October 28, 2000 - Guardian - New Delhi

During the heyday of classical Greece, the city of Helike was the renowned cult centre for worship of Poseidon, god of sea and earthquakes. On a winter night in 373 BC, a violent earthquake and tsunami destroyed and submerged the city.

Helike was capital of a confederation of city states in the Gulf of Corinth, near modern day Aigion, 150 km west of Athens. Its precise location has long been debated. Last week the ruins of Helike were uncovered onshore, three to four meters beneath the mud and gravel of the Aigion coastal plain.

There was forewarning that an earthquake was about to strike Helike.

Writing in the 2nd-3rd century AD, Aelian described how five days before the earthquake, all the animals had left the city en masse.

Ancient writers record the earthquake destroyed every single building in the city and with the receding waters of the tsunami, Helike was dragged down along with every living person.

The discovery of Helike was announced formally last week by Dr Dora Katsonopoulou, a Greek archaeologist, and Dr Steven Soter, an astrophysicist from the American Museum of Natural History.

Their discovery was no accident.

The locations of the excavations had been carefully targeted following 12 years of subsurface probing by boreholes and geophysical imaging. Nevertheless, the nature of the finds still took both by surprise.

In the most important excavation, ruined walls and building foundations were found buried below thick deposits of black peat and marine mud.

Ruins entombed in a mixed blanket of terrestrial, brackish and marine sediments is consistent with a classical city engulfed by a tsunami. For archaeologists, the prize is that Helike may provide an unplundered, unmodified "time capsule" from the classical era. Its shallow onshore location may allow the greater part of the city to be excavated, giving Greece its very own Pompeii.

For earthquake geologists, Helike offers a different prize. The city is fossilised result of a scale of seismic event known to strike the earthquake-prone shores of the Aegean but for which there is no modern analogue.

The most popular aspect of the Helike discovery will be its association with the Atlantis legend.

The story of Atlantis is first recorded by the philosopher Plato in the mid-fourth century BC. Plato would have been in his early 50s when the 373 BC earthquake obliterated Helike. It would have been reminiscent of a similar catastrophic event that struck mainland Greece around the time of his birth.

In 426 BC, a major earthquake caused widespread seismic destruction and tsunami inundation around the Gulf of Evvia, including, in the Gulf of Atalanti, the reported separation of Atalanti Island from the mainland.

In his Dialogue, Plato recounts how "there occurred violent earthquakes and floods" and then, in one awful day and night "the island of Atlantis - disappeared in the depths of the sea."

The parallels between Plato's Atlantis and the 373 BC and 426 BC earthquakes are enticing, particularly given even after two and a half millennia of notable historical seismic activity in Greece, these two earthquakes stand out as particularly catastrophic events.

Perhaps the Atlantis legend is the real legacy of Helike.

September 14, 2000 - Associated Press

Researchers say ancient pine tree stumps found in a Swedish peat bog may hold a record of the great volcanic blast that some historians link with the end of the fabled Atlantis.

Using radiocarbon dating, a team of researchers determined that the trees had been alive between 1695 B.C. and 1496 B.C., and a study of their growth rings showed a four-year period of severely depressed growth about 1636 B.C.

Major volcanic eruptions have been known to blast enough dust into the atmosphere to cause frosts and limit crop growth, and one of the most powerful such blasts occurred when the Greek island of Santorini blew up in the mid-1600s B.C.

That disaster destroyed a culturally developed island and some historians believe it gave rise to the legend of the lost continent Atlantis.

"Our dating and the severe magnitude of this phenomenon suggest that it can be ascribed to the 1628-27 B.C. event, hence providing new evidence of a wider, more northerly area of influence," the team of Swedish scientists reports in the Sept. 15 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

While the team led by Hakan Grudd of the Climate Impacts Research Center in Kiruna, Sweden, dated the Santorini blast to 1628, other scholars use different dates, though all are within a few years.

The Swedish team said their tree ring dating had a margin of error of plus or minus 65 years.

Other scientists studying tree rings have found periods of frost damage and slow growth in the mid-1600s B.C. affecting Irish, English, and German oaks, pine trees in California and trees in Turkey.

This is the northernmost evidence of an effect from the volcanic blast, the researchers said of the new Swedish find.

"The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis of a major Northern Hemisphere volcanic eruption in 1628 B.C., which may have been Santorini in the Aegean Sea," they concluded.

The climate impact of volcanoes has long been a topic of discussion, going back at least to Benjamin Franklin. The eruption of the Indonesian volcano Tambora was blamed for a worldwide cooling in 1816 - known as the "year without a summer" in New England, where snow fell in June.

Today Santorini is a popular tourist spot, where visitors can see the great caldera formed when the ancient volcanic island blew up and view excavations uncovering the remains of the ancient town.

The first mention of Atlantis occurs in Plato, who discusses an ancient island or continent destroyed by earthquakes and sunk into the sea.

ATLANTIS  INDEX

ANCIENT AND LOST CIVILIZATIONS

ALPHABETICAL INDEX OF ALL FILES

CRYSTALINKS MAIN PAGE