He writes that around 7000BC a huge comet impacted at Hudson Bay resulting in world wide cataclysmic events. 95% of all animal and plantlife were extinguished and whole continents shifted from their original location, some to places more than 2000 miles away.
The book tells of an ancient civilisation who he calls the Amenes who were in fact the original Atlanteans, very advanced in all things.
So this got me to wonder what, if any, is the proof or otherwise that Atlantis did in fact exist.
BTW. It isn’t a great book by any stretch of the imagination but it aint so bad.
While there certainly have been several mass extinctions from meteorites, wiping out a large proportion of earthly life, there hasn’t been one as recently as 7000BC. The prospect of the majority of evolutionary avenues becoming extinct fairly arbitrarily is an interesting one. Atlantis though is only as interesting as the imagination of groundless speculators. How would an impact suddenly shift tectonic plates? This sudden happening would surely be shown in (relatively fresh) geological records.
Of course, Plato (who is the source of the Atlantis legend) placed it many thousands of years before the Thera event, and his description of Atlantean society and the layout of the city doesn’t correspond at all with what would have been possible at Thera. So it’s just a story, allegory, whatever.
If you Google “Plato Timaeus Critias Atlantis” you’ll find several translations of the source material. I’m not capable of determining which is the most accurate.
But seriously man, Clive Cussler!!! I like a trashy thriller as much as the next man, but Clive has been phoning it in for decades. Have you read Lee Child?
So basically it’s just yer run of the mill allegory
Recommended reading: Lost Continents, by L. Sprague deCamp. A very thorough exploration of every turn the Atlantis/Lemuria/Mu meme has taken over the years, from Plato to Blavatsky to Ignatius Donnelly to Cayce, with appropriate debunking. A thoroughly fascinating piece of work.
Atlantis apparently started life as a political/philosophical allegory created by Plato and provided with a believable fictional background (information brought by Solon from Egypt, imparted to the grandfather of someone at the dinner at which the dialogue is set). Aside from a couple of then-exposed now-submerged coastal areas in the Azores and Bahamas dating from the Pleistocene or before, there appears to have been no submerged lands in the Atlantic, and certainly no advanced ancient mid-Atlantic civilization drowned in a cataclysm.
Insofar as there might be a historical analog to the Atlantis story, the destruction of the Minoan civilization by events associated with the Thera eruption (a Krakatoa-style catastrophic eruption) matches in some amazingly accurate ways – provided that you assume an exaggeration factor of ten on both temporal and spatial number cites, and ignore some inconvenient details as being Platonic pontification superimposed on the legend.
Cussler wrote it the other guy saved the world from being flooded (again) and what was left from being taken over by Nazis who had been hiding since 1945.
There is snow and ice and wind and no sex in the story altho’ a breast is mentioned once.
Polycarp summed up the whole “Plato wasn’t a writing a geography textbook” thing, but it doesn’t stop folks looking. For a list of the various places the’e looked at, Wikipedia has a nice long list
Graham Hancock is a very entertaining author. He even brings up the occasional “good point.” It’s just that he plays logic hop-scotch into a swimming pool filled with drivel juice.