Atlantis and Whatnot

I have always been interested in legends and stories of lost cities and civilizations. Particularly Atlantis. I've done quite a bit of reading on the subject and thought I'd share some cool highlights on the story. The following is a map of the world based on what scientists think it looked like during the ice age:



There were sheets of glaciers across North America and Europe two miles thick. That's as high as Mount Everest! All that ice piled up means less water for the ocean, which were two to three hundred feet shallower than they are today. That's a lot more land exposed along the continental shelves. In fact, all the islands of what we see today as Indonesia were originally the mountaintops of what scientists now call Sundaland, a massive landmass in the Pacific branching off from southeast Asia reaching toward Australia!



The point of all this is that there was a lot more inhabitable land than there is today. In fact, some people have theorized that Atlantis may have been on one of these lost landmasses. Of course, depending on the theory, Atlantis could have been in any number of places, although Plato originally placed it specifically in the Atlantic. Some theorize, now this one's out there but I like to keep an open mind, that Atlantis wasn't in one place, but had many colonies across the globe. These colonies supposedly ranged from the high Andes Mountains, to the Irish coast, all the way to the modern deserts of Africa (although these deserts were once lush, tropical areas).