The Drowned Land of Aegeis: Did a Cataclysmic Flood Wipe Out Ancient Greece?
By Joe O'Donoghue | Part 2 of 4: The Geology of Greece
Look at a map of the Aegean Sea today, and you see a sun-drenched paradise of scattered islands. But look beneath the surface, and the geology tells a terrifying story. Deep submarine basins filled with thousands of metres of coarse sediment. Massive boulders stranded in river valleys far from any glacier. A fractured, stretched, and sunken landscape that seems to have collapsed into the sea. More than 2,500 years ago, an Egyptian priest told the statesman Solon that ancient Greece was struck by a dreadful flood that washed away its rich soils, leaving behind only the “skeleton of the country.” Modern geology insists that the Earth changes only slowly, over millions of years. But what if the priest was right? What if the physical evidence scattered across Greece and the Aegean proves that a sudden, catastrophic deluge really did wipe a lost world off the map?
About This Series
This article is Part 2 of a four-part series by Joe O’Donoghue (Part 1: Before the Flood: The Geological Secret Buried Beneath the Azores), a professional geologist who challenges the exclusively uniformitarian paradigm of modern earth science, arguing that the physical evidence, when examined without ideological constraint, points toward a very different geological history of our world. Each part investigates a distinct but interconnected line of evidence, building toward a comprehensive geological case for the existence of Atlantis. Part 1 examined Plato’s original description of Atlantis against the real geography and geology of the Azores. Part 2 (this article) turns to the geological record of ancient Greece and the Aegean Sea to test whether the catastrophe described by the Egyptian priest left any physical trace. Part 3 focuses on the Acropolis Hill and the Athens Basin, scrutinising the erosion and sediment evidence for a catastrophic flood. Part 4 dives into the submarine geology of the Azores Plateau and the Atlantic seafloor itself, examining the oceanographic evidence for a former large landmass in the central North Atlantic.
Introduction
As indicated in Part 1, I consider the Azores Plateau as quite possibly a remnant of the island continent of Atlantis, and the old Egyptian priest gives a limited amount of geological information. While not definitive by any means, the evidence reported is internally consistent, and very much in keeping with the former existence of a landmass in the central North Atlantic. The priest also discusses ancient Greece and the Acropolis, and gives a good deal more information on the geology of Greece than he does on that of the Atlantic, or the area of the Azores in particular.
It is much easier, naturally enough, to study the surface geology of Greece than it is the submarine geology of the Atlantic, around the Azores or elsewhere. While the priest describes Greece and discusses the catastrophe, the normal presumption today is that uniformitarianism adequately explains Greek geology, as it supposedly does for any other region one might care to mention. However, we find that, on examination, academic geologists have had some difficulty in accounting for a good deal of the Greek evidence via Lyell’s long-lived paradigm. There are, of course, many aspects to the geology of Greece beyond those mentioned in the legend.
The priest describes Greece in the context of the catastrophe’s effect on that country, at the same time as Atlantis’ sinking in the Atlantic. While the geology of Greece cannot decide whether a landmass recently existed in the Atlantic, it certainly can confirm whether or not a catastrophe occurred, as portrayed in the legend, and the priest describes how ancient Greece was struck by a dreadful flood that washed away much of its soil cover.
