash, or at the bottom of that deep caldera, might lie the answer to the Atlantis question.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Scientific Americans

  Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Cape Cod

  The more I read about the Thera explosion and the Minoan Hypothesis, the more I kept circling back to Werner Wickboldt’s mention of the Parian Marble and Deucalion’s flood. Solon describes the flood near the start of the Timaeus when trying to convey the great antiquity of Athens; the Egyptian priest cuts him off and explains that the Greeks have short historical memories due to their cyclical misfortune with natural disasters. “There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind rising out of many causes,” he explains. “The greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water.” The priest mentions the flood again in the Critias when he describes an “extraordinary inundation,” accompanied by earthquakes that transformed the shape of the Acropolis in Athens by washing away its soil.

  The myth of Deucalion will sound familiar to anyone who’s read the book of Genesis. Deucalion was the son of Prometheus, the Titan infamous for stealing fire from the gods. Prometheus learned that Zeus was planning to annihilate humanity with a flood and advised his son and his son’s wife, Pyrrha, to build an ark to withstand the inundation. When the waters subsided, the ark came to rest on Mount Parnassus. The earth’s only two survivors gave thanks to Zeus, who instructed them to throw stones over their shoulders to repopulate the earth. Deucalion’s stones became men, and Pyrrha’s women.

  There are a few differences between the stories of Deucalion and Noah, such as the lack of animals in the Greek version, but by and large the tales are similar enough to suggest a common origin. A centuries-long chicken-or-egg debate over which story came first became moot in the nineteenth century with the discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a series of Babylonian stories about a king who seeks immortality, inscribed on twelve stone tablets that dated to the late third millennium BC. King Gilgamesh seeks the wisdom of Utnapishtim, a survivor of the great flood, whom the gods have granted eternal life. Utnapishtim explains that he was guided by a deity to build a boat so that a small remnant of people and animals could survive a coming flood. When the waters receded, the boat landed on a mountain; only when a raven was dispatched and did not return did the passengers feel safe to disembark.

  It seems probable that all these stories of a Great Deluge were based on tales of ancient disasters that had been passed down orally through the generations. But were they the product of one flood or many? And might they tell us anything about the floods Plato wrote of?

  Because the global warming trend that began with the onset of the Holocene period around 9700 BC roughly coincided with Plato’s date of 9600 BC, many antiestablishment Atlantologists like Rand Flem-Ath have theorized that the torrents of water unleashed by this glacial melt could have been the source of Plato’s flood myths. But serious scientists have also seen a connection between the big thaw and the preponderance of ancient flood narratives. The renowned oceanographer Robert Ballard—probably best known for locating the Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean—found the shoreline of what had likely been a freshwater lake four hundred feet beneath the Black Sea. Freshwater shells Ballard collected from the area were carbon-dated to around 5000 BC. The discovery bolstered a controversial hypothesis floated by two Columbia University scientists, William Ryan and Walter Pitman. They argued that the rapidly rising Mediterranean had spilled over the Bosphorus, pouring two hundred times the daily volume of Niagara Falls into what had been a lake, creating the Black Sea. Ballard believed that accounts of such a traumatic event, which would have inundated any lakeshore settlements, could have been passed down orally from generation to generation, essentially creating the Noah’s ark tale.

  One obstacle blocking any connection between the Thera explosion and ancient flood myths has been researchers’ inability to agree on a hard date for the blast. Radiocarbon dates of charcoal samples have been stacked up against evidence of narrowed tree-growth rings (a result of reduced sunlight after the blast ejected ash into the atmosphere), which were compared to dated pottery samples. The technicians favored a date in the early 1600s BC; the specialists with dirt under their fingernails stood firm at 1500 BC. The hundred-year gap was important. A date of 1600 didn’t line up nearly as well with the evidence for Atlantis.

  Alexander MacGillivray, an archaeologist with the British School of Athens and codirector of excavations at Palaikastro, a major Minoan site in Crete, had recently published a long paper summarizing all the collected evidence. He had come down firmly in favor of the 1500 BC date for the Thera explosion. After Skyping MacGillivray at his home on a small vineyard near Athens, I asked the disembodied head that filled my laptop screen if there was any connection between Deucalion’s flood and Thera.

  “In terms of the mythology and the history, it tends to go together pretty well. Deucalion’s flood appears in Greek history. It’s the beginning of the Heroic Age and the rise of Mycenae and the heroes who go off and fight the Trojan War.” In his long poem Works and Days, the Greek poet Hesiod identifies the Five Ages of Man: the Golden Age (when men lived peacefully among the gods), the Silver Age (when men turned away from the gods), the Bronze Age (a violent time ending with Deucalion’s flood), the Heroic Age (when men fought noble battles like the Trojan War), and the Iron Age (Hesiod’s own time, an era of lawlessness and evil). Egyptian chroniclers placed the flood of Deucalion during the reign of Pharaoh Thutmosis III, MacGillivray told me, which matches the 1500 BC date perfectly.

  “So the Greeks never forgot that Poseidon sent this wave against all of Greece and, essentially, caused this great disaster. This massive flood comes all the way up to the foot of the Acropolis in Athens. Which is exactly what the Theran tsunami would have done.” MacGillivray had been unable to find any tsunami research that had been done on the Greek mainland, but the latest modeling at Palaikastro indicated a wave fifty feet high. Another study showed that the Thera tsunami had traveled as far as modern Israel.

  This was interesting. A point that often gets forgotten is that in the Timaeus, the priest tells Solon that in the same “violent earthquakes and floods” that obliterated Atlantis, “your entire warrior force sank below the earth all at once.” I asked what MacGillivray thought about the Minoan Hypothesis.

  “I’m pretty happy with what Plato gives us,” he said. “The Egyptian priests told him that we should be looking beyond the Pillars of Hercules.” In other words, outside of the Mediterranean.

  MacGillivray had half-jokingly sent a tweet to filmmaker James Cameron a couple of weeks earlier suggesting that he might search for the lost civilization in his custom-made submersible Deepsea Challenger, with which he’d just dived a world-record thirty-six thousand feet to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Another possibility, MacGillivray said, would be the oceanographer Ballard. “Finding the Titanic in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean is like finding a grain of sand,” he said. “If you can find that, you should be able to find substantial architecture.”
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  • • •

  As it turned out, the next person I called worked with both James Cameron and Robert Ballard. If anyone should be able to explain how to find something lost under the ocean, it would be David Gallo, the director of special projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. An expert in deep-sea research, he had helped find the sunken Nazi battleship Bismarck in fifteen thousand feet of water and in recent years oversaw the 3-D mapping of the Titanic, also two and a half miles under the sea. In 2011, he led the team that located Air France Flight 447, which had vanished over the Atlantic on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 passengers aboard. A French executive for the plane’s manufacturer, Airbus, asked why Gallo’s team at the WHOI had been called in to conduct the search, had responded, “Because no one else in the world can do it.”

  Several e-mails I sent to Gallo vanished into the abyss, until late one night a reply popped up in my inbox. “Mark, just got out of two days of Atlantis meetings,” he wrote. “Let’s talk.”

  A few weeks later, I drove up on a sunny day to Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where Gallo conducts business when he’s not at sea. The main WHOI campus, with its shingled buildings and manicured lawns, could still pass for its former role as the Gatsby-ish family compound of an especially wealthy New England businessman. Gallo’s light-filled office on the second floor had a gorgeous view of Nantucket Sound. He had given one of the most popular TED Talks of all time, an inspirational multimedia presentation about the unexplored wonders of the oceans. When I arrived, he was just exiting a meeting to discuss an upcoming voyage to Antarctica to search for the wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance. On his large desk he had an eclectic stack of Atlantis books, ranging from scholarly monographs on the Thera eruption to Rand Flem-Ath’s The Atlantis Blueprint. He wore a turquoise polo shirt, a neon Swatch and fluorescent pink running shoes. Together with his seaman’s suntan he seemed to glow from within like a bioluminescent jellyfish.