Spotlight
Research: Searching for Atlantis
| USF News
Since Plato etched his immortal story of a spectacular city which fell into the ocean, the lost city of Atlantis has captivated the imagination.
Doñana National Park is a marshy mud flat on the southwest coast of Spain. For all but six weeks out of the year, it is covered in water from the rivers which flow into the Atlantic Ocean, which lies just beyond a string of dunes.
When the water recedes, it leaves a dusty landscape with very little signs of life. But it's not what is on top of the ground that has the world transfixed these days — it is the mystery of the lost city that some believe lies beneath.
And it is a mystery that USF professor Philip Reeder is playing a major role in solving.
Reeder is part of an international research team led by famed archaeologist Richard Freund. The team, which includes historians and geophysicists from across the United States and Canada, has drawn startling distinctions between anomalies underneath the marsh in Doñana and the clues Plato left in his writings about Atlantis thousands of years ago.
From its geographic location near the Straits of Gibraltar — known in ancient times as the Pillars of Hercules — to the three concentric rings of the same dimensions Plato described as being unique to Atlantis' construction, scientific ground surveys conducted by the team seem to bear a striking resemblance to Plato's one-and-only description of the lost city.
Is what's buried beneath the Spanish marsh definitely Atlantis? Not so fast, Reeder cautions.
"I wouldn't venture that," says Reeder, whose research has taken him through an adventuresome list of archaeological digs from the ancient Holy Land to the site of Nazi atrocities at Sobibor in Poland.
"To definitively say it's there would require something that will probably never happen — which is a full excavation. It's a World Heritage Site and the Spanish authorities are not interested in digging up a World Heritage Site."