Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City

by Mark Adams

  Archaeological technology has moved far beyond the rudimentary gadgets James Mavor brought to Santorini in the 1960s. The emerging field of satellite archaeology can now spot even underground structures from four hundred miles above the earth. An American team has mapped the ancient Egyptian city of Tanis, which long ago had been silted over by the Nile’s shifting current, without lifting a shovelful of dirt. Other archaeologists have used remote sensing technology to find long-vanished temples in the jungles of Cambodia and Belize. In 2013, a team of scientists using an airborne 3-D mapping system called lidar penetrated the dense rain forest canopy in Honduras and located what are likely the ruins of Ciudad Blanca, a legendary lost city that countless explorers have died searching for since the sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés heard tales of its incredible riches. Perhaps the most promising area of all was deep-sea exploration.

  “A bazillion people are out there looking for a bazillion different things” under the sea, Gallo said as we sat down at a round table covered with large color printouts of seafloors. “Bin Laden’s corpse. Sir Francis Drake’s coffin. Amelia Earhart’s plane. Jeez, talk about spending a lot of money on something where there’s nothing.” Almost anything underwater was possible to search for. The issue was cost. “A deep-ocean expedition is about $1 million a month for starters,” he said.

  Finding stuff like Air France 447 is what had made Gallo famous, but it wasn’t his primary job. “We’re a scientific organization, so mostly when we’re mapping we’re looking for geology or biology or something from the natural world. If you’re making a very detailed map of the seafloor or the ocean floor, anything that’s human-made should fall out of that. Like on the bottom of the Atlantic there are incredible underwater dunes and sediment waves and currents and other stuff and then plunk in the middle, there’s Titanic. We have a whole new suite of robots that cover a lot more ground with a lot better resolution and these would be perfect to go look in the deep Med. Even at a distance of about a mile you can see something the size of a cinder block if conditions are right.”

  Gallo suggested we drive down to the wharf to take a look at some of his cool new gadgetry. His latest obsession, he explained as we walked to my car, was finding a Minoan shipwreck. “We’re in the process of putting together an expedition to go look in earnest for one of those,” he said. Finding the first Minoan wreck, with an intact load of cargo, was “the Holy Grail of deep-sea archaeology. I can’t understand why we don’t know more about that era. I think there are some big surprises headed our way.

  “A major problem with underwater archaeology in the Mediterranean is that much of the sea is relatively shallow. It’s been picked over for centuries by divers and fishermen scooping up artifacts.” More recently, fishing trawlers harvesting bottom-feeders like cod and scallops have scoured the seafloor. Robert Ballard had seen trawling furrows more than five hundred meters down off the coast of Malta.

  “But the deep Med can go down four thousand–plus meters,” Gallo said. “So that part’s pretty much unexplored. We’d like to look between Crete and Santorini to see if we can find one of these Minoan wrecks. The other thing is, at the bottom of the Med there are these things called brine lakes. They look just like lakes on land but they’re at the bottom of the ocean. Brine lakes have no oxygen and no sunlight. It’s basically pickle juice. So any kind of organic matter that falls into there should be preserved incredibly well.”

  This was where Atlantis came in. Gallo had first heard of the Minoan Hypothesis when a friend asked if he’d be willing to meet with her father, who turned out to be Prince Michael of Greece. “We went to a coffee shop in New York City and he started to unroll his idea of Atlantis and, oh man, it was like that scene in Amadeus where Salieri is talking to the priest. I left in a bucket of sweat.”

  In his recent meetings about an expedition to search for a Minoan wreck, the Atlantis connection had, naturally, come up. James Cameron, an adviser to WHOI—the group’s undersea work had inspired his film Titanic—was gung ho about the possible connection. Not everyone at Woods Hole shared his enthusiasm. I assumed this had something to do with memories of James Mavor, the WHOI specialist whose long scientific career was overshadowed by his obsession with Atlantis.

  “We made a deal among ourselves that we wouldn’t talk about Atlantis while we are discussing [Minoan wrecks] because of the hype, you know, people living with mermaids at the bottom of the sea,” Gallo said. “I don’t think that’s fair. I think we ought to be able to let people know that there’s a plausible link between Atlantis and the Minoans.”

  The search for a Minoan ship was temporarily on hold due to lack of funds. As a related project, Gallo was trying to arrange for equipment to map the ancient city of Akrotiri, still buried under several layers of ash. Almost half a century after Marinatos had found it, only a tiny percentage of Akrotiri has been excavated. Guesses about what surprises might still be waiting varied widely. “Maybe beneath the vineyards of Santorini there’s a giant chest of rubies and the controls of the earthshaking machine,” Gallo said, laughing.

  We parked in downtown Woods Hole at WHOI’s sister campus. One of the institute’s research ships was docked in preparation for a long voyage to the West Coast. A burly man with a ponytail wearing a Harley-Davidson T-shirt walked past dragging a duffel bag on wheels. “He’s sure got the look of a crew member,” Gallo said as he ushered me through the front door of a brick security building outside the marina. Two nice elderly ladies were on desk duty. “I forgot my ID badge again,” Gallo said, patting the pockets of his jeans and slowing down only slightly. “This is Mark. He’s a foreign spy with bad intentions.” As the door closed behind us I heard a faint cry of “David, wait . . .”

  We paused for about ten seconds to peek through the windows of a large shed. “Here’s something you might like,” Gallo said, standing on tiptoe. Inside, laid out carefully on tables, were large yellow cylinders, the autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) used to find Air France 447. “This stuff is top secret technology. Cool, huh? Let’s go see Atlantis.”

  Or rather, Atlantis, WHOI’s state-of-the-art 274-foot-long research vessel. Serious scientists may not always like the idea of searching for Plato’s sunken island, but they sure do like naming things after it: a space shuttle, an asteroid, an impact crater on Mars. We walked up and down staircases and across catwalks, poking our heads into tiny cabins and rooms crammed with electronics. The ship had multiple winches and cranes, an enormous globe-shaped GPS receiver, six science labs, a full-service cafeteria that seemed to be unusually well stocked with Tabasco sauce and protein bars (“a lot of companies hear about us and just send boxes of stuff,” Gallo explained), and beds for twenty-four crew members. I kept expecting to bump into Jacques Cousteau. At the end of our tour we finally reached the latest iteration of Alvin, the round little three-man submersible that Mavor had helped design. Its pincers were protected with boxing gloves, giving it the aspect of a chubby kid trying to defend himself. Maybe it would have to. James Cameron had just donated Deepsea Challenger to WHOI, which put Alvin in line for a demotion.

  The AUVs Gallo had shown me were capable of sucking up terabytes of information, which was then processed into single images. Gallo wanted me to see some of the results. We crossed a road and walked to the WHOI’s village campus, which seemed pretty ramshackle compared to the one Gallo worked at. At the end of a long parking lot we finally reached what looked like a windowless double-wide trailer. This was the office of William Lange, WHOI’s technical wizard. Lange was famous in oceanographic circles as one of the first people to lay eyes on the submerged Titanic in 1985. Gallo paused before we ascended the steps to the door. “I need to warn you: Billy’s a little prickly. But he is a genius.”

  The building was dimly lighted by fluorescent bulbs and computer screens and crammed with audiovisual equipment; its interior reminded me of the mobile TV command center parked outside a stadium duri
ng a major sporting event. At the front of the main room was the largest LCD screen I had ever seen.

  Lange was reclining in an office chair in front of his computer. He had gray hair and a gray beard and wore a gray shirt and black jeans. Next to Gallo’s neon glow he looked like a nocturnal forest creature caught outside his burrow. His right hand was wrapped in a bandage of some sort, so he shook my hand warily with his left.

  “I told Mark that we don’t normally like to use the term Atlantis because it sets in motion a whole bunch of stuff that probably has no basis in reality. True?” Gallo said.

  “True,” Lange said, leaning back and staring at me.

  “And that there is a plausible link between Thera and the Minoans and what Plato talked about as being Atlantis,” Gallo said. Lange looked displeased. “A plausible link, Billy,” Gallo added. “Plausible.”

  Lange folded his hands over his belt buckle. He had scowled when Gallo said the word Atlantis.

  To break the uncomfortable silence, I asked Lange what he thought of Gallo’s plan to search for a Minoan ship. To my surprise, he seemed to think Gallo’s ambitions were too small.

  “I don’t want to go down the ancient astronaut route or all that nonsense,” Lange said, leaning back farther and boring into my eyes, “but I’m totally convinced there’s a portion of our history that’s missing. The sea level has changed significantly in the Mediterranean in the last ten thousand years. A significant part of our history and culture development is four hundred feet down. Worldwide.” As a result, the river mouths where settlements tend to be built have shifted over time, sometimes dramatically. The mouth of the Hudson River is now located a hundred miles west of where it was prior to the end of the last Ice Age. “Waterways—lakes, rivers, oceans—were the highways back then. Where would you have a city or settlement? You’d have it where a river intersected the ocean. And those aren’t where they used to be anymore. The economic capitals of multiple cultures potentially disappeared in a very, very narrow time span.”

  Lange pointed out that a recent discovery of a stone axe in Crete had suggested that humans may have been sailing the Mediterranean one hundred thousand years ago. “If you go back and project what was going on in the Med from 3000 to 7000 BC, or five thousand to nine thousand years from us right now, there’s a lot of building going on, especially on islands. That’s when Santorini, Malta, Crete, Cyprus, even the Canaries—they all have big megalithic structures there that really don’t make a lot of sense. I’m hoping that by looking at some of these ancient shorelines we’ll be able to find some submerged structures that would’ve survived.”

  Gallo prodded the reluctant Lange into unrolling a gigantic black-and-white photo that covered a large tabletop. “This is probably the highest-resolution data we have for any part of the ocean,” Lange said. Near the center of the image was a tiny white wedge. The bow of the Titanic. “My dream is to do with Akrotiri what we’ve done with Titanic,” he said. He hoped to combine ground-penetrating radar with high-resolution underwater images “to put Akrotiri in scope and see how big it was.”

  It sounded like a massive undertaking. If the roll-out of Google Ocean had made Atlantologists’ pulses race, a map of greater Akrotiri might result in heads exploding. “How could you even begin to plan such a project?” I asked.

  “We could do it in a week if we had the money,” Lange said.

  “Why don’t you show Mark some of the 3-D stuff you’ve been working on?” Gallo said.

  “It’s not ready yet,” Lange said. He had returned to his chair and was reclining to the point where he appeared to be awaiting a molar extraction, but after the Titanic demonstration the edge in his voice had disappeared.

  “Aw, come on, Billy.” Gallo turned to me. “I haven’t even seen this stuff.”

  Lange pursed his lips as he thought it over. Finally, he called across the room to a young associate. “Beth, can you kill the lights and get the glasses?”

  Beth left and returned with dark glasses for everyone. We put them on and stared at the enormous screen.

  “This is the highest resolution underwater imagery ever collected,” Lange said as the lights dimmed. He turned to Gallo. “We’re getting toward immersion, right?”

  The footage was staggering. We watched as schools of porpoises chased what looked like millions of fish. We passed over a propeller airplane, covered in decades of marine muck. A gigantic, pulsating jellyfish crossed the screen, followed by the colorful spiral of a nautilus paddling by. Everything looked as if you could reach out and touch it.

  “You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me,” Gallo said.

  I asked if, hypothetically, this technology could be used to locate an underwater city.

  “There’s a bigger story, and it’s not that one city disappeared,” Lange said. “It’s that a hundred cities disappeared.”

  At the end of his TED Talk, Gallo quoted Marcel Proust: “The true voyage of discovery is not so much in seeking new landscapes as in having new eyes.” The prospect of using this technology to find whatever was lurking under Santorini’s ash and its surrounding waters was tantalizing. Maybe there really were a hundred cities waiting to be found, any of which might have inspired a story of a watery cataclysm.

  I needed to find only one.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Kalimera!

  Santorini, Greece

  When I arrived in Santorini, my to-do list had a single item on it: Find George Nomikos. I wasn’t entirely sure why I needed to find him. I’d gotten his contact information from the Greek tourist board in New York City. Usually when a writer contacts a country’s travel council, the people in that office bend over backward to provide far more information than the writer can possibly use, most of it relating to spas and horseback riding. Then they follow up so many times that the words restraining order must sometimes be deployed.

  The Greeks played hard to get. Phone calls, e-mails; for weeks, I tried—and failed—to connect. Finally, as I was preparing to leave for the airport, a nice fellow named Chris called back and assured me that whatever it was I needed to do in Santorini, George Nomikos would take care of it. George and I exchanged e-mails and he promised to get in touch shortly before my arrival, but he hadn’t by the time my flight landed at Santorini’s tiny airport. I awoke on my first morning in Greece wondering what I was going to do with myself.

  At 8:55 my phone rang. “Kalimera, Mark! That’s how we say ‘good morning’ in Santorini! I’ll pick you up in ten minutes. We’ll have coffee at my café!”

  A few minutes later I was riding shotgun in George’s white Volkswagen hatchback. George was in his early thirties, handsome, deeply tanned, with perfectly groomed black hair. His prosperous belly bulged a bit behind his pressed pink oxford. We drove through the narrow streets of Fira, Santorini’s main town, searching for a place to park as George waved at, shouted “Kalimera!” to, or stopped to shake hands with every other person we passed. After about ten minutes, we finally backed into a very illegal spot blocking the driveway of a hairdresser’s shop. “It’s okay; I got my hair cut here the other day,” George explained. He shouted “Kalimera!” to the shop’s owner and waved. We were about fifty yards from my hotel.

  We walked through the tight passageways of Fira’s whitewashed old town to George’s café, Character. (The English word derives from the same ancient Greek word.) George shouted “Kalimera!” to the half dozen young, attractive staff members and ordered coffees for us on the terrace. The view was spectacular and, at first glance, utterly Atlantean in its circularity—totally worth the five bucks George charges for a cappuccino. It’s like looking down into a half-filled gigantic teacup from a perch on the rim. At the center of this annular basin, surrounded by deep blue water, is the island of Nea Kameni, roughly where Angelos Galanopoulos believed the Temple of Poseidon and Cleito had once stood. Steep cliffs surround most of the caldera, on this day dwarfi
ng two gigantic cruise ships parked near shore. For many boats, dropping anchor is pointless. The Thera blast had been so powerful that the water in the four-mile-wide caldera was more than a thousand feet deep.

  “Okay, Mark, so we can’t see the ruins at Akrotiri today,” George said, leaning back in his chair and adjusting his sunglasses. “There’s a strike. I know you only have two days here, so if there’s still a strike again tomorrow”—his tone seemed to imply this was a possibility roughly on par with the sun rising in the east—“I have a friend who works in the laboratory there, cleaning artifacts. He can sneak us in through the back door.” George looked down at his phone on the table. “Right now I’m waiting for a call from Mr. Doumas.”

  This was news. Because my communication with the Greek tourism board had been so sketchy, the only request I’d been able to get through was that I wanted to meet someone working at Akrotiri. If Atlantis was Santorini’s number one legend, Christos Doumas was probably runner-up. He had worked as second-in-command to Spyridon Marinatos himself and had taken over when his mentor suffered a stroke and died at Akrotiri in 1974. Doumas had been leading the excavations of the buried city for nearly four decades. If anyone had an up-to-date opinion about its connection to Plato, it would be Doumas.

  George and I finished our coffees and took a walk through the claustrophobic maze of Fira’s shopping district. Archaeologists might still be debating Santorini’s status as Atlantis, but the local merchants had obviously long since made up their minds. We passed an Atlantis Hotel, an Atlantis restaurant, and several shops selling Atlantis T-shirts. For a guy who ran a busy café, George sure seemed to have a lot of side projects: He stopped to show me some guidebooks he had published, some calendars that used photos he had taken, and two or three coffee shops that sold a popular brand of espresso he imported. George grabbed a pumice stone from a basket outside one shop and handed it to me. “Good for the feet,” he said, pantomiming a scrubbing motion. I reached for my wallet but the shopkeeper waved me off. Only when we were back in George’s car did I understand his indifference. Many of Santorini’s roads had been carved through volcanic pumice more than twenty feet deep.