Atlantis (island)

According to Plato, the celebrated Greek philosopher of antiquity, Atlantis lay on this side of the Pillars of Hercules, was larger than Africa and Asia combined, and vanished in the space of a day and a night as the result of a tremendous convulsion of the globe.

For a long time Plato’s account was regarded as pure fable. Today, however, when science seeks to extend its reach even to the most remote corners of the globe, it may be said that, although the existence of Atlantis has not yet been established as fact, it cannot be considered impossible either.

Mr Termier reports in number 256 of the Boletim do Instituto Oceanografico de Mónaco that when the telegraph cable running from Brest to Cape Cod broke in the summer of 1898, the men charged with raising it from the sea bed noticed that it frequently caught on sharp-pointed rocks with keen edges, fragments of which the grapnels brought up. When these fragments were collected and studied, they were found to belong to a glassy lava called tachylite, with the chemical composition of basalts, which, in the state in which it appeared, could only have solidified under atmospheric pressure.

Since the rocks we have referred to were found at a depth of three thousand metres and nine hundred kilometres north of the archipelago of the Azores, Mr Termier concluded from these facts that a continent must once have existed in that region of the globe and later sunk beneath the sea. The archipelago itself, which lies, as is well known, in the Atlantic volcanic zone, may well have formed part of that continent. Only a short time can have elapsed between the eruption of the lavas and the submersion of the continent, for otherwise atmospheric erosion would have levelled and smoothed the surface of the rocks.

In the view of Professor Eduardo Forbes, all the islands of the Atlantic must have been joined to Europe or Africa at a recent epoch. For Unger and Dr Oswald Heer, the hypothesis that Atlantis existed was in no way extraordinary, since it alone could satisfactorily explain the affinities naturalists had observed between the natural productions of these islands and those of the nearby continents.

However, since the remarkable work of Darwin has demonstrated that not only many plant seeds but also certain animal species can be carried great distances by the winds, by birds and even by ocean currents, it seems to us unnecessary to resort to these hypotheses to explain the presence of a varied fauna and flora in the archipelagos of the Atlantic.

Plato’s Atlantis seems to us to differ somewhat from the Atlantis conceived by the naturalists. Yet whether we regard that real or fabled region as an island or as an extension of the present continents, what seems certain is that Madeira and the nearby islands have nothing to do with it. The geological structure of these islands, the great depth of the sea surrounding them and the absence from all of them of the small quadrupeds that abound on the nearby continents lead us to believe that our archipelago is an independent creation, and not a relic of vast territories now submerged.

What we say about Madeira may perhaps apply to the neighbouring archipelagos, notwithstanding the opinion expressed by Mr Termier on the origin of the islands of the Azores. This geologist states that, before one would be entitled to assert that the Canary Islands are fragments of a submerged continent, certain local observations would be needed, which have not been carried out to date.

In our humble opinion, the hypothesis put forward by some geologists that the archipelagos of the Atlantic Ocean were joined to Europe, Africa and perhaps America in a recent geological period does not accord with what is known about these archipelagos. This is so even though it is reasonable to believe that this sea once washed vast lands, which sank in an age of ruin and cataclysm whose beginning and duration cannot be determined.