Minus One Hundred Twenty-Two Meters and Climbing
17
all historical natural disasters, the great eruption and resulting tsunami that blew much of Santorini Island in the Aegean into space in about 1627 B.C.E. An entire town, now known as Akrotiri, vanished under a cloud of ash and pumice.13 The inhabitants must have had some warning, for no skeletons lie among its ash-smothered dwellings, which stand up to three stories high. Wine jars, storage pots, the remains of a bed, and bright friezes are all that remains of a once-vibrant community. On the walls, a fisherman returns home with his catch; two boys exchange fisticuffs. Fast ships with serried oarsmen pass by a town amid a pod of dolphins. A visit to Akrotiri is a stroll through a moment frozen in time. One can imagine the inhabitants grabbing their possessions, driving bleating goats into boats, and rowing hastily away as lumps of pumice drop into the seething water. Then a sudden explosion and oblivion, and a onceprosperous town was forgotten until Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos unearthed some of its houses and alleyways in 1967. The scale of the explosion boggles the mind. What had once been one island measuring about nine by six kilometers became four small ones. Ash from the eruption fell over a large area, some of it on Crete, 177 kilometers to the south, at the time the center of Minoan civilization with its far-flung trade networks, extensive olive groves, and wealthy palaces. A tsunami after the eruption lashed the Cretan shoreline with huge waves, which must have caused considerable damage and disrupted mercantile activity over a vast area. Many experts believe the surging ocean permanently weakened Minoan civilization. When visiting the deep Santorini crater, one’s mind turns to Plato’s account of the lost continent of Atlantis immortalized by the Greek philosopher with his tale of kings “of great and marvelous power,” overthrown by “portentous earthquakes and floods.”14 Despite enduring searches by the obsessed, Atlantis is almost certainly a figment of classical imagination and never existed, perhaps a folk memory of the Santorini cataclysm or some other tsunami. The Greek historian Thucydides witnessed an earthquake at Orobiae in the Euboian Gulf off eastern Greece in 429 B.C.E. He recorded how the sea, “retiring from the then line of coast, returned in a huge wave and invaded a great part of the town, and