10 . The Lost City, Atlantis is a magnificent and ancient city lying beneath the waves of the sea. Does this sound like a fairy tale to you? Many people have tried and failed to find it. Michael Hubner from Germany thought he had. Let us learn more about this fascinating city.

The Greek philosopher Plato, who lived in the 4th century BC, mentioned Atlantis in detail in his writings. He said that Atlantis was a city built on an island around 9,000 years before his time. Atlantis became a powerful nation that planned to conquer all other countries. However, it disappeared suddenly beneath the sea into the Atlantic Ocean because of earthquakes and floods. Plato gave 51 clues to its location. He described the city having an island at the center and being surrounded by rings of water and land. He also said how far the city was from Athens in Greece.

Many explorers had tried and failed to find Atlantis under the sea. They had been looking under the sea because of what Plato wrote about it. A German computer expert called Michael Hubner came up with the theory that Atlantis was not at the bottom of the ocean. He thought that Atlantis had been destroyed by a tsunami wave. The strong force of the wave would have caused the end of the once great city.

Michael Hubner looked at all of Plato’s clues again. He used a computer program to enter all the information that Plato wrote about. The computer program would check on a map of the world for a place that matched all the clues. In this way Michael Hubner was able to find the place that Atlantis might have been. The computer program pointed to a place on the Moroccan coast in Africa, which was called the Souss-massa plain. Michael Hubner immediately boarded a plane to look for himself. When he got there, he was surprised to see many things that matched Plato’s description. There was a small mound in the centre of the plain and circular dry riverbeds. It was also very close to the distance that Plato had described.

We know that a tsunami can occur if there is an earthquake. The area of the Souss-Massa plain has had many earthquakes over years. Michael Hubner’s theory that a massive tsunami had flattened the city is not impossible. This would explain why it disappeared so suddenly.

Even though Michael Hubner believed that he had found the site of Atlantis, many experts disagreed. Some scholars have suggested that Plato might have been writing about Crete and the neighbouring island of Santorini, which was badly destroyed by a volcanic eruption in 1600 BC. Others feel he made up the story and based it on old legends. Michael Hubner believed Plato. He used his time and energy to prove to himself that Atlantis existed and stood proudly along the Moroccan coast.