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Tales from a continental drifter

Nature volume 405, pages 16–17 (2000)Cite this article

The Eternal Darkness

  • Robert Ballard &
  • Will Hively
Princeton University Press: 2000. 388 pp.$29.95, £18.95

Matthew Maury, the founding father of oceanography, knew as early as 1850 that a ridge on the sea floor ran the length of the Atlantic Ocean, but it would be another century before its real significance was generally accepted. In his 1882 novel Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, Ignatius Donnelly identified the new ridge with Atlantis, Plato's lost, rich island submerged by an ‘earthquake’. Donnelly invoked antique literature, anthropology, linguistics, folklore, artefacts and architecture to propose an Atlantean cultural cradle for both Europe and Meso-America. He was taken seriously in his time, for my copy is the book's 24th edition.

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  1. Place de l'Eglise, Cajarc, 46160, France

    Alan Longhurst

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  1. Alan Longhurst
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Longhurst, A. Tales from a continental drifter. Nature 405, 16–17 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35011115

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