Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific

Abstract

There are few topics that have captured the imaginations of people within the last few centuries more than the idea of vanished islands. For myself - and, I would argue, for most schoolchildren with inquiring minds growing up in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century - the questions of whether the fabulous island Atlantis, described in exhaustive detail by the Greek philosopher Plato about 350 BC (Before Christ), ever truly existed and where it might have been located proved compulsive. For me at that time, such questions seemed to go straight to the fundamentals of existence in ways that the questions raised within prescriptive curricula did not. In adolescence, it seemed to me that proving the former existence of Atlantis was tantamount to proving the existence of God for it was self-evident that only in the wisdom of the Ancients, unpolluted by the complexities and crass materialism of the modern world, could the answers to such fundamental questions be found. Naturally these views have since been significantly tempered but, decades later, I realize that numerous people had similar views, both before and after I held them.