I haven’t written about Atlantis on this site in ten years. The last time I did, I was working through a set of horary charts that consistently pointed to a specific location rather than a vague idea or symbolic landscape. Those earlier posts are still here, and I’ll link to them below, as this post does not replace them.

What Has Changed

From the beginning, when I asked about Atlantis in those horary charts, I was asking about a city, not a continent. It appears that was instinctive decision. Only this month did I realize how far that instinct put me from how Atlantis is usually discussed.

Those earlier posts led me toward a specific region, one that has since become more interesting, with the appearance of lidar data showing large scale structures along the top of a mountain range. I am left with reconciling a sense of disappointment after rereading accounts of Atlantis by Edgar Cayce. One thing became very clear to me, a city disappearing in a tectonically active region makes far more sense than the idea of a vanished continent. That realization has left me with mixed feelings and a sense of loss. Hidden records of the ancient advanced civilization of Atlantis may not exist anywhere as that portion of the story was likely pure myth.

A Necessary Distinction

Before going any further, I want to briefly reference two earlier posts on this site: Where is Atlantis and Where is Atlantis, Part 2. These posts document the horary work that pointed toward a specific location. Over time, that location has aligned uncomfortably well with an area now showing extensive features in lidar scans along the crest of a mountain range.

Whether those features ultimately prove to be cultural, ceremonial, defensive, or something else entirely remains an open question. What matters is that the scale fits a city, not a continent.

Cities are real archaeological entities. They sit in particular places, interact with specific landscapes, and are vulnerable to identifiable natural forces. Continents, by contrast, are abstractions. They are not inhabited as single units, destroyed as single units, or remembered as single units.

A coastal or near-coastal city can collapse into the sea through earthquakes, subsidence, or fault rupture and vanish within hours or days. A continent cannot do that in any way meaningful to human experience. So, when the question is framed as Where was the continent of Atlantis? the search is already disconnected from how real destruction actually works.

Once the focus shifts to Was there a city later remembered as Atlantis? the problem becomes grounded enough to be worth revisiting. Cities are real archaeological entities. They sit in particular places, interact with specific landscapes, and are vulnerable to identifiable natural forces. Continents, by contrast, are abstractions. They are not inhabited as single units, destroyed as single units, or remembered as single units. Once the focus shifts to “Was there a city later remembered as Atlantis?” the problem becomes solvable.

Why Did Plato Describe a Continent?

Plato (c. 428–348 BCE) was a Greek philosopher who introduced Atlantis in two dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, texts that were written as philosophical conversations rather than historical records. In these dialogues, Plato describes Atlantis as an island larger than Libya and Asia combined, located beyond the Pillars of Heracles. Atlantis functions as a counterexample to idealized Athens, powerful society undone by corruption and imbalance. To serve that moral and political purpose, it had to be vast, impressive, and remote. Precision of geography was never the point.

What matters most in Plato’s account is not size or exact location, but process; violent earthquakes, sudden flooding, rapid disappearance, and a sea left choked with debris. Plato also places distance between himself and the story’s factual certainty, attributing it to Solon, who in turn received it from Egyptian priests. By the time Plato recorded the account, it had already crossed cultures, languages, and generations. What he preserved was a moralized echo of a catastrophe whose original location had already faded.

Plato (c. 428–348 BCE) was a Greek philosopher, not a historian or geographer. He introduced Atlantis in two dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, written around 360 BCE. These works were philosophical conversations, not records of exploration or excavation.

Why Cayce Also Needed a Continent

Edgar Cayce approached Atlantis from a completely different direction. For him, Atlantis was a stage for soul development, misuse of power, and karmic return. A continent works far better than a city in that framework. It allows for multiple migrations, long timelines, racial and spiritual lineages, and global civilizational influence.

On a symbolic scale Cayce was constructing a metaphysical system. Treating that system as literal geography creates expectations it was never meant to meet.

Continents Don’t Vanish, But Cities Do

Continents do not suddenly sink beneath the ocean. Plate tectonics doesn’t work that way. Even major continental breakup occurs over millions of years. However, cities are another matter entirely. Coastal cities, especially those near subduction zones, are vulnerable to sudden vertical land drop, fault rupture, earthquake‑triggered subsidence, and tsunamis and submarine landslides. These processes can remove a city from the surface record almost instantly.

This is why the Pacific Rim matters. It is dominated by subduction zones, where plates sink beneath one another and coastlines can fail catastrophically. The Atlantic Ocean, by contrast, is geologically quiet by comparison. If a real city inspired the Atlantis story, a tectonically active margin is a requirement.

What This Changes—and What It Doesn’t

Coming back to Cayce’s material after years away was unexpectedly disappointing. Not because it conflicted with the location I’ve been drawn to, but because it almost makes sense.

Stripped of its metaphysical scaffolding, Cayce repeatedly describes sudden destruction, misuse of power, and loss through geological instability. What it lacks, and what I now find myself grieving, is evidence. No surviving technical records. No clear descriptions of how things were built. No durable traces of an advanced civilization that could show how people once worked with materials, energy, or landscape.

If a city did exist where the horary charts and subsequent physical evidence point, it may have been inhabited by the Yumbo people or by a group we don’t yet have a name for yet. Time will tell. Archaeology moves slowly, and interpretation even more so.

What seems increasingly clear is that if something was lost there, it wasn’t a continent. It was a place and places can vanish without leaving the kind of records we wish they had. That, more than anything else, is what I’m sitting with now; relief that the location makes geological sense, frustration that so much may be gone forever, and the uneasy recognition that myths sometimes survive precisely because the evidence does not.

Once the distinction between city and continent is made explicit, many long‑standing contradictions simply dissolve. Plato’s Atlantis no longer needs to be a literal landmass. Cayce’s Atlantis no longer needs to be a geological claim. And a real city, located outside both of their maps, can still plausibly underlie the story.

In that light, the questions are, “What kind of real place disappears so completely that only a story remains? Why do later cultures keep enlarging it into a continent?”