Original subtitles

[suspenseful music]

- Tonight, Atlantis, the lost island kingdom

that's baffled explorers for centuries.

- When you think of lost cities, you think of Atlantis.

[volcano erupts]

- Atlantis is hit with these earthquakes

and floods that ultimately sink the entire island nation

to the bottom of the sea, never to be seen again.

- Some say Atlantis is a myth.

Others insist it was a very real place,

wiped out thousands of years ago.

- Finding Atlantis would not only be the archaeological coup

of this century, but perhaps for all time.

[dramatic music]

- Now we'll explore the top theories surrounding one

of history's most famous lost kingdoms.

- Easily a half dozen sites fit the profile of Atlantis.

- Could Atlantis and this other lost city be one

and the same?

- A major eruption could have easily wiped out

an ancient civilization like Atlantis thousands

of years ago.

- Is Atlantis a real place and, if so, where could it be?

[dramatic music]

Circa 360 BCE, Ancient Greece.

The philosopher Plato writes

of an epic battle waged long before his time.

- This battle, according to Plato,

took place about 9,000 years before his time.

[warriors screaming]

Plato writes about this battle between the Greeks

and a very highly advanced civilization

from an island called Atlantis.

- Atlantis is this huge island that is populated

by Atlanteans who are

incredibly prosperous,

wealthy, have huge armies.

So with all their wealth

and prosperity, the Atlanteans are arrogant, they're proud,

they feel they can expand and conquer others,

and this is what brings them into contact

with the Greeks when they invade their territories.

[weapons clashing]

- Atlantis has basically been provoking the Greeks.

They've been trying to expand their empire,

and the Greeks finally decide it's time to respond.

[ominous music]

- The nation of Atlantis is a military juggernaut.

They are technologically advanced.

They've got the better military, better tech,

they've got this beat.

[dramatic music] [warriors screaming]

Plato writes about this battle

as if it's like a true tale of good versus evil,

and in the end,

[swords clanging]

the underdog Greeks end up winning the day.

To make matters worse for the Atlanteans,

after they lose the battle, they are then struck

with even more tragedy.

[dramatic music]

As the story goes, Atlantis is hit

with these natural disasters, earthquakes, floods

[water roaring]

that ultimately sink the entire island nation to the bottom

of the sea, never to be seen again.

[water gurgling]

[dramatic music]

- [Laurence] Today, Plato's work

remains the only known ancient record of Atlantis.

- The big mystery here is, is this a true story?

Was there actually an island nation called Atlantis?

- Plato is our singular source for the story of Atlantis,

and he's using it almost as a parable,

but he references real places in this story

that makes it sound like it could be a historical account.

[dramatic music]

- The reason why we can't tell if Atlantis was meant

to be completely true

or allegorical is that Plato used both forms of writing.

And in the Atlantis story,

he has the main speaker say over and over again,

this story is true,

but maybe that itself was a rhetorical device.

- He tells stories that have some sort

of a moral purpose to them.

So if it's an allegory, it would be about the dangers

of power and wealth.

However, not everybody believes that the story is made up.

- People that read Plato's writing look at it

and go, "There's no way that he made this up."

It's too vivid of a description for him

to have fictionalized this place.

He describes these very lush concentric islands

all linked together by a canal with massive waterways

and surrounded by mountains as well as a rectangular plane

that's 340 miles long.

[dark insistent music]

- The Atlanteans were sort

of a sophisticated maritime trading community,

and on the central island there is an enormous ornate

temple of Poseidon.

- [Laurence] But there are skeptics

who point out details in Plato's story

that don't make sense.

- There's some strange things about Plato's account,

including the fact that it's 9,000 years ago

and 9,000 years ago,

we did not have any major human civilizations.

Humanity was still living

in hunter-gathering type situations.

[dramatic music]

- Plato might have just been off in his chronology

or maybe there was some problem

in the transmission of Plato's text.

Maybe there's a mistake

and it was supposed to be 900 years instead of 9,000.

- There are naysayers of Atlantis,

but there are people that read the description

and they go, "No, it's got to be real."

And the first place that they speculate as to the location

of this lost city of Atlantis is underwater.

[birds cawing]

- [Laurence] It's the year 1500

and as the Middle Ages draw to a close,

Europeans are venturing out and exploring the world.

- The age of discovery is an era of global exploration.

Columbus has already discovered the new world.

Magellan has already circumnavigated the globe.

The Portuguese have traveled all the way over

to what's now modern day Japan.

The Dutch East India Company had already made it all the way

down to the shores of New Zealand and Australia.

- As reports come back of new lands found

and new cultures encountered,

people have this voracious appetite

to learn more about all of these new lands

as they're being discovered.

- [Laurence] By the mid 1600s,

The fascination with undiscovered lands

brings Atlantis to the forefront.

- During this whole period of discovery,

people are engaging with these ideas,

reading about Atlantis

and wondering could that be any of the places

that are being discovered during all of these excursions?

- Enter a young Jesuit scholar by the name

of Athanasius Kircher.

He is well versed in multiple languages,

in physics, in history.

In the 1600s,

He is what is called like a renaissance man.

- He's also really interested in mapping.

He takes Plato's writings

and he also combines those with some ancient Egyptian texts.

He puts these sources together

and is able to draw what he thinks is the definitive map

of the land of Atlantis.

[pulsating inquisitive music]

[dramatic music]

- Athanasius Kircher puts Atlantis underwater

in the Atlantic Ocean

and for hundreds of years moving forward,

people take Kircher's map as fact

because he's got such an incredible reputation

as this amazing scholar.

- The map is very popular.

It's consistent with what Plato says.

There are things out there that they have yet to discover,

so it made sense that this is where Atlantis is.

- Kircher places the city of Atlantis near what

Plato called in his writings, the Pillars of Heracles.

To the ancient Greeks, the Pillars of Heracles mark

what they see as the edge of the known world.

Historians have tried to decipher where the Pillars

of Heracles actually are

and they believe that it actually is the Strait

of Gibraltar, which is this body of water

that connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.

[tense music]

- It seems, at first, kind of counterintuitive.

That's awfully far from Greece

and we don't know exactly where the Pillars

of Heracles were,

but this Strait of Gibraltar

with its very narrow passage would make sense

as being interpreted in the Greek context

as being the Pillars of Heracles.

- When people think of Atlantis, they think, "Okay,

it must be off the western coast of Europe and Africa,

somewhere beyond the Strait of Gibraltar

in the Atlantic Ocean."

That just becomes the default notion of where Atlantis is.

- One of the things that Kircher knows he's looking

for is the possibility of mountains.

Plato in his description of the landscape

of Atlantis talks about there being mountains

and, in fact, in the middle

of the Atlantic Ocean there is what's known

as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which is a series

of underwater mountains.

- Our entire planet is covered

by oceanic crust and continental crust.

If this happens to be an area that is tectonically active,

that will cause lots of geological movement of the land.

Some goes under, some gets lifted up to form mountains.

- There are a number of island chains, for example,

the Azores and the Canary Islands,

which are the topmost peaks of some

of these volcanic ranges.

[dramatic music]

- Thinking about this particular underwater mountain range,

it's possible that the volcanic activity

that's creating these mountains underwater could, in fact,

have played a role in not just the creation,

but also the destruction of Atlantis.

[volcano exploding]

- A volcano eruption is definitely known

to wipe out civilizations.

That could have lent itself to erasing evidence of Atlantis

from the surface.

[dramatic music]

- Kircher's map influenced a lot of people,

but it didn't influence everybody.

- Some experts who believe in Atlantis don't think that

we should be using Kircher's map as the end all answer.

They, in fact, think that Atlantis isn't underwater.

It's hiding in plain sight.

[birds cawing]

- [Laurence] For centuries,

many European explorers believe that the lost city

of Atlantis must be deep underwater.

But in 1839,

a discovery on land challenges that assumption.

- Archaeologists excavating on the island

of Malta find the remains of a temple believed

to be older than 5,000 years.

That would make it one of the oldest buildings

on the planet.

- This temple is so old

that the builders didn't even have metal tools

at the time to create it.

It's a marvel of engineering for ancient history.

- It has hugely large heavy rocks placed on top

of one another fitted together almost perfectly.

So this is evidence for a pretty advanced civilization.

[tense music]

- There's a Maltese architect by the name

of Giorgio Gronet de Vasse.

He's the one overseeing this dig

and he comes to a conclusion.

This has to be the lost city of Atlantis.

[dramatic music]

- Malta is a nation of five islands off the coast of Sicily

in the Mediterranean Sea.

The largest island is 17 miles long and nine miles wide.

That makes it one

of the most densely populated areas on planet earth.

- Scientists believe that there was more

to Malta than there is now,

and that part of that was wiped out by an earthquake

and a tsunami that followed soon after.

- This entire Maltese archipelago was only part

of a larger island chain that started gradually sinking

around 20,000 years ago

- To de Vasse,

the evidence suggests that this newly excavated temple

was a part of an advanced civilization that was living

in that time 2000 years before Plato writes about it.

This is not the 9,000 years

before Plato as he listed in his writings,

but it is still a considerable time

before him, so it is conceivable

that the story was actually passed down

to him as ancient history.

- So de Vasse is convinced

that these ancient structures on Malta indicate

that it is the legendary Atlantis

and he stakes his entire reputation on this.

He even gets inscriptions

that were found in these archaeological sites in Malta

that have the name Atlantis,

and so he thinks, "Here, this is my smoking gun evidence."

- There are lots of people

who did not in any way take him seriously,

but he goes to his grave still believing

that Malta is Atlantis.

[tense music]

- [Laurence] In the 1930s, 70 years after de Vasse's death,

some turned their attention

to another Mediterranean locale,

a place that's ground zero

for one of the most powerful natural disasters

in human history.

- A new candidate arises for Atlantis,

and that's the island of Thera, which is in the middle

of the Aegean Sea,

and we know that there was a massive volcanic eruption there

in either the late 1600s, BCE or into the middle 1500s BCE.

[volcano exploding]

- This volcanic explosion was so massive that it shot rock

and ash up into the air almost six miles,

and it was visible all the way from Egypt.

After the volcano explodes,

there is an entire ongoing series

of earthquakes, of tsunamis.

The island basically collapses in on itself.

- Now after the explosion is over,

the island of Thera will rebuild,

and today the island of Thera is still around,

but we now know it by another name, Santorini.

[tense music]

- In the 1930s, a Greek archaeologist by the name

of Spyridon Marinatos joins the search for Atlantis.

Marinatos is a top Greek archaeologist.

Probably his biggest claim to fame is that he found the site

of the ancient battle of Thermopylae,

probably best known from the movie "300."

[shields clattering]

- Marinatos is also interested in the Minoan world.

Now, the Minoans were a pre-Greek population

that lived on the islands of the Aegean,

based in Crete we think,

and even in some coastal settlements

on the mainland of Greece.

- The Minoans are a culture we don't really know a ton

about, but we do know that they were living

on the Greek island of Thera around the time

of the volcanic eruption.

- We also know that they were highly advanced

and there's some evidence

that they might have built structures in an effort

to be earthquake proof.

After that catastrophic eruption, the Minoans continued

to persist and thrive in other areas like Crete.

However, mysteriously they vanish.

There's no historical record or mention of them after that.

- Marinatos's theory is

that the eruption in 1600 was probably not the only eruption

that ever happened.

A whole series of volcanic eruptions,

of earthquakes and floods and tsunamis destroyed this area

little by little.

So if you put all these elements together about the Minoans,

this highly advanced civilization

destroyed by a volcano, by earthquake, floods,

it begins to sound an awful lot like Atlantis.

- When Marinatos takes a closer look at Thera's topography,

he's pretty certain that he's on the right track.

For starters, Thera is a series of

concentric circles alternating between land and water,

and in the center, you've got this caldera

that fills up with water

because that's where all the volcanic activity took place.

And then on the sides you've got these steep cliffs

that are surrounding it.

These steep cliffs could have possibly been those mountains

that Plato talked about in his writing.

- [Laurence] In 1967, Marinatos and other archaeologists

make a spectacular discovery on Santorini.

- They find the remains of a city buried under ash

for 3,500 years,

and it's an example of an advanced culture

with a city that had a harbor, fine works of art,

incredible buildings, and even indoor plumbing.

- Marinatos had to dig down through layers of ash

to find this incredible settlement,

which we call Akrotiri today,

and that volcanic eruption by dumping all that ash

on that settlement, it preserved it like a time capsule.

It is the Greek equivalent

of the famous Pompeii from the Roman world.

[dramatic music]

- Given what we know now, it's very likely

that a place like Santorini could be

the representation of Atlantis.

- In the 1970s, Jacques Cousteau,

the famed oceanographer and submarine explorer,

decides that he is going

to explore around Santorini.

He is going to see if he can find proof

that this is, in fact, Atlantis.

In the end, Cousteau does not find the conclusive proof

that he was looking for.

There's no temple of Poseidon,

but this doesn't stop the thinking

that this could still be Atlantis

or that it's at least out there somewhere.

[intriguing music]

- [Laurence] For centuries, explorers have been trying

to decipher clues in Plato's writings,

hoping to find the lost kingdom of Atlantis.

But while the theory of Santorini as the location

of Atlantis is explored,

other experts wonder

if they've been misunderstanding the text all along.

- Plato in his writings, describes Atlantis as an island,

but the word he uses in Greek, nesos,

doesn't just mean island.

It might refer to a peninsula.

- An island is a body of land

that is surrounded on all sides by water,

whereas a peninsula is only surrounded on three sides

and a peninsula is always attached

to a much larger landmass.

- Plato describes Atlantis as being an island

with a large flat area.

You don't usually find those on islands,

so it's much more believable

to find such a plain on a peninsula.

- [Laurence] In the 1920s, this idea captures the attention

of a German archaeologist named Adolf Schulten.

- Schulten is known for his work in Spain.

He's actually uncovered an ancient Celtic territory

or settlement known as Numantia,

so he knows Spain actually very well.

- He realizes, of course, that Spain,

all of it is a peninsula,

so it occurs to him, maybe this is the location of Atlantis.

[tense music]

- If you look at Spain on a map, you'll notice

that it's right there by the Strait of Gibraltar.

So if the Strait of Gibraltar actually is the Pillars

of Heracles, you have another geographical marker

that aligns with what Plato was saying.

- And this region has had plenty

of earthquakes and tsunamis,

which could have affected civilizations

for a very long time.

In fact, in 1954, there was an earthquake

that measured 7.8 on the Richter scale.

- Fortunately, that large earthquake

was mostly subterranean,

and so it didn't do a huge amount of damage,

but still there are shifting plates there.

So this could be a place

where you might expect to find Atlantis.

- In the 1920s, Schulten zeroes in

on a region known as Donana,

which is part of a national park,

and it's this swampy marshland south of the city of Seville.

There is some evidence of an ancient site,

but when they get to the site to start digging,

they run into a huge problem.

- The water table of Donana is very high,

so as they start to dig down,

pretty soon the water starts to seep up

and they have to abandon these attempts

to dig down any deeper.

- It's kind of like Mother Nature's way

of saying, "Whatever's buried here,

you're not going to find it."

[tense music]

- [Laurence] After Schulten's failed attempts,

Atlantis researchers largely ignore the southern tip

of Spain until the 1990s.

- Suddenly we have this new ability

to take photographs from satellites,

and that really changes how we understand this region

because satellite photography starts

to show us these long rectangular developments right

in this same area where Schulten was looking.

[mysterious music]

- So, a physicist from

the University of Dortmund in Germany,

he looks at these pictures and is really intrigued by them,

and he thinks that maybe these rectangular structures

could be the remains of the famed temple to Poseidon.

- He also believes that he sees some evidence

of perhaps circular structures that would seem

to fit Plato's dimensions of Atlantis.

[suspenseful music]

- [Laurence] In 2009, researchers set out to confirm

what these images seem to show with astonishing results.

- They use something called electrical resistivity

tomography or ERT as it's also known,

which can actually map beneath the surface

to see large structures.

And what they find is confirmation

that there are large structures there

and some of them have a ring-like shape.

- Following the discovery of that,

you have marine archaeologists that dive into the swamp,

and when they get down there,

they end up finding these stone structures

that look like walls.

Could these be the famed walls of Atlantis?

[mysterious music]

- One thing you would need to do is

to date these structures.

Do they fit with Plato's descriptions,

if not 9,000 years before his time,

at least sometime very far in the past?

- These ruins are dated

and they only date back to the first century CE,

thousands of years too late for Plato's description.

- Roman archaeologists are pretty familiar

with first century stone walls, so when they see it,

they know instantly that it dates from the Roman occupation

of Spain, but there are at least 20 other sites

in this area that could still be excavated,

and those are probably much, much older

than the first century walls of this particular site.

[waves crashing]

- Archaeologists have also been able to confirm

that this region probably was hit by natural disasters,

both an earthquake followed by a tsunami around 2000 BCE,

which is long before Plato.

So there are plenty of experts that firmly believe

that Atlantis is hiding in the marshes of southern Spain.

- For centuries, explorers have been searching

for the lost city

that Greek philosopher Plato called Atlantis.

They've traveled the globe

and studied the text endlessly searching

for overlooked clues.

But in the 1990s, a Swiss archaeologist proposes that

the key to the mystery might lie in the work

of another legendary Greek author

who lived 300 years before Plato.

His name is Homer.

[tense music]

- Homer is best known for "The Odyssey," his story,

which tells the voyages of the young hero Odysseus.

But there's another work that Homer is famous for

that he writes actually before "The Odyssey,"

and that's called "The Iliad."

And "The Iliad" tells of an epic battle between the Greeks

and the inhabitants of the city of Troy, the Trojan War.

- Homer's account of the Trojan War

concerns a massive Greek expedition

from the mainland of Greece to the city of Troy.

[doors creaking]

This is said to have taken place

some 400 years or so before Homer's time.

[swords clashing] [dramatic music]

- After the Greeks defeat Troy, the city is destroyed.

Now how it's destroyed, we're not entirely sure.

It might've been by fire, it might've been by earthquake.

That information is lost to us.

Archaeologists dream of finding this place,

but after years of searching,

many people believe that ultimately

maybe it just never existed at all.

[tense music]

- [Laurence] That changes in the late 19th century

when archaeologists zero in on a potential site

in western Turkey near the Aegean Sea.

- It so happens

that this site is already an archaeological legend.

The city is called Hisarlik,

and in 1871, archaeologists uncover

what is now believed to be the city of Troy.

- Over 100 years later in 1992,

Swiss archaeologist Eberhard Zangger makes a shocking claim

in his book, "Flood From Heaven."

He claims that Troy and Atlantis are one and the same.

[dramatic music]

[tense music]

Zangger's premise is that Atlantis is based on the city

of Troy and that Plato is

actually giving us a garbled description

of the city of Troy.

Are they in fact the same place?

- For Zangger, Troy turned out to be real.

If that's the case, Atlantis can be real given the fact that

these places were prosperous, wealthy, and powerful

and then were destroyed and disappear from history.

Perhaps it's the same story.

[dramatic music]

- So there are a number of things that Zangger uses

to make his case for this.

One, both Troy and Atlantis are said to be very windy.

They're also both said to have a lot of waterways,

but maybe more telling is that the King of Troy claims

to be a descendant of Atlas, an Atlantean,

which is basically the same word

that Plato uses to describe the people of Atlantis,

the Atlanteans.

Zangger uses satellite images of Troy

and the area surrounding it

and makes the argument that a lot

of things line up, the plains, the mountains,

the general shape of the city match up

with what Plato describes about Atlantis.

[dramatic music]

- [Laurence] According to Zangger,

there is also a major geographic feature of the region

that bolsters his case.

- Troy is located next to a major waterway,

which today is known as the Dardanelles,

which separates the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara

from the Aegean Sea.

Although not precisely,

the same as how Plato described Atlantis,

Zangger believes that he can find enough similarities

to equate the two.

- Plato writes that Atlantis is

near the Pillars of Heracles,

which has been presumed to be the Strait of Gibraltar.

Zangger claims, it's not Gibraltar,

but it's the Dardanelles Strait.

Today, the two sides

of the Strait have highly developed port towns,

but in ancient times, these sides

of the Strait would've been nothing

but just empty land filled with woods.

[tense music]

- Atlantis is clearly on an island

and Turkey is not an island.

So here you find another kind of creative translation

of the ancient Greek word nesos

that Zangger argues doesn't exactly mean island.

It really means any kind of a place that has a coastline.

So if you look at it like that, then Turkey would qualify.

- Zangger's theory is still pretty hotly debated.

There are people who insist, Plato made this up.

It is not a real place,

but there are people equally devoted to the idea

that Troy is Atlantis.

- Those who discount the Troy theory entirely

take their hunt to even more unexpected locations

like places that barely have any water at all.

[eerie music]

- [Laurence] It is a widely held belief that

if Atlantis is real,

it's somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.

But in 2008, new research turns that assumption on its head.

- In the mid 2000s,

Michael Hubner is a 40-year-old German software engineer,

but his true passion is trying to find

and locate the lost city of Atlantis.

- Hubner scours Plato's writings

for any geographical features associated

with Atlantis, the mountains, the plains,

the concentric islands, the water,

the temple in the center of it.

- In Hubner's analysis

of Plato's writings about the geographical features

of Atlantis, he comes up with 51 characteristics

of Atlantis that he puts into a computer program

and then applies to a map of the Mediterranean region

to see if there are any places

that match those 51 characteristics.

[keyboard typing]

- So Hubner basically lays out a grid

with these 400 little squares

and looks for which attributes each

of those squares might have

so that he can zero in on the places

that are most like Atlantis according to Plato.

- [Laurence] Months into his research,

Hubner's program reaches a shocking conclusion.

- One of the squares on his grid lights up as a place

that has a ton of these geographic features,

but it's in a place that you would never expect.

- The most likely candidate that his program comes up

with is right on the edge of the Sahara Desert,

a region called Souss-Massa outside of Marrakesh, Morocco.

- This place just looks way too dry to be Atlantis,

but Hubner insists that this is the place.

[dramatic music]

[intriguing music]

- Hubner believes that there was a great earthquake

in the North Atlantic

and a resulting tsunami that swept up the coast of Morocco

before sweeping back.

- It's not an island in the literal sense

that Hubner is talking about,

but the word nesos that Plato uses in his writing comes up.

And this time another interpretation is created.

- The word nesos can be expanded

beyond island into peninsula or into beach.

So Hubner takes an even more expansive definition

of that term and says it's any region that's bounded

by mountains or an ocean.

The region that Hubner is talking about,

Souss-Massa is surrounded by mountain ridges on two sides

and the Atlantic Ocean on one.

So he suggests this one region

of Morocco fits the bill as nesos.

- So Hubner plugs in these geographic features

into other locations, but none get as many hits

as the Souss-Massa region.

Case in point, he tries Santorini,

but the computer program tells 'em that there are only 23

of the 51 geographic features,

whereas Souss-Massa, 44 features pop up.

[mysterious music]

- [Laurence] Proponents of Hubner's theory say

his most convincing evidence comes

from his research on the ground.

- In 2012, Hubner goes out to this particular area

of Morocco and in the sands,

he actually finds kind of a bowl-shaped depression.

In the center of this bowl is a hill

and the remains of an ancient temple.

- One of the most unique descriptions of Atlantis that

comes to us from Plato is its organization as a series

of concentric circles

with the temple of Poseidon in the middle.

- He's absolutely convinced

that he has not just found Atlantis,

he has found the famed temple of Poseidon in the center.

- And sure enough, these rings that he identifies

in Souss-Massa are wadis,

which are ancient water gullies and valleys.

And so perhaps then they might be evidence

that at one time there was more water there

and you had the concentric rings

that Plato describes for Atlantis.

[tense music]

- Tragically before he's able to continue

or finish his research, Hubner dies in a bicycling accident,

but other scholars are continuing his work

and looking in the same place

and hoping to prove

that this Moroccan desert location

is the unexpected location of Atlantis.

- When it comes to unlikely locations

for where we should be looking for Atlantis,

there are people who say we should be digging not in sand,

but in ice.

[suspenseful music]

- [Laurence] The 2000-year-old search

for Atlantis takes another unexpected turn in 1949.

At Springfield College in western Massachusetts.

A class discussion piques the curiosity

of anthropology professor Charles Hapgood.

- Hapgood and his students are talking about the idea

of continental drift.

This theory that the different continents on our planet,

once they broke apart

from being a central unified mass,

drifted really slowly over time

to their current locations where we know them to be now.

- Hapgood tries to challenge those ideas

during this conversation.

He tells the students,

what if it's possible that some

of these land masses move much faster than we

actually think they did?

- Hapgood argues that the crust

of our planet can actually move freely over the core

and the mantle, and he suggests

that it can move fairly quickly even so far

as flipping the North and South Poles.

And he says that this is something

that may have happened innumerable times

over the last 100 thousand years.

- According to this theory,

at one point, Atlantis was in a warm climate,

but these massive land shifts cause another polar shift,

which causes the South Pole

to move closer and closer to this island.

As it gets closer, it starts to get colder.

Nothing can survive there anymore,

and Atlantis becomes known

as the continent of Antarctica.

[dramatic music]

- In 1953, Hapgood actually writes to one

of the most brilliant men in Western history,

Albert Einstein,

and he tells Einstein about his shift theory

and to his great surprise and delight,

Einstein writes him back

and he tells him that he finds his theories

actually really very convincing.

- Hapgood decides to put out his theories into a book

in 1958 entitled "Earth's Shifting Crust,"

and he even manages to get Albert Einstein

to write the foreword for his book.

- When Albert Einstein writes the introduction to your book,

that's a pretty strong endorsement

from one of the greatest minds of all time.

Suddenly, people are gonna take Hapgood seriously.

[tense music]

- Hapgood contends that these incredibly fast changes

in these land masses would lead

to these incredible natural disasters,

earthquakes, tsunamis, melting ice caps, mass extinctions,

anything that we would be looking

for would be buried underneath the ice.

That's why, he contends, we can't find Atlantis.

- From about 1960 on,

Hapgood's career takes kind of a weird twist.

He meets up with a psychic medium

by the name of Elwood Babbitt.

And Babbitt channels various historical figures

from antiquity, everybody from Jesus to Mark Twain,

and he records these

with Hapgood in a series of interviews.

[suspenseful music]

- This really casts a shadow

on Hapgood's scholarly credibility.

That this is the direction his career takes,

makes a lot of people look quite differently

at his earlier work,

despite the acclaim it may have at one time received

from Albert Einstein.

- [Laurence] But a 2012 book called

"Atlantis Beneath the Ice" researcher Rand Flem-Ath

revisits Hapgood's ideas about the lost kingdom.

- He goes ahead and takes these maps

of Antarctica from pre-9,600 BCE

and lines them up with maps from Athanasius Kircher

and makes an exciting discovery,

which is that the shapes found on both

of the maps are a near-perfect match,

proving that Atlantis is Antarctica.

[tense music]

- Some people will still hold that

as climate change continues

and the ice on Antarctica begins to melt,

once and for all, we will find the lost ruins of Atlantis

beneath the ice.

- The reason why people get excited about looking

for Atlantis is

because it really is the world's greatest unsolved mystery.

Did it exist, was it all made up?

And if somebody finds out whether that was true or not,

it's gonna be one

of the most amazing discoveries of all time.

[dramatic music]

- Perhaps Plato really was inventing the story of Atlantis

for literary effect,

and the details were just inspired by real places.

But the search is far from over.

Teams of investigators continue to hunt

for clues all over the world.

in Ireland, the mountains of Belize,

the waters of the Caribbean, and beyond,

all operating on the assumption

that Atlantis did exist.

Maybe someday one of them will dig up the temple

of Poseidon, and that's when we'll know the kingdom

of Atlantis was no myth at all.

I'm Laurence Fishburne.

Thank you for watching "History's Greatest Mysteries."

[tense music]