3. The Calamity Behind the Legend of Atlantis
Sometime between 1642 – 1540 BC, Santorini in today’s Greece experienced one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded history. It was about four times as powerful as the gigantic Krakatoa eruption of 1883. The explosion sundered the island of Thera, and wiped out the flourishing Minoan settlement of nearby Akrotiri and surrounding islands.
Known as the Minoan Eruption of Thera, the event gave rise to the legend of the vanished civilization of Atlantis, which was doomed by a natural catastrophe and swallowed by the sea. Beyond legend, however, the Minoan Eruption was one of history’s most impactful natural disasters, with consequences not only to its own era, but with knock-on effects and a chain of causation leading directly to the world in which we live today.