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The Legend of Atlantis
& The Science of Geology

Atlantis! Ever since Plato, the legend of the lost continent of Atlantis has intrigued people the world over, and despite all the dismissals and skepticism down through the centuries, especially in the last one hundred years, it has managed to maintain its grip on the imagination and simply refuses to stay sunk and out of mind in the ocean depths where Plato put it.

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According to an old Egyptian Temple Priest, as Plato relates, a large island continent with a genial climate and an advanced civilization sank suddenly somewhere in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean about 11 or 12 thousand years ago, and did so over the course of but a "single dreadful day and night" of catastrophe, involving earthquakes and floods.

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The science of geology, of course, denies any reality to the notion of a lost Atlantis, or catastrophes in general, and holds that only everyday processes produced the world we see around us. Given the number of unexplained phenomena all over the world and the many unproven theories of geology, it would seem that Uniformitarianism, in its chosen diagnostic approach, and despite all its claims, has proven generally incompetent in its efforts to explain this world of ours, and so perhaps a return to the catastrophism of the old days is in order.

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The Legend of Atlantis and the Science of Geology is a eight-part series with each volume pertaining to a different aspect of the topic, from its beginning with Plato's account and Greek mythology, to natural disasters and the physical geology of Greece, the series progresses through different topics and theories of the science of geology, including an analysis of uniformitarianism, plate tectonics and the Great Ice Age, among many others.

An Eight Volume Book Series

Volume I

We begin with Atlantis, starting with the legend itself.  We first examine it to see what it tells us of the island continent and the North Atlantic.  (The legend also speaks of Greece and the Aegean, but we will leave those for Volume II).  A brief look at the relevant sections of the legend follows, especially those parts referring to the catastrophe.  We then analyze the legend itself from the point of view of mythology, including what ancient writers said of it.  Next comes a classical and philological analysis.  We finish up Volume I with chapters on the relatively new discipline of geomythology.  We hear a lot from people both within and without academia, and we see that attitudes and opinions are not so monolithically united as academia would like the public to believe.

Volume II

Volume II  continues with Atlantis and what the Priest has to say about Greece and the Aegean.  We are done with mythology at this point, so this volume is almost entirely geological in nature.  We first see what the legend says, and then we look at the recent structural geology of the Aegean area as well as mainland Greece.  It is here we meet the Ice Age for the first time, as well as many of the sacred so-called Principles of Geology.  Greece, as we'll see, is littered with surface deposits of various kinds, mostly concentrated in the valleys, as might be expected, having been washed in there by something...

And it is the "something" that is interesting; it must, of course, be able to do the work asked of it, and we will see just what it is being asked to do.

Volume III

Volume III is devoted to Noah's Flood and its Sumerian equivalents, the latter likely being its original source.  Apart from minor amounts of mythology and a look at other writers' claims, this volume is almost entirely archaeological and geological.  Noah's Flood, like Atlantis, has long been dismissed, or, in this case, written off as just a local flood. Since Noah's Flood figured so prominently in the early years of geology, the general topic of large floods, or megafloods as they're called, is also examined, as well as the Diluvialism of the early geologists. This volume, like the series in general, is an unbiased, non-ideological, and solely scientific look at the legends of a major Mesopotamian flood, with a view to determining whether that Flood rightly belongs in the realm of science or that of fantasy, as modern geology has it.

Volume IV

Leaving geology for a while, in Volume IV we turn our focus to the archaeology of Greece and the eastern Mediterranean: Türkiye, the Levant, and around to Egypt. We continue on to Libya and Malta before moving out into the Atlantic. The archaeological evidence that we will examine, in the form of buildings mostly, is generally referred to as megalithic, meaning construction involving the use of very large (mega) blocks of stone (lithic). What is notable about them is that they are all extremely old on the one hand, and inexplicable from the point of view of engineering on the other. They appear to predate everything else, as though from an earlier, but more advanced, civilization. Some geology is also included, ranging from the Levant to the Nile Valley, and he Sahara. We will find some very strange archaeological remains in Egypt and other places, and some surprising evidence in the bone-dry Sahara.

Volume V

Given the importance of the Atlantic Ocean to the question of Atlantis, a most thorough examination of all aspects of it is called for. In Volume V we begin with its terrestrial surroundings, and islands, and naturally follow with the shallow coastal regions and continental shelves. From these we get a sense of the structure of the ocean basin and its underwater topography. We then begin an exploration of its depths, beginning with the original explorers engaged in telegraph cable laying in the latter 19th century. Following on from this work came truly scientific explorations of the ocean floor and the central mid-Atlantic Ridge. Combining these data will enable a tentative history of the ocean basin to be defined, and such history, of course, includes any former landmasses that may have existed in the central part of that ocean. 

Volume VI

In Volume VI, we begin with an overview of the history of the science, focusing mostly on the 19th century, and extending into the 20th. We first discuss the development of the science and its theories, from catastrophism to uniformitarianism and including the Ice Age and so forth. We then 

analyze all the geological processes that we've been persuaded are so effective at wearing down this world of ours. Here we use evidence eyesight and the laws of physics to test all those agents and processes of the uniformitarians, and here  we'll also meet a lot of imaginary agents and processes that were dreamt up and dragged in to do the work that Lyell's uniformitarianism patently cannot do. We will also examine catastrophism and we'll see why it is much the better explanation.

Volume VII

Volume VII is devoted to that great geological mystery, the Ice Age, still without an explanation after almost two hundred years. Here we see what, exactly, is involved and just what the evidence is. We examine a number of theories that were proffered over the years to account for this Ice Age. For comparison purposes, the ice caps of today are examined and we analyze their behavior and investigate their origins. Radical climate change is, of course, associated with the beginning and ending of any Ice Age, such climate change being far more extreme than today's global warming. While modern-day climate change will not be addressed in this series, a possible solution to the Ice Age mystery is included.

Volume VIII

In this final volume VIII, we bring together everything we have seen and studied in the series and correlate all the evidence into one comprehensive and overarching theory that seeks to account for all the phenomena involved. Now that we know just what we have to explain, the key that unites it all can be revealed, demonstrating that the legend of Atlantis is grounded in fact, uniformitarianism is invalid as an explanation for the evidence while catastrophism does indeed hold the better answer. We see that the early geologists had it right, right at the beginning, even if they couldn't explain the cause of such catastrophes, their extent, or their severity, and these catastrophes are, as the early geologists said, separated by long periods of quietude as we see today. 

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“Once you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Casebook Sherlock Holmes, 1926

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