10 Mind-Blowing Pieces Of Evidence That Proves Lost City Of Atlantis Was Real
2. Destruction Of Thera
In Plato’s account, the war against the Greeks is not what wiped out the Atlanteans. Although defeated, they do survive that war. However, the gods become angry with them and they destroy the civilization in one day and night of ‘violent earthquakes and floods’ by causing it to sink down into the depths of the sea.
Historically, the island of Thera erupted in roughly the year 1500 BCE. It is thought to have been cataclysmic – one of the largest eruptions in human history, in fact. The emptying of the magma chamber beneath the island resulted in huge portions of the island quite literally collapsing into the sea. And of course, the resulting tsunamis caused floods to varying degrees on the nearby Aegean islands and the northern coast of Crete.
The one big difference here between the history of the Minoans and the story of Atlantis is that this destruction of Thera happened before the war with the Greeks, not after. Nonetheless, the two events happened within a few generations of each other, and it is easy to see how a later chronicler might have assumed that the grand destruction of the island must have been the last thing that occurred, if he didn’t understand that the civilization continued for a time on the remaining islands.