The Atlantean island and the Azores
A very plausible solution to the Atlantis mystery is that Plato's Atlantic Island was located in the Mid-Atlantic and that the island chain known as the Azores are its surviving remnants. This cluster of nine main islands is located amid a chain of underwater mountains that rise to heights in excess of 9000 metres. They form part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge which defines the division between tectonic plates, aligned approximately north-south beneath the ocean floor for some 17,600 kilometres. It is the tips of the very highest of these subterranean mountains that protrude from the ocean floor as the principal islands of the Azores, which are themselves endowed with sizeable mountains that soar to a height in excess of 2100 metres.
Perhaps the most important writer to propose that the Azores were remnants of an Atlantean island continent was Ignatius Donnelly, author of the seminal classic Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, first published in 1882. This American congressman set down the foundations for the thousands of books and articles that have been written on the subject of Atlantis over the past 120 years. Although Donnelly's book has seen countless reprints, much of what he had to say about Atlantis being an antediluvial motherland for the diffusion of civilisation on both sides of the Atlantic has since been proved incorrect.
Despite this drawback, Donnelly's original thesis of a central Atlantean landmass has been perpetuated by a number of well-respected scholars of the Atlantis mystery. They include Russian academic Nikolai Zhirov. In the 1960s he wrote a series of papers on the subject, as well as a definitive book entitled Atlantis - Atlantology: Basic Problems, published in 1970. Like Donnelly, he argued that the former Atlantean landmass lay in the vicinity of the Azores and that, before it sank without trace, it acted as a land-bridge for the migration of flora and fauna between Africa and the Americas.
