I was watching ‘The Little Mermaid’ the other day…okay, I know you are rolling your eyes, but whatever, I am a proud Disney fan, and shall always be. Anyway, so I was watching ‘The Little Mermaid’ when it struck me that the movie’s under water city of Atlantica must be modeled after the mythical lost city of Atlantis. And of course, I had to immediately start researching it. I was charmed by what I learnt, and felt compelled to share it with you all.
Atlantis, a likely mythical island nation mentioned by Plato many times, has been an object of fascination among western philosophers and many historians for almost about 2,400 years now. Plato (c.424-328 B.C.) described it as a powerful and advanced kingdom that sank, in a night and a day, into the ocean, around 9,600 B.C. There are many archaeologists and scientists who are trying their luck at finding a trace of the city, all around the borders of Spain, but even with advanced technology nobody has been able to locate the Lost City, which remains lost for now. No trace of Atlantis has ever been found, despite advances in oceanography and ocean floor mapping in the past decades.
Though there remains much mystery at the bottom of the world’s oceans, it is inconceivable that the world’s oceanographers, submariners, and deep-sea probes have somehow missed a landmass “larger than Libya and Asia together.”Furthermore, plate tectonics demonstrate that it’s impossible for Atlantis to exist, as the continents have drifted and the seafloor has spread, not contracted, over time. There would simply be no place for Atlantis to sink into. As Ken Feder, an eminent American archaeologist, has noted, “The geology is clear; there could have been no large land surface that then sank in the area where Plato places Atlantis. Together, modern archaeology and geology provide an unambiguous verdict: There was no Atlantic continent; there was no great civilization called Atlantis.”
I know as an educated adult I should swallow by disappointment and accept what science is telling the world, that Atlantis never existed. But it is too fascinating to dismiss as just a myth. I think the city really exists somewhere deep under water, or maybe it’s just magical and shows itself once a decade or something, or it is a charmed land, surrounded by a protective shield, where the mermaids and mermen live… or something in that vein.
What are your thoughts on this? Are you a believer in myths and mythical creatures? Because I totally believe Atlantis exists and vampires live amongst us :D!
