Geology Reference
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proposed that the volcanic destruction of the island of Santorini (also known as Thera)
was responsible for the story of Deucalion's flood. Radiocarbon dating of the ash from the
eruption of Santorini (as the volcano composing the island was also known) revealed it
dated from 1500 to 1600
BC
, around the historical reign of King Deucalion. On the island
of Paros, a marble pillar listing the kings of Greece implies Deucalion's flood occurred in
about 1539
BC
. The eruption destroyed a great city on Santorini and generated a tsunami
that ravaged the Greek coast. In an early version of the Deucalion story the flood is even
said to have come from the sea.
The connection to the story of Atlantis comes through Plato, who believed it had been
handed down since the time of the great lawgiver Solon. Two hundred years before Plato's
time, Solon traveled to Egypt and asked priests there about Deucalion's flood. They told
him of a great disaster that had destroyed the mighty island metropolis of Atlantis. Lying at
the center of three concentric harbors connected to the sea by a narrow channel, the great
city vanished in a single day. This island kingdom beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which
Plato placed past the Straits of Gibraltar, existed nine thousand years before Solon's time.
Galanopoulos suggested that Solon had mistranslated the Egyptian word for one hundred
as one thousand, because when divided by ten, Plato's age for Atlantis comes out at about
1500
BC
and its size matches that of Santorini. Did Plato realize that Solon's oversized is-
land would not fit in the Mediterranean, and did he move the Pillars of Hercules from the
southern Peloponnesus to Gibraltar, expediently banishing Atlantis to the unexplored world
beyond?
Whether or not they lived in Atlantis, the inhabitants of Santorini built their city on the
flanks of an active volcano. They chose the easily defended island because it was ringed
by the natural moat of a volcanic caldera pleasantly plumbed with geothermal hot water. In
exchange for the Bronze Age luxury of running hot water, residents unwittingly took on the
risk of living in a city that lay within the heart of an active volcano. Eventually, the cata-
strophic eruption of their island home obliterated their idyllic city and triggered a tsunami.
I suspect that this event is immortalized in the story of Deucalion's flood.
Others have argued that a more gradually rising sea level, and not a tsunami, was re-
sponsible for the world's flood stories. In 1960, Rhodes Fairbridge, a Columbia University
geology professor, proposed that flooding of coastal lowlands around the world displaced
