Antarctica is Atlantis

The argument

The theory that Antarctica is Atlantis is a relatively new one, dating back to the mid 20th Century. It is a speculative claim rather than an established finding, and its appeal rests on a proposed mechanism that would explain how a habitable place could have become the least habitable one on Earth. According to Charles Hapgood's 1958 book 'Earth's Shifting Crust', the continent of Antarctica was in fact originally much further north than its current position. Due to the shifting of the Earth's crust, the continent was displaced, and the climate of the continent, which had been mild, plummeted to below freezing. The attraction of this premise for the Atlantis question is that it supplies both halves of the legend at once: a place that could have supported a civilisation, and a catastrophe capable of ending it. This shift in location and temperature has led some to argue that an ancient Civilisation existed on the continent, which was subsequently destroyed by this monumental geographical realignment. On that reading the disappearance of Atlantis requires no sinking beneath the sea, only a continent carried into a climate that buried whatever stood on it. In 2016, faint credence was given to this claim with the revelation that remains of a human settlement had been found under the Antarctic ice. The evidence offered was interpretive rather than excavated. One report claimed, 'the pictures, taken using remote sensing photography for NASA's Operation IceBridge mission to Antarctica, show what online sleuths believe could be a city.' The claim is thus that images gathered for another purpose contain shapes which some observers read as structures — a reading advanced by those observers rather than by the mission that produced the images. Proponents of the theory take these strands together to hold that Antarctica is Atlantis, and therefore that Atlantis does exist.

Context

Plato relayed the story of Atlantis in his dialogues around 360 B.C. According to his dialogues, the city of Atlantis was an island located in the Atlantic Ocean.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Charles Hapgood's theory was proposed before the advancement in research surrounding plate tectonics. As such, this specific theory regarding the location of Atlantis has largely been consigned to 'the fringes of Atlantean beliefs'.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Hapgood's crustal displacement hypothesis has no standing in the earth sciences. It was proposed before plate tectonics was established and is incompatible with it: continents move on the order of centimetres a year, Antarctica has been at or near the South Pole for tens of millions of years, and its ice sheet dates back roughly 34 million years — long before any human population existed to build anything. [Rejecting P2] The 2016 images are the only physical evidence offered, and the premise describes them honestly enough to defeat itself: they are remote-sensing photographs of what "online sleuths believe could be a city", which is an interpretation by anonymous readers rather than a finding by anyone who examined the site. No survey, excavation or published analysis is cited. The premise is also unnecessary to the question it answers — Plato places Atlantis beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the account in the Timaeus and Critias is generally read as a philosophical parable, so an argument for its existence has to address that first.