Yet if there was a ‘lost civilisation’ (regardless of its connection with or not to the Atlantis legend) it would have had to have had a home, and any identified location would have to provide supporting evidence that a civilisation actually did live there, for, as Egyptologist Mark Lehner rightly points out, without evidence of remains, it would be safer to conclude that that there was no former civilisation, and the purported clues to its existence would have to be explained in some other way.
There is certainly some evidence to support Thera, an island near Crete in the Mediterranean, being the location of an early civilisation. Professor Marinatos, under the auspices of the Archaeological Society at Athens, began a systematic excavation of a town on the island, Akrotiri in 1967, after evidence of early habitation had been discovered there in the second half of the 19th century.
However, it appeared that the town’s life came to an abrupt end in the last quarter of the 17th century BCE when the inhabitants were forced to abandon their homes as a result of severe earthquakes. An eruption of the island-volcano Thera followed, with volcanic materials covering the entire island and the town itself, preserving the buildings (above) and their contents forming an intriguing time capsule just like as at Pompeii.
A ceramic disc (right) had been found at Phaistos on Crete which was around 3700 years old, however made from a clay not indigenous to the island, indicating that Crete had certainly been visited by that time. Indeed, other evidence suggests that the island was in fact occupied at least by 6000BCE; indicating the existence of a sea faring people who had boats that could be rowed out into open sea.
These events appear to fit the story handed down by Plato of the island paradise, Atlantis. Indeed the volcano at Thera erupted exactly 900 years before Solon received the original story of Atlantis from Egyptian priests leading to some concluding that Plato might have got his figures wrong; he should have referred to Atlantis being destroyed 900 years previously, not 9000 years. There were other indications that Crete could have been the legendary Atlantis. Crete was well known to the Egyptians as ‘Keftui’, a land that was "the way to other islands and the continent beyond" exactly as Plato described Atlantis. Not so, retorted Dr. Jurgen Spanuth, who was familiar with Plato’s account of Atlantis. "Neither Thera nor Crete lies in the Atlantic … Neither island lies at the mouth of a great river, neither was swallowed up by the sea and vanished … in fact this great breakthrough in archaeology is a bubble that burst long ago."
He attempted to prove his theory in his 1976 book ‘Atlantis of the North’ but, of course, could not. History advises us of other submerged archaeological remains in the European area. Pliny the Elder and Strabo make reference to the Etruscan city of Spina in the Adriatic, which was once a thriving metropolis of trade and culture, but now completely submerged. Similarly, Dioscuria, an ancient Greek port of considerable size is now beneath the surface of the Black Sea. (1)
The first person to make such a proposal was Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901). Donnelly (right) was a respected statesman, who served in the US Congress from 1863 to 1869 and wrote several works, including a treatise on ‘Atlantis, the Antediluvian World’. In that work he stated: "Deep sea soundings have been made by ships of
different nations; the United States ship Dolphin, the German frigate
Gazelle, and the British ships Hydra, Porcupine and
Challenger have mapped out the bottom of the Atlantic [Challenger map
below], and the result is the revelation of a great elevation, reaching from a
point on the coast of the British Islands southwardly to the coast of South
America, at Cape Orange, thence south-eastwardly to the coast of Africa and
thence southwardly to Tristan d’Acunha. … The submerged land … rises about 9000
feet above the great Atlantic depths around it, and in the Azores, St. Paul’s
Rocks, Ascension, and Tristan d’Acunha it reaches the surface of the ocean."
(3).
"Evidence that this elevation was once dry land is found in the fact that the ‘inequalities, the mountains and valley’s of its surface, could never have been produced in accordance with any laws for the deposition of sediment, nor by submarine elevation; but, on the contrary, must have been carved by agencies acting above the water level." (4) Donnelly concluded that the area was the probable location of the missing Atlantis. The then British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, was so impressed with Donnelly’s finding’s that he sent a letter of appreciation on publication of the book, and even went so far as to request that the British Parliament approve the use of the Royal Navy to search the area for evidence of the lost civilisation. Unfortunately for Donnelly, the fleet was engaged elsewhere at the time and so the search never took place. (Unfortunately for Shakespeare, Donnelly also became famous for discovering a cipher in the bard’s work suggesting that he had not written all that he was credited for, and that Francis Bacon was the true author of some of the texts.)
Volcanic activity cannot just make living conditions untenable, but is also known to have a significant impact on the land and seascape. For example, in 1808 a volcano rose in San Jorge to a height of several thousand feet, and in 1811 a volcanic outpouring created a large island which was called Sambrina during its short above-water existence before it sank again beneath the sea. The Azore islands of Corvo and Flores have also constantly changed shape over the centuries, with large parts of Corvo presently under the sea (5). More recently, on 14th November 1963, the skipper of a fishing boat off the south coast of Iceland radioed his base to report a large cloud of black smoke rising from the sea. He and his crew went on to watch as a huge explosion sent rocks hurtling into the sky, before a black land form emerged from the ocean depths. Within twenty-four hours the new island was higher than a house, and within a week its peak was 200ft above sea level.
But for a civilisation, there would not only have to be land but lost artefacts discovered on that land, and, again there is some evidence that such artefacts have been found.
Robson advised the reporters who examined his finds that he intended to donate them to the British Museum, however at that point verification of these claims becomes difficult for the log of the SS Jesmond along with the offices of the ship’s owners, ‘Watts, Watts and Company’ was destroyed during the London blitz of September 1940. The British Museum now has no record of any such donation from Robson (7). Despite this lack of corroboration, there is other supporting evidence of Robson’s discoveries. The unfortunately named Captain James Newdick of the steam ship Westbourne was sailing from Marseilles to New York during the same period when it reported sighting a large uncharted island in the area where Robson had landed. Other captains also reported floating fish which were eaten by the sailors, indicating that the fish’s demise was sudden and not the result of some epidemic disaster (8). History has also revealed that just as lands have emerged from the depths in that area, other land now under water was once above sea-level. One such piece of evidence was uncovered during the 1898 laying of a transatlantic cable (below). As during earlier attempts, the cable snapped and the workers were required to pull it to the surface for repairs. This incident occurred some 500 miles to the north of the Azores.
According to Pierre Termier, a French geologist who made a study of the incident, if the lava had solidified under water it would have been crystalline instead of vitreous (10). Termier further surmised that the lava had been submerged under water soon after cooling, as evidenced by the relative sharpness of the material brought up. Although it cannot be ascertained exactly when this occurred, it was certainly within the last 15,000 years as lava decomposes in that time. Further evidence of more recent underwater activity comes from a discovery in 1923 when technicians from a Western Telegraph ship searching for a lost cable in the Atlantic detected that the rising ocean bed had thrown up the cable by 2.25 miles in only twenty-five years (11). In 1949, Professor M Ewing of Columbia University was exploring the mid-Atlantic ridge. At a depth of between two and three and a half miles, he discovered pre-historic beach sand. This puzzled Ewing, as sand, being the product of erosion should be non-existent on the seabed. The conclusion reached was that either the land sank, or the ocean level was much lower in a past epoch (12). There are other interesting finds. In the course of a submarine probe by the Geological Society of America in 1949, about a ton of limestone discs were lifted from the bed of the Atlantic, just south of the Azores Island chain. Their average size was about 6 inches with a thickness of 1.5 inches. The discs had a peculiar cavity in their centre. On the outside they were relatively smooth, but, in the cavities, they were rough. These ‘sea-biscuits’ as they were called, did not appear to be a natural formation and could not be identified. According to the Lamont Geological Observatory (Columbia University) "the state of lithification of the limestone suggests that it may have been lithified under subariel conditions and that the seamount may have been an island within the past 12,000 years." (13). Other claims that the Azores may have been the location of a lost civilisation were supported by alleged sightings in the area of underwater buildings and entire ‘cities’ made from aircraft as far back as 1942. These sightings first started when air ferry pilots flying from Brazil to Dakar glimpsed what appeared to be a submerged city on the western slope of mountains in the mid-Atlantic ridge.
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Yet ironically it is probably the legend of Atlantis
itself, however fanciful, that has provided the foundation for the belief in the
existence in a pre-historic civilisation to account for the out-of-place
knowledge and artefacts detailed in previous chapters. 
Many locations for the lost civilisation have been suggested with
many of them centring on the Mediterranean area. A Dr. James Mavor set out one
theory in his 1969 book, believing that the lost peoples were a Minoan
civilisation. This followed earlier claims first set out in the 1930s by Greek
scientists Dr Angelos Galanopoulos and Professor Spyridon Marinatos (right).
These excavations confirmed that Akrotiri had been one of the most
important prehistoric settlements of the Aegean, and the various imported items
discovered indicated a wide network of external relations. Not only as Akrotiri
in contact with nearby Crete but it also communicated with mainland Greece, the
Dodecanese, Cyprus, Syria and Egypt.
Despite evidence of early civilisation, the evidence was
not early enough, with the first signs of habitation being from the late
Neolithic times (c. 4th millennium BCE.) Attention therefore turned
to Crete itself, Thera’s much larger neighbour, and a popular choice for the
home of the ‘missing’ civilisation.
Whenever the civilisation started, history records that by
1500BCE Crete had become the centre of a seafaring empire. However, within a
very short time, this empire collapsed along with its infrastructure. In all
probability this collapse was caused by the eruption of a volcano (left) that
destroyed the nearby island of Thera and also deposited layers of ash that would
have destroyed harvests for decades. The eruption is also known to have
triggered off a substantial tidal wave.
Spanuth (right) wasn’t having any nonsense about some
mythical lost continent lying somewhere in the Mediterranean. Absolutely not.
No, as far as he was concerned, Atlantis was to be found on the sunken islands
near Heligoland off the northwest German coast.
The Azores are a group of islands lying ‘beyond Gibraltar’
that have frequently been proposed as a possible location of the lost
civilisation. 
The Azores, themselves, are constantly subject to volcanic
activity; the picture, below, was taken by the Space Shuttle and shows volcanic
smoke over Pico Island. Altogether there are five active volcanoes situated in
the Azores area, and it may well be that such volcanic activity could account
for the disappearance of an entire civilisation just as it had in Crete. 
Eruptions continued and, by 1967, the new island, named
Surtsey (after the Norse god fire god Surtur), had reached a height of 500 foot
and was over a mile long. Today, colonised by birds and vascular plants, the
island stands as proof that new land can emerge from the depths as quickly as an
old one can sink into legend:- and there is evidence to suggest that some of the
land now under water around the Azores was once above sea level, lending further
support to the idea that these islands could have been the home of a lost
civilisation.
Whilst searching for the cable, the sea floor in the area
was found to be composed of rough peaks, pinnacles and deep valleys, more
reminiscent of land than the expected sea bottom. Grappling irons brought up
rock specimens from a depth of 1700 fathoms. These rocks proved to be tachylyte
– vitreous basaltic lava that cools above water under atmospheric pressure
(9).
