page_title: Location hypotheses of Atlantis
section_title: North Sea
hierarchical_section_title: Location hypotheses of Atlantis / Atlantic Ocean: North / North Sea
context_page_description: Location hypotheses of Atlantis are various proposed real-world settings for the fictional island of Atlantis, described as a lost civilization mentioned in Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias, written about 360 B.C. In these dialogues, a character named Critias claims that an island called Atlantis was swallowed by the sea about 9,200 years previously. According to the dialogues, this story was passed down to him through his grandfather, also named Critias, who heard it from his own father, Dropides, who had received it from Solon, the famous Athenian lawmaker, who heard the story from an Egyptian sanctuary. Plato's dialogues locate the island in the Atlantic Pelagos "Atlantic Sea", "in front of" the Pillars of Hercules and facing a district called modern Gades or Gadira, a location that some modern Atlantis researchers associate with modern Gibraltar; however various locations have been proposed.
context_section_description: The North Sea is known to contain lands that were once above water; the medieval town of Dunwich in East Anglia, for example, crumbled into the sea.  The land area known as "Doggerland", between England and Denmark, was inundated by a tsunami around 8200BP (6200BC), caused by a submarine landslide off the coast of Norway known as the Storegga Slide, and prehistoric human remains have been dredged up from the Dogger Bank.  Atlantis itself has been identified besides Heligoland off the north-west German coast by the author Jürgen Spanuth, who postulates that it was destroyed during the Bronze Age around 1200 BC, only to partially re-emerge during the Iron Age. Ulf Erlingsson hypothesized that the island that sank referred to Dogger Bank, and the city itself referred to the Silverpit crater at the base of Dogger Bank. A book allegedly by Oera Linda claims that a land called Atland once existed in the North Sea, but was destroyed in 2194 BC.
caption: Satellite image of the North Sea, which has also been suggested as the location of Atlantis
exif: {}