Discovery of Atlantis
Chapter 6 Excerpt

The destruction of the Gibraltar dam by earthquake created a disaster of epic proportions for the basin inhabitants, indeed, causing the world’s greatest waterfall. As Dr. Hsu puts it in his depiction of the Gibraltar disaster: “Cascading at a rate of 40,000 cubic kilometers per year, the Gibraltar Falls were 100 times bigger than Victoria Falls and a thousand times grander than Niagara.  Even with such an impressive influx, it took more than one hundred years to fill the empty Mediterranean.  What a spectacle it must have been!” Visualizing a waterfall one thousand times greater than the Niagara Falls certainly tests the limits of ones imagination. Like a faucet opening to fill a gigantic bathtub, the incredible torrent of water would have fallen about three miles (three times the depth of the Grand Canyon) and crashed onto the basin before speeding toward the eastern Mediterranean region, traveling at such speeds that anything on its path would have been obliterated.

The final weeks of the Glomar Challenger expedition left little ambiguity concerning the implications of the research. There had been an “instantaneous flooding” of a colossal nature that had changed the Mediterranean “from dry salt lake bed to a mile-deep abyss.” Is it any wonder that the legend of the great flood is “common to Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Egyptians, the city states of Asia Minor, Greece and Italy, and others around the Mediterranean…”?

So, we know that the Mediterranean was once a vast basin spotted with lakes and lagoons, and that it contained towering plateaus reaching many thousands of feet into the air.  We also know that the basin was literally filled in by the greatest flood in human history. This means that Plato’s description of the natural disasters that destroyed Atlantis may well have been based on factual events. The new scientific discoveries about the natural history of the Mediterranean directly corroborate the disasters depicted in Timaeus and Critias.