Original subtitles

NARRATOR: 3 and 1/2 1,000 years ago,

the biggest volcanic eruption in recorded history rocked

the planet.

In the heart of the Mediterranean,

a peaceful island exploded with devastating force.

At a stroke, an entire civilization

was wiped from the face of the Earth.

Then at the dawn of the 20th century,

the remains of a spectacular palace

were discovered on the island of Crete.

On a neighboring Greek island, a town

was unearthed, preserved beneath thousands

of tons of volcanic ash.

Teams of investigators are examining every fragment

from these mysterious sites to decipher their hidden secrets.

And out of the physical clues lifted from the ash,

a radical theory has emerged.

These ruins could be the home of an ancient civilization,

Atlantis.

Using cutting edge visual technology,

we rebuild the incredible towns, temples, and palaces.

We reveal the majesty and the mystery of this lost world.

Every search for Atlantis begins with the writings

of the great Greek philosopher, Plato.

Plato was essentially the father of Western philosophy.

And because what he had to say was so important

and has remained important throughout the history

of Western thought, it became much more acceptable, much

more respectable if you will, than if someone else

had written it.

NARRATOR: In one of the most intriguing of his writings,

Plato describes a remarkable Utopian society.

Rich and wealth and knowledge, their skills

as builders and engineers were advanced beyond imagining.

But he says, the peace of this land was suddenly torn apart.

Legend has it that the entire civilization was wiped out

in a single day and night, engulfed by the ocean

and lost to the world for thousands of years.

No other mystery on Earth has sparked such obsession

or given rise to so many extraordinary theories.

On the Mediterranean island of Crete,

a discovery was made in early 1900 that

would add a new chapter in the search for Atlantis.

An archaeologist named Arthur Evans, a real life Indiana

Jones, arrived on Crete.

He was searching for the treasures of the ancient world.

Evans was looking for something very specific.

He was looking for the first European culture,

but he was also looking for the roots to Greek mythology.

NARRATOR: Evans began his search in a hilltop settlement called

Knossos.

He soon found something that was beyond his wildest dreams.

In the very first trench he dug, Evans unearthed

a magnificent stone throne.

It was the heart of a spectacular palace complex.

Covering an area the size of four football fields

and containing 10 times as many rooms as Washington's White

House, the dig exposed construction

on a massive scale.

What he found was beyond all expectations

of anyone at the time.

And essentially, he defined the civilization around it,

which he called the Minoan civilization.

The name Evans Chose came from a figure in ancient Greek myth

called King Minos.

Minos was said to live in a great palace

at the center of which he had imprisoned a terrible monster,

half man, half bull.

It was called the Minotaur.

Sir Arthur Evans thought that he had found the palace of King

Minos, they probably had nothing to do with King Minos.

But on the other hand, it seemed like a good label

and it has stuck.

NARRATOR: Today, a groundbreaking new theory

has emerged as to the origin of this lost world.

It's entirely possible that something like the Atlantis

myth comes out of here, and it's passed on for centuries

and grew into some kind of grand importance.

So there is this theory that the Minoans were

in fact the early Atlanteans.

NARRATOR: It is the sophistication of the palace

on Crete that is the first linked to the idea of Atlantis.

The builders of this remarkable structure

had achieved a level of engineering excellence

that would not be seen anywhere else

in the world for centuries.

It is littered with artifacts dating back over 3 and 1/2

1,000 years.

The remains of hundreds of decorative pots

and beautiful wall paintings are being discovered.

As investigators piece together the fragments

of this ancient art, they are discovering

sophisticated images of the people

and the lives of a lost civilization.

People were extremely interested

because this was going back beyond the boundaries

of classical studies and classical archaeology

into something entirely new, which had not really

been envisaged before.

NARRATOR: The buildings here are older than anything previously

discovered on the island.

And they are infinitely more advanced.

Teams of experts are now searching for the clues that

relate this complex architecture to Plato's story of Atlantis.

Colin McDonald has scoured every inch of the palace

above and below ground to expose every technological

achievement.

And beneath the surface, he has discovered one of the site's

most advanced features.

Down beneath all of this, there

is the most remarkable water system

both for the drainage of water and for the water

supply itself.

NARRATOR: Astoundingly, this sophisticated network of pipes

predates the plumbing of the great Greek and Roman empires

by over 1,000 years.

These terracotta or clay water pipes

made up of 1 meter sections the one tapering into the other.

They took water to lots of different parts of the palace,

and equally impressive systems were used actually

to get water out of the palace for the drainage system itself.

NARRATOR: A vast subterranean network carried wastewater away

from the palace.

Using the details of Colin's survey,

we can now see how the drains circled through the palace's

royal quarter.

We're right in the middle of the main drainage

system of the palace here on the East side.

It's stone built on either side about a meter high here.

In times of torrential rain, huge quantities of water

could be dealt with by this drainage system.

NARRATOR: A similarly sophisticated water management

system is described in Plato's stories.

He wrote of a palace where water was plentiful.

Collected from the surrounding hills,

it was in abundant supply throughout the city

just as it was here at Kenosis.

What's more, at the Palace of Kenosis

the engineering above ground is every bit as sophisticated

as that which Plato describes.

The palace contained 1,300 rooms spread over for floors

all interconnected by miles of passageways.

It was centuries ahead of anything seen from the same era

on mainland Greece.

What we have on the Greek mainland in the period

of the palaces was nothing more complicated really than maximum

three or four room, single story mud brick structures.

There's no grand architecture on the scale

that we see in Creten palaces.

NARRATOR: Plato describes the palace of Atlantis

as an Acropolis sitting atop a Great Hill.

At Kenosis, we find just that.

Construction must have involved huge earth moving operations.

The entire hilltop was flattened,

and terraces were carved so that the palace could

be built on multiple levels.

The large foundation blocks of the palace walls

were constructed of crystalline stone called gypsum.

It was quarried locally and then cut into massive blocks

with bronze swords.

We're right in the middle of a large Quarry

used for quarrying the gypsum that

was used in the construction of the first palace at Kenosis.

Here one can see very, very clearly the tool mark

of the bronze object which sliced away an enormous part

of the face, and the resulting block which would have fallen

down but then either have been worked here

or moved the 800 meters or so over to the palace itself.

NARRATOR: In the Atlantis myth, the external walls

of the great palaces were said to shine like silver.

Today the gypsum walls of Kenosis

have been eroded by the elements,

but in their full glory they too would have sparkled.

You can almost imagine what it felt like for a Greek coming

ashore in Crete and seeing something like the glimmering

gypsum palace at Kenosis, this giant shiny structure

glistening in the sun from all this crystalline gypsum

and on a scale like they couldn't have even possibly

imagined at that time.

NARRATOR: A vast royal residence,

a place of worship and ceremony at the center

of an advanced and wealthy civilization.

Using their latest evidence, our team

apply state of the art imaging techniques

to rebuild this prehistoric palace.

We can now see the structure as it would once have stood here

supported by huge Redwood pillars.

Many believe this was Atlantis.

Now our investigators are going deeper to the very fabric

of this extraordinary palace in search of the vital clues that

might provide proof.

What they find is evidence of the cause of the destruction

of this lost world.

In the heart of the Mediterranean Sea on the island

of Crete, a remarkably sophisticated palace

has been unearthed, and the find has reignited the search

for the most famous of all lost worlds.

With its massive scale, its complex water management

systems, and its sparkling gypsum walls,

the engineering of this extraordinary palace

ties it closely to Plato's descriptions of Atlantis.

Hidden deep in the fabric of this amazing place,

there are even more compelling links.

Plato wrote of Atlantis that it was a complex society that

lived a Utopian existence, its people in harmony

with nature and their fellow man.

That same harmony can be seen here in the order and symmetry

of the building's engineering in the way it makes use

of the natural flow of the elements,

the palace engineers were masters at controlling the path

of air and light through the depths of the palace corridors.

They devised systems that appear advanced even today,

even though they are almost 4,000 years old.

Internal rooms were divided with an ingenious system known

as peer and door partitioning.

Rows of pillars were linked by discreet wooden shutters which

could be controlled independently of each other.

They could be set to block the path of a cold wind

or channel a breeze to the palace innermost room.

At the very heart of the palace is the central court providing

light and air to all areas of the complex.

To the East is the royal corridor,

a multistory structure to rival anything described in Plato's

accounts of Atlantis.

At its heart, a huge four story spiraling staircase

was built around pillared balconies open to the elements

to form a vast like well.

This impressive structure was really

one of the great achievements of my own engineering.

And in the middle of the staircase

is this marvelous rectangular light well,

which allows the natural sunlight to diffuse all the way

down to the bottom and then outwards into all the rooms

which would otherwise have been very gloomy indeed.

NARRATOR: This awesome technology

and the sophisticated culture that

created it appear to have thrived in the Mediterranean

for centuries, but then they simply disappeared.

Just as in the story of Atlantis,

it seems this entire civilization was wiped

from the face of the Earth in a sudden and violent catastrophe.

The first clues to what might have happened

lie in the sea that surrounds the island.

The whole of the Mediterranean is divided

into two tectonic plates with Europe on one side and Africa

on the other.

These two colossal land masses collide and periodically

the energy of these collisions is released in earthquakes.

The archaeological evidence for earthquakes

is very difficult to detect here partly because

of course they rebuilt and repaired immediately

afterwards.

There is one instance however on the South side

in the so-called house of the fallen blocks.

It seems that at the end of the first palus period,

there was a huge earthquake, and these enormous blocks

were thrown several meters to the South.

And there they remained today as evidence

of this enormous earthquake.

NARRATOR: Our experts have discovered that the palace

engineers devised new and innovative techniques to create

structures that would withstand the destructive force

of these violent quakes.

Simply put, today our team are keen to learn

from the experience of the palace engineers

and they study closely the anti seismic techniques deployed

at Kenosis.

In order to make their tall, skinny wall

stand up it's quite probable that the first thing they did

was to buttress them up rather like this.

So if I pretend to be an earthquake

and shake this table here, well, as we can see buttressing

on its own doesn't do the job.

NARRATOR: In the final phase of building at the palace,

walls were constructed of stone and supported

by an ingenious system of wooden frames.

This combination of materials gave the structure

both enormous strength and flexibility.

So what the people of Kenosis did

was to use timber framing to reinforce their thin masonry

walls and support the framed up pool of big heavy walls

buttressing like this.

And if I pretend to be an earthquake machine again

and give it a good old shake, we can rapidly

see I could be shaking that all day long,

and this wall is going precisely nowhere.

NARRATOR: Despite these incredible engineering

achievements, nothing was going to save the palace

from the devastating cataclysm to come.

Seismologists that have been studying the geological history

of the area now believe that Crete suffered

a cataclysmic event around 1,500 BC.

This new evidence shows that Crete was struck

by a massive and deadly wave.

Dozens of tsunami swept across entire Asian, tsunami, tsunami,

tsunami, trains of these waves.

NARRATOR: On the Mediterranean island of Crete,

archaeologists have discovered the remains

of an ancient palace.

These stunning buildings are the first trace of a culture that

has been missing for 3 and 1/2 thousand years,

and many believe that the palace was at the heart of the most

famous of all lost worlds, the civilization of Atlantis.

Just like Atlantis, the palace of Kenosis

and the island of Crete were devastated

in a cataclysmic event.

In search of the source of this destruction,

experts have focused on a volcanic island 100 miles North

of Crete.

It was known in ancient times as Thera.

Today it is Santorini.

Vulcanologist Floyd McCoy has made it his life's work

to decipher the geological clues and piece together the island's

destructive history.

This volcano has an amazing history of repeated giant

explosions.

With every explosion, this hole in the ground,

which we call a caldera is be excavated repeatedly.

And every time it blows itself apart, It

leaves a deposit on the landscape and layer by layer

it built itself up.

And so what we see over there are the layers

of these repeated explosive eruptions through tens

of thousands of years.

NARRATOR: At the center of Santorini inside the cliffs

of the main island is Neya khamenei, the new furnace.

It is a barren and hostile island piqued by the crater

of an active volcano.

Floyd McCoy has discovered that there was once an island right

at the center of the caldera.

It was swallowed up by a terrible volcanic eruption.

Occupying this large caldera then

was this large, large island that civilization lived on.

It's gone.

The island was blasted to bits.

NARRATOR: Plato wrote of a devastating cataclysm that

destroyed the great civilization of Atlantis.

And Santorini, the closest neighbor to Crete

and the palace of Kenosis was the location of one

of the biggest explosions in recorded history.

Researchers have developed a new theory that Santorini and Crete

were both a part of Atlantis.

The theory has its basis in the dramatic color of these cliffs.

Plato described queries in Atlantis

where rocks of white, black, and red

were extracted from the hills.

The rock was then used in the construction of a great Island

city.

The description matches the rocks found here in Santorini.

This Island City was described as being laid out

in a series of concentric circles of land and water,

each one connected to the ocean by an immense canal 100 feet

deep.

There were also docks for huge numbers of ships and a causeway

over which they could offload the riches whatever that were

coming into Atlantis.

In other words, everything that human beings could need

was available in Atlantis itself.

NARRATOR: Plato's description of the island as circular relates

perfectly to the symmetrical formation

of the central volcanic island on Santorini.

But to prove a link is impossible without proof

of life on the island before its last big eruption.

Then in the early 1900s during excavations in a quarry here,

a fantastic discovery was made.

That layer, that white layer on top of the cliffs

is it deposit left from the catastrophic eruption

in the bronze age.

And it was digging there that they found a house site.

Another case found a burial.

They realized this eruption had buried a civilization a culture

lived there.

The story then of that ancient civilization

starts there with that layer of white ash.

NARRATOR: These volcanic deposits

which still cover the entire island fell

in the course of a single cataclysmic eruption.

Now our experts are stripping back the ash layer by layer

to expose evidence of the lost world that lies beneath.

Here it is.

This is a level of man lived on right here.

Here in fact is what appears to be a remnant of a wall built

by man on top.

And then the eruption came, the big blast started

and all of this was deposited.

This is pumice, and the pumice piled up very rapidly,

and then the eruption continued for days

of a massive accumulation of all of this material all up here.

30, 50, 60, 80 feet of this material piling up and then

way up at the top the debris flows, the mud flows

have scoured the surface.

All of this when the giant eruptions in human history.

NARRATOR: The first signs of life

from before this big eruption had been found

and the search was on to reveal proof of a culture that would

link the island to the great civilizations of Crete

and Atlantis.

The answer was unearthed in 1966 by an American archaeologist

named James Mavor Jr. Mavor assembled a team

to search the islands for signs of ancient artifacts.

They began their dig on the Southern tip of the island

in the tiny village of Akrotiri.

In their very first trench, they struck gold.

They unearthed an ancient wall buried

under 30 feet of volcanic rock.

As they dug deeper, the wall became a house and the trench

revealed a cobbled street.

At their very first attempt, Mavor's team

had discovered an extraordinary town perfectly preserved

in the ash of a volcanic eruption.

We are talking about a brilliant culture,

brilliant civilization with a very advanced technology

in all ways, and especially building technology.

The discovery was hailed as one of the most important finds

in classical archaeology.

The town remained substantially intact.

Just like the city of Pompeii in Italy,

volcanic ash had filled the city and sealed it

from the elements.

Its contents had been preserved for more than 30 centuries.

The huge task of uncovering the town continues today.

With every inch of ash that is removed,

new clues to the civilization that was here are revealed.

And just as described in the legend of Atlantis,

we see engineering skills that were sophisticated way

beyond their time.

When I first came to our Akotiri,

I was expecting something rather simple.

But then I realized that this town was made

of multi-storey buildings, and well, we

are talking about multi storey you are talking about two

and three story buildings.

And at some point, I realized that I was walking

on the third floor of a building that had been constructed 3,500

years ago.

That was really extremely impressive.

NARRATOR: Akrotiri is a truly extraordinary find.

It is a city arranged with a structured assembly

of interconnecting roads and paths,

the earliest form of organized town planning ever discovered.

And centuries, more advanced than anything

that has ever been seen before from this period.

Archaeologists have mapped every inch of the town,

and from their data our team have built computer generated

models.

You are now traveling down the streets

and interacting with the buildings

of a sophisticated community that

was destroyed at the height of its power thousands of years

ago.

Just as we have seen in the palace of Kenosis, at Akrotiri

there are complex multistory buildings

constructed of wood and stone.

And the plumbing was even more elaborate.

Fresh running water fed each house,

and a sewage system ran throughout the entire town.

There is a perfect sewage system

running under the streets.

And these are connected to lavatories on the upper floors

of the buildings.

NARRATOR: Not for at least 1,000 years would

it become commonplace to find bathrooms inside people's

homes.

The discovery of this lavatory as you can imagine

is truly very important.

If you just stop to think, I mean that it again.

I mean it took ages, hundreds of years

to have lavatories within a house.

NARRATOR: It was not just the discovery of a toilet that

so amazed the engineers, but also its ingenious design.

The waste fell through a clay pipe to a chamber

below where water from the town drains

flushed it into a cesspit.

The pipes interconnected in such a way

that a siphon effect was formed, drawing foul

smells down the pipes and away from the lavatory.

The design was centuries ahead of its time.

This sophisticated system of water management

matches up to the stories of Atlantis in which Plato wrote

of ancient towns equipped with hot and cold running water.

But there was one crucial discovery at Akrotiri

that lent new credibility to the idea

that Santorini was the island at the center of Atlantis.

A Fresco was unearthed that revealed an image of life

on the island 3 and 1/2 1,000 years ago.

Can we be so lucky as to have a snapshot of what

this landscape looked like?

Here is the peninsula, Akrotiri peninsula.

It shows a profile of the island one, two, three peaks.

Going down further, we see a waterway

that surrounds a central island, a fairly large island.

And on that island, a city.

They were living on the central island.

That central island was a developing volcano.

NARRATOR: This idea of a central island port and circled

with layer upon layer of buildings

fits perfectly Plato's description of the Island City

of Atlantis, a city that at the height of its power

was blown to bits in a devastating eruption.

Seismologists are now following a trail

of clues that lead from Santorini back

to the palaces of Crete.

They will reveal the full extent of the horrific disaster that

tore Santorini apart and led to the destruction

of an entire civilization.

In the heart of the Mediterranean,

a lost world has been discovered, a palace on Crete,

and a town on Santorini linked by the unique engineering

of their buildings.

Archaeologists have opened a window

on a highly advanced culture known today as the Minoans.

They thrived 3,500 years ago, and many now

believe that what they left behind

gave rise to the myth of Atlantis.

Since the discovery of the palace at Kenosis in 1900,

archaeologists have expanded their search.

Today, a network of ancient towns and palaces

has been revealed across the length and breadth of Crete.

What all these sites have in common

is that they were destroyed in the middle

of the second Millennium BC by a series of terrible disasters.

According to the Greek philosopher Plato,

Atlantis too was destroyed in a single day and night.

The land was swallowed by the sea.

100 miles North of Crete on Santorini,

Floyd McCoy has been gathering data

to determine if the magnitude of the eruption that happened here

in 1,500 BC was enough to cause the devastation of Crete.

What he has discovered is beyond all expectations.

So how big was this eruption?

It was huge.

How do we determine this is by how much material is blown out

during the eruption, and the more we look,

the more find there are huge thick deposits

of this ash and pumice on the seafloor that surround

this island.

It's been found down to the Nile Delta,

it's been found up in the Black Sea.

When we take all of this material

and calculate the volume of it, we

come out with an eruption that is perhaps 10 times Krakatoa

in 1883.

NARRATOR: Because Krakatoa exploded

in the late 19th century, we have comprehensive records

of the eruption, and the details are spine chilling.

The eruption ejected more than six cubic miles

of rock ash and pumice into the atmosphere,

killing 36,400 people.

But it would have been dwarfed by the Santorini eruption.

It was enormous, and it occurred right in the middle

of a flourishing civilization.

Now things got nasty.

In this eruption, things got terribly violent.

And the mixture of water with this magma

produced what we call pyroclastic surges and flows.

As they swept across the landscape,

they destroyed everything that had not

been buried in this palace.

NARRATOR: At the heart of this civilization in Akrotiri,

archaeologists have found signs that the residents were

preparing to leave.

Belongings were piled up outside houses,

and beds were found pulled out into the streets.

Sadly for the few who took to the sea to head for Crete

and the shelter of the palaces of Kenosis,

escape was no guarantee of survival

because the settlements of Crete would be devastated not

by the ash and pumice that was raining down on Santorini,

but by the next even more devastating phase

of the eruption.

Every pyroclastic flow that entered the ocean also

pushed the ocean aside.

We pushed the ocean aside tsunami.

NARRATOR: Our investigators have turned to the experts

at the National observatory in Athens

for proof of what happened.

Using the very latest Investigative techniques,

they have discovered evidence of a killer tsunami.

Because of this new field of science,

we have been able to discover a number of about

10 distinct tsunami events.

So there's no doubt today that this very big tsunami event

really existed and possibly contributed

to the collapse of the Minoan civilization.

Dozens of tsunamis swept across the entire Aegean.

They made their way into the Mediterranean.

NARRATOR: These massive waves surge

towards the unprotected North coast of Crete.

First in the firing line was the coastal town of Mallea.

Just yards from the seashore stood a magnificent palace,

its sophisticated structures engineered

with the same complex layout as the palace at Kenosis.

The three story facade facing North

was directly in the path of the approaching waves.

The inhabitants of the region probably

gathered here at the palace because they

saw this great plume of ash shooting up into the sky

off to the North.

It would have been visible all the way down to the Nile Delta.

NARRATOR: When the ash cloud reached the island,

the sky above this ancient Minoan palace turned gray.

During excavations on Crete, Alexander McGilvray

discovered this volcanic ash in the deepest parts

of the palace's ruins.

It's a clue to the catastrophic sequence of events that

overtook this society.

When the first wave came pushing ashore bringing with it

their fleet from fishing boats to great trading ships

would have all come crashing through here

and gone all the way to the foot of the mountains

over there, ripping away at this architecture rubble, and trees,

and smashed up ships come crashing back through here

and over back into the sea.

NARRATOR: This scene of destruction

was repeated all along the coast of Crete and far beyond.

Not even the brilliant builders of the great reinforced walls

at the Palace of Kenosis could have

foreseen the power of the tremors that accompanied

these waves.

They rocked the island.

Massive earthquakes caused by the volcano

shook the palace to its foundations.

The devastation of this ancient civilization was complete.

Today long after the destruction that struck the Mediterranean,

the search for the links that bind these places to the story

of Atlantis has taken a new turn.

The final extraordinary clue leads East to the ancient land

of Egypt.

For the survivors of the largest volcanic eruption in history,

life in the Mediterranean became hell on Earth.

Thousands were dead.

Tsunamis had poisoned the land with salt water,

and the air was thick with ash and noxious gases.

Just as Plato wrote when he described the end of Atlantis,

the island of Santorini at the center of this newly discovered

world had been destroyed.

It had been blown to smithereens then swallowed by the sea.

And 100 miles away, the great palaces of Crete

had been devastated by quakes and engulfed

by terrible tidal waves.

In their search for evidence of the survivors

of this devastating cataclysm, our investigators

are piecing together the final chapter

in the life of this extraordinary civilization.

When the tsunami swept through here and reduced this building

behind me to foundation level, the best way for the survivors

to cope was to go to the most powerful nation.

And the wealthiest nation of the time to ask for help.

NARRATOR: Alexander McGilvray believes that the survivors

turned to their long term trading

partners, the Egyptians.

They may have been people brought in from elsewhere

to help with all of this with the pharaoh in Egypt

contributing the wealth and perhaps the manpower.

NARRATOR: This close relationship with Egypt

is probably the single most important link that researchers

have established between this newly discovered civilization

and the stories of Atlantis.

Because the origin of the story of Atlantis was not Greek,

it was Egyptian.

In 590 BC in the holiest shrine of Egypt's capital,

the great Greek statesman Solon was shown ancient inscriptions.

They date back to almost 1,000 years before, 1450 BC.

These documents told of the existence of a civilization

of great power and prestige, ruler of all the lands

to the West of Egypt.

When Solon returned to his homeland, the story of Atlantis

became part of Greek folklore, a tale told at parties

and passed down through the generations

until in 370 BC Plato penned his version of this Egyptian tale.

Now on the wall of an Egyptian tomb,

researchers have discovered inscriptions

that they believe are the original texts that were shown

to Solon.

It turns out that Solon must have invented the name Atlantis

because the Egyptians called the people of this ancient world

by another name.

That name was Keftiu and Keftiu is the Egyptian name

for the people of Crete, the very island at the heart

of this lost world.

So what happened to the survivors

from this remarkable civilization?

There are signs on Crete that the Keftiu

did begin to recover after the effects

of the catastrophic volcano.

But the survivors were dangerously vulnerable

and soon after the catastrophe warriors

from the Greek mainland invaded Crete.

The Minoans did not have the strength or the numbers

to repel the invaders and the island fell.

This finally spelled the end of one of the greatest

civilizations in human history.

The sophisticated engineering techniques

and the extraordinary architecture

that gave them their unique identity disappeared forever.

The Greeks went on to dominate the entire Western world.

They gave birth to a culture on which Western societies are

based, but things could have been so different.

If it weren't for the tsunami and the fear and eruption,

we would probably be reading Plato in Minoan.

The Minoans would have continued to expand their empire

onto the Greek mainland.

The White House would probably look more

like the palace source than classical Greek architecture.

NARRATOR: There are still many questions

to be answered that could shed light

on the links between the great palaces, towns,

and temples of Crete and Santorini,

and the mysterious legends of the Egyptians Keftiu

and Plato's Atlantis.

On Santorini, vast areas wait to be excavated

and the ocean bed remains largely unexplored.

But time may be running out.

At the heart of the caldera beneath the towering cliffs

of the modern day Santorini is the Nia khomeini

or new furnace.

It is the site of the present volcano,

and it is still very much alive.

When the volcano collapsed after the eruption 3,500 years ago,

it left behind a hole in the ocean 1,000 feet deep.

Since that time, the volcano has been growing again, pushing

back up through the ocean.

Today it rises 400 feet above sea level,

back almost to the size that it was when

it erupted 35 centuries ago.

Seismologists believe that it will erupt again.

The question is when?

When that next big blast comes, the best we can do

is hope that we can predict it and get away.

If we don't, if we stay here for that next big explosion,

we'll be a piece of the volcanic ash deposit.

NARRATOR: When the volcano does blow,

it will engulf the surrounding islands again, freezing life

in a moment of time, burying it under a new layer

of volcanic ash.

A new lost world will be created.