[music playing] NARRATOR: 3 and 1/2
thousand years ago, the biggest volcanic eruption
in recorded history rocked the planet. In the heart of
the Mediterranean, a peaceful island exploded
with devastating force. At a stroke, an
entire civilization was wiped from the
face of the Earth. Then, at the dawn
of the 20th century, the remains of a
spectacular palace were discovered on
the island of Crete. On a neighboring
Greek island, a town was unearthed, preserved
beneath thousands of tons of volcanic ash. Teams of investigators are
examining every fragment from these mysterious sites to
decipher their hidden secrets. And out of the physical
clues lifted from the ash, a radical theory has emerged. These ruins could be the home
of an ancient civilization, Atlantis. Using cutting-edge
visual technology, we rebuild the incredible
towns, temples, and palaces. We reveal the majesty and the
mystery of this lost world. Every search for Atlantis
begins with the writings of the great Greek
philosopher, Plato. RICHARD ELLIS: Plato was
essentially the father of Western philosophy. And because what he had
to say was so important, and has remained important
throughout the history of Western thought, it became
much more acceptable, much more respectable, if you will, than
if someone else had written it. NARRATOR: In one of the most
intriguing of his writings, Plato describes a
remarkable utopian society. Rich in wealth and knowledge,
their skills as builders and engineers were
advanced beyond imagining. But he says the peace of this
land was suddenly torn apart. [waves crashing] [volcano erupting] Legend has it that the entire
civilization was wiped out in a single day and night,
engulfed by the ocean and lost to the world
for thousands of years. No other mystery on Earth
has sparked such obsession, or given rise to so many
extraordinary theories. On the Mediterranean
island of Crete, a discovery was made
in early 1900 that would add a new chapter in
the search for Atlantis. An archaeologist named Arthur
Evans, a real-life Indiana Jones, arrived on Crete. He was searching for the
treasures of the ancient world. Evans was looking for
something very specific. He was looking for the
first European culture, but he was also looking for
the roots to Greek mythology. NARRATOR: Evans began his search
in a hilltop settlement called Knossos. He soon found something that
was beyond his wildest dreams. In the very first trench
he dug, Evans unearthed a magnificent stone throne. It was the heart of a
spectacular palace complex. Covering an area the size
of four football fields and containing 10 times as many
rooms as Washington's White House, the dig
exposed construction on a massive scale. What he found was
beyond all expectations of anyone at the time. And essentially, he defined
the civilization around it, which he called the
Minoan civilization. NARRATOR: The name Evans
chose came from a figure in ancient Greek myth
called King Minos. Minos was said to
live in a great palace at the center of which he had
imprisoned a terrible monster. Half man, half bull, it
was called the minotaur. Sir Arthur Evans thought that
he had found the palace of King Minos. It probably had nothing
to do with King Minos. But on the other hand, it
seemed like a good label, and it has stuck. NARRATOR: Today, a
groundbreaking new theory has emerged as to the
origin of this lost world. It's entirely possible that
something like the Atlantis myth comes out of here. And it's passed on for
centuries and grew in some kind of grand importance. So there is this theory that
the Minoans were, in fact, the early Atlanteans. NARRATOR: It is
the sophistication of the palace on Crete that
is the first link to the idea of Atlantis. The builders of this
remarkable structure had achieved a level of
engineering excellence that would not be
seen anywhere else in the world for centuries. It is littered with artifacts
dating back over 3 and 1/2 thousand years. The remains of hundreds
of decorative pots and beautiful wall paintings
are being discovered. As investigators piece
together the fragments of this ancient art,
they are discovering sophisticated
images of the people and the lives of a
lost civilization. People were
extremely interested, because this was going
back beyond the boundaries of classical studies
and classical archeology into something entirely
new which had not really been envisaged before. NARRATOR: The buildings here are
older than anything previously discovered on the island. And they are infinitely
more advanced. Teams of experts are now
searching for the clues that relate this complex architecture
to Plato's story of Atlantis. Colin McDonald has scoured
every inch of the palace, above and below
ground, to expose every technological achievement. And beneath the surface, he has
discovered one of the site's most advanced features. Down beneath
all of this, there is the most remarkable
water system, both for the drainage of
water, and for the water supply itself. NARRATOR: Astoundingly, this
sophisticated network of pipes predates the plumbing of the
great Greek and Roman empires by over 1,000 years. These terracotta
or clay water pipes are made up of 1 meter
sections, the one tapering into the other. They took water to lots of
different parts of the palace, and equally impressive
systems were used actually to get water out of the palace
for the drainage system itself. NARRATOR: A vast subterranean
network carried wastewater away from the palace. Using the details
of Colin's survey, we can now see how the drains
circled through the palace's royal quarter. We're right in the
middle of the main drainage system of the palace
here on the east side. It's stone built on either
side, about a meter high here. In times of torrential rain,
huge quantities of water could be dealt with by
this drainage system. NARRATOR: A similarly
sophisticated water management system is described
in Plato's stories. He wrote of a palace
where water was plentiful. Collected from the
surrounding hills, it was in abundant supply
throughout the city, just as it was here at Knossos. What's more, at the
Palace of Knossos, the engineering above ground
is every bit as sophisticated as that which Plato describes. The palace contains
1,300 rooms spread over four floors,
all interconnected by miles of passageways. It was centuries ahead of
anything seen from the same era on mainland Greece. What we have on the Greek
mainland in the period of the palaces was nothing more
complicated really than maximum three or four
room, single-story, mud brick structures. There's no grand
architecture on the scale that we see in the
Cretan palaces. NARRATOR: Plato describes
the Palace of Atlantis as an acropolis sitting
atop a great hill. At Knossos, we find just that. Construction must have involved
huge earth-moving operations. The entire hilltop was
flattened and terraces were carved so that
the palace could be built on multiple levels. The large foundation
blocks of the palace walls were constructed of crystalline
stone called gypsum. It was quarried locally and
then cut into massive blocks with bronze saws. We're right in the
middle of a large quarry used for quarrying
the gypsum that was used in the construction
of the first palace at Knossos. Here, one can see very,
very clearly the tool mark of the bronze object
which sliced away an enormous part of the face. And the resulting block,
which would have fallen down, would then either
have been worked here, or moved the 800 meters or
so over to the palace itself. NARRATOR: In the Atlantis
myth, the external walls of the great palaces were
said to shine like silver. Today, the gypsum
walls of Knossos have been eroded
by the elements, but in their full glory,
they too would have sparkled. ALEXANDER MACGILLIVRAY:
You can almost imagine what it felt like for
a Greek coming ashore in Crete and seeing something like
the glimmering gypsum palace at Knossos, this giant,
shiny structure glistening in the sun from all
this crystalline gypsum. And on a scale like
they couldn't have even possibly imagined at that time. NARRATOR: A vast
royal residence, a place of worship and
ceremony at the center of an advanced and
wealthy civilization. Using their latest
evidence, our team applies state of the
art imaging techniques to rebuild this
prehistoric palace. We can now see the structure as
it would once have stood here, supported by huge
redwood pillars. Many believe this was Atlantis. Now our investigators are
going deeper to the very fabric of this extraordinary palace in
search of the vital clues that might provide proof. What they find is evidence of
the cause of the destruction of this lost world. In the heart of the
Mediterranean Sea, on the island of Crete, a
remarkably sophisticated palace has been unearthed. And the find has reignited
the search for the most famous of all lost worlds. With its massive scale, its
complex water management systems, and its
sparkling gypsum walls, the engineering of this
extraordinary palace ties it closely to Plato's
descriptions of Atlantis. Hidden deep in the fabric
of this amazing place, there are even more
compelling links. Plato wrote of Atlantis that
it was a complex society that lived a utopian existence,
its people in harmony with nature and
their fellow man. That same harmony can be seen
here in the order and symmetry of the building's
engineering, in the way it makes use of the natural
flow of the elements. The palace engineers
were masters at controlling the
path of air and light through the depths of
the palace quarters. They devised systems that
appear advanced even today, even though they are
almost 4,000 years old. Internal rooms were divided
with an ingenious system known as peer and door partitioning. Rows of pillars were linked by
discreet wooden shutters which could be controlled
independently of each other. They could be set to block
the path of a cold wind, or channel a breeze to the
palace's innermost room. At the very heart of the
palace is the central court, providing light and air to
all areas of the complex. To the east is
the royal quarter, a multi-story structure to rival
anything described in Plato's accounts of Atlantis. At its heart, a huge
four-story spiraling staircase was built around pillared
balconies, open to the elements to form a vast light well. This impressive
structure was rarely one of the great achievements
of Minoan engineering. And in the middle
of the staircase is this marvelous
rectangular light well, which allowed the natural
sunlight to diffuse all the way down to the bottom,
and then outwards into all the rooms,
which would otherwise have been very gloomy indeed. NARRATOR: This
awesome technology and the sophisticated
culture that created it appear to have
thrived in the Mediterranean for centuries. But then, they
simply disappeared. Just as in the
story of Atlantis, it seems this entire
civilization was wiped from the face of the Earth in a
sudden and violent catastrophe. The first clues to what
might have happened lie in the sea that
surrounds the island. The whole of the
Mediterranean is divided into two tectonic plates,
with Europe on one side, and Africa on the other. These two colossal
landmasses collide, and periodically, the
energy of these collisions is released in earthquakes. COLIN MACDONALD: The
archaeological evidence for earthquakes is very
difficult to detect here, partly because, of course,
they rebuilt and repaired immediately afterwards. There is one instance,
however, on the south side in the so-called house
of the fallen blocks. It seems that at the end
of the first palace period, there was a huge earthquake,
and these enormous blocks were thrown several
meters to the south, and there they remain
today as evidence of this enormous earthquake. [music playing] NARRATOR: Our experts have
discovered that the palace engineers devised new and
innovative techniques to create structures that would
withstand the destructive force of these violent quakes. ED MCCANN: Simply put, if you-- NARRATOR: Today, our
team are keen to learn from the experience of
the palace engineers, and they study closely the
anti-seismic techniques deployed at Knossos. In order to make their
tall, skinny wall stand up, it's quite probable that
the first thing they did was to buttress them
up, rather like this. So if I pretend to
be an earthquake and shake this table
here, well, as we can see, buttressing on its own
doesn't do the job. NARRATOR: In the final phase
of building at the palace, walls were constructed
of stone and supported by an ingenious system
of wooden frames. This combination of
materials gave the structure both enormous strength
and flexibility. ED MCCANN: So what the
people of Knossos did was to use timber framing to
reinforce their thin masonry walls and support the framed
up wall of big heavy walls, buttressing like this. If I pretend to be an
earthquake machine again and give it a good old
shake, we can rapidly see, I could be shaking
that all day long, and this wall is going
precisely nowhere. NARRATOR: Despite these
incredible engineering achievements, nothing was
going to save the palace from the devastating
cataclysm to come. Seismologists that have been
studying the geological history of the area now believe
that Crete suffered a cataclysmic event
around 1500 BC. This new evidence shows
that Crete was struck by a massive and deadly wave. FLOYD MCCOY: Dozens of tsunamis
swept across the entire Aegean. Tsunami, tsunami, tsunami,
trains of these waves. NARRATOR: On the
Mediterranean island of Crete, archaeologists have
discovered the remains of an ancient palace. These stunning buildings are the
first trace of a culture that has been missing for 3
and 1/2 thousand years, and many believe that the palace
was at the heart of the most famous of all lost worlds,
the civilization of Atlantis. Just like Atlantis,
the palace of Knossos and the island of
Crete were devastated in a cataclysmic event. In search of the source
of this destruction, experts have focused on a
volcanic island 100 miles north of Crete. It was known in
ancient times as Thera. [music playing] Today, it is Santorini. Volcanologist Floyd McCoy
has made it his life's work to decipher the geological clues
and piece together the island's destructive history. This volcano has an amazing
history of repeated giant explosions. With every explosion,
this hole in the ground, which we call a caldera,
is reexcavated repeatedly. And every time it
blows itself apart, it leaves a deposit on the
landscape, and layer by layer, it built itself up. And so what we see over
there are the layers of these repeated explosive
eruptions through tens of thousands of years. NARRATOR: At the
center of Santorini, inside the cliffs
of the main island, is Nea Kameni, the new furnace. It is a barren and
hostile island, peaked buy the crater
of an active volcano. Floyd McCoy has discovered that
there was once an island right at the center of the caldera. It was swallowed up by a
terrible volcanic eruption. FLOYD MCCOY: Occupying
this large caldera then was this large, large island
that a civilization lived on. It's gone. The island was blasted to bits. NARRATOR: Plato wrote of a
devastating cataclysm that destroyed the great
civilization of Atlantis. And Santorini, the
closest neighbor to Crete and the palace of Knossos,
was the location of one of the biggest explosions
in recorded history. Researchers have developed a new
theory that Santorini and Crete were both a part of Atlantis. The theory has its basis in the
dramatic color of these cliffs. Plato described
quarries in Atlantis where rocks of
white, black, and red were extracted from the hills. The rock was then used in the
construction of a great island city. The description matches the
rocks found here in Santorini. This island city was
described as being laid out in a series of concentric
circles of land and water, each one connected to the ocean
by an immense canal 100 feet deep. RICHARD ELLIS: There were
also docks for huge numbers of ships, and a causeway
over which they could offload the riches, whatever they were,
that were coming into Atlantis. In other words, everything
that human beings could need was available in
Atlantis itself. NARRATOR: Plato's description of
the island as circular relates perfectly to the
symmetrical formation of the central volcanic
island on Santorini. But to prove a link is
impossible without proof of life on the island before
its last big eruption. Then, in the early 1900s, during
excavations in a quarry here, a fantastic discovery was made. That layer, that white
layer on top of the cliffs is a deposit left from
the catastrophic eruption in the Bronze Age. And it was digging there
that they found a house site. Another case found a burial. They realized this eruption
had buried a civilization. A culture lived there. The story then of that
ancient civilization starts there with that
layer of white ash. NARRATOR: These volcanic
deposits, which still cover the entire island,
fell in the course of a single
cataclysmic eruption. Now our experts are stripping
back the ash layer by layer to expose evidence of the
lost world that lies beneath. Here it is. This is the level that
man lived on, right here. Here, in fact, is what appears
to be a remnant of a wall built by man on top. And then the eruption came. The big blast started, and
all of this was deposited. This is pumice, and the
pumice piled up very rapidly. And then the eruption continued. Four days of a
massive accumulation of all of this material, all
up here, 30, 50, 60, 80 feet of this material piling up,
and then way up at the top, the debris flows, the mud
flows have scoured the surface. All of this, one of the giant
eruptions in human history. NARRATOR: The
first signs of life from before this big
eruption had been found. And the search was on to reveal
proof of a culture that would link the island to the
great civilisations of Crete and Atlantis. The answer was unearthed in
1966 by an American archeologist named James Mavor Junior. Mavor assembled a team to
search the islands for signs of ancient artifacts. They began their dig on the
southern tip of the island, in the tiny village of Akrotiri. In their very first
trench, they struck gold. They unearthed an
ancient wall buried under 30 feet of volcanic rock. As they dug deeper, the
wall became a house, and the trench revealed
a cobbled street. At their very first
attempt, Mavor's team had discovered an extraordinary
town, perfectly preserved in the ash of a
volcanic eruption. We are talking about
a brilliant culture, a brilliant civilization with
a very advanced technology in all ways, and especially
building technology. NARRATOR: The
discovery was hailed as one of the most important
finds in classical archeology. The town remains
substantially intact. Just like the city
of Pompei in Italy, volcanic ash had filled
the city and sealed it from the elements. Its contents had been preserved
for more than 30 centuries. The huge task of uncovering
the town continues today. With every inch of
ash that is removed, new clues to the civilization
that was here are revealed. And just as described in
the legend of Atlantis, we see engineering skills
that were sophisticated way beyond their time. CLAIRY PALYVOU: When I
first came to Akrotiri, I was expecting
something rather simple. But then I realized
that this town was made of multi-story buildings. And when we are talking
about multi-story, we are talking about two
and three-story buildings. And at some point, I
realized that I was walking on the third floor of a building
that had been constructed 3,500 years ago. That was really
extremely impressive. NARRATOR: Akrotiri is a
truly extraordinary find. It is a city arranged
with a structured assembly of interconnecting
roads and paths, the earliest form of organized
town planning ever discovered. And centuries more advanced
than anything that has ever been seen before from this period. Archeologists have mapped
every inch of the town, and from their data,
our team have built computer-generated models. You are now traveling
down the streets and interacting
with the buildings of a sophisticated
community that was destroyed at the height of
its power thousands of years ago. Just as we have seen in the
palace of Knossos, at Akrotiri, there are complex,
multi-story buildings constructed of wood and stone. And the plumbing was
even more elaborate. Fresh running water
fed each house, and a sewerage system ran
throughout the entire town. CLAIRY PALYVOU: There is a
perfect sewage system running under the streets. And these are connected to
lavatories on the upper floors of the buildings. NARRATOR: Not for at
least 1,000 years would it become commonplace to find
bathrooms inside people's homes. CLAIRY PALYVOU: The
discovery of this lavatory, as you can imagine, is
truly very important. If you just stop to think,
I mean, that, again, I mean, it took ages, hundreds of
years to have lavatories within a house. NARRATOR: It was not just the
discovery of a toilet that so amazed the engineers, but
also its ingenious design. The waste fell through a
clay pipe to a chamber below, where water from the town drains
flushed it into a cesspit. The pipes interconnected
in such a way that a siphon effect
was formed, drawing foul smells down the pipes and
away from the lavatory. The design was centuries
ahead of its time. This sophisticated system
of water management matches up to the stories of
Atlantis, in which Plato wrote of ancient towns equipped with
hot and cold running water. But there was one crucial
discovery at Akrotiri that lent new
credibility to the idea that Santorini was the island
at the center of Atlantis. A fresco was unearthed that
revealed an image of life on the island 3 and
1/2 thousand years ago. FLOYD MCCOY: Can we be so lucky
as to have a snapshot of what this landscape looked like? Here is the peninsula,
the Akrotiri Peninsula. It shows a profile of the
island, one, two, three peaks. Going down farther,
we see a waterway that surrounds a central
island, a fairly large island. And on that island, a city. They were living on
the central island. That central island was
a developing volcano. NARRATOR: This idea of a
central island port encircled with layer upon
layer of buildings fits perfectly Plato's
description of the island city of Atlantis, a city that
at the height of its power, was blown to bits in a
devastating eruption. Seismologists are
now following a trail of clues that lead
from Santorini back to the palaces of Crete. They will reveal the full extent
of the horrific disaster that tore Santorini apart and
lead to the destruction of an entire civilization. In the heart of
the Mediterranean, a lost world has
been discovered. A palace on Crete and
a town on Santorini, linked by the unique
engineering of their buildings. Archeologists have
opened a window on a highly advanced culture
known today as the Minoans. They thrived 3,500
years ago, and many now believe that what
they left behind gave rise to the
myth of Atlantis. Since the discovery of the
palace at Knossos in 1900, archeologists have
expanded their search. Today, a network of
ancient towns and palaces has been revealed across the
length and breadth of Crete. What all these
sites have in common is that they were
destroyed in the middle of the second millennium BC by
a series of terrible disasters. [volcano erupting] According to the Greek
philosopher Plato, Atlantis too was destroyed
in a single day and night. The land was
swallowed by the sea. 100 miles north of
Crete on Santorini, Floyd McCoy has
been gathering data to determine if the magnitude of
the eruption that happened here in 1500 BC was enough to cause
the devastation of Crete. What he has discovered is
beyond all expectations. So how big was this eruption? It was huge. How do we determine this is by
how much material is blown out during the eruption. And the more we look,
the more we find. There are huge, thick deposits
of this ash and pumice on the seafloor that
surround this island. It's been found down
to the Nile Delta. It's been found up
in the Black Sea. When we take all
of this material and calculate the
volume of it, we come out with an eruption that
is perhaps 10 times Krakatoa in 1883. NARRATOR: Because
Krakatoa exploded in the late 19th century, we
have comprehensive records of the eruption, and the
details are spine-chilling. The eruption ejected more
than six cubic miles of rock, ash, and pumice
into the atmosphere, killing 36,400 people. But it would have been dwarfed
by the Santorini eruption. It was enormous, and it
occurred right in the middle of a flourishing civilization. [volcano erupting] Now things got nasty. In this eruption, things
got terribly violent. And the mixture of
water with this magma produce what we call
pyroclastic surges and flows. As they swept across
the landscape, they destroyed
everything that had not been buried in this pumice. NARRATOR: At the heart of
this civilization in Akrotiri, archeologists have found
signs that the residents were preparing to leave. Belongings were piled
up outside houses, and beds were found pulled
out into the streets. Sadly for the few who took
to the sea to head for Crete and the shelter of the
palaces of Knossos, escape was no
guarantee of survival, because the settlements of
Crete would be devastated not by the ash and pumice that
was raining down on Santorini, but by the next, even
more devastating phase of the eruption. FLOYD MCCOY: Every
pyroclastic flow that entered the ocean also
pushed the ocean aside. When you push the
ocean aside, tsunami. NARRATOR: Our investigators
have turned to the experts at the National
Observatory in Athens for proof of what happened. Using the very latest
investigative techniques, they have discovered
evidence of a killer tsunami. Dozens of tsunamis swept
across the entire Aegean. They made their way
into the Mediterranean. NARRATOR: These
massive waves surged towards the unprotected
north coast of Crete. First in the firing line was
the coastal town of Malia. Just yards from the seashore
stood a magnificent palace, its sophisticated
structures engineered with the same complex layout
as the palace at Knossos. The three-story
facade facing north was directly in the path
of the approaching waves. The inhabitants of
the region probably gathered here at the
palace because they saw this great plume of ash
shooting up into the sky off to the north. It would have been visible all
the way down to the Nile Delta. [music playing] NARRATOR: When the ash
cloud reached the island, the sky above this ancient
Minoan palace turned gray. During excavations on Crete,
Alexander MacGillivray discovered this volcanic
ash in the deepest parts of the palace's ruins. It's a clue to the catastrophic
sequence of events that overtook this society. ALEXANDER MACGILLIVRAY: When the
first wave came pushing ashore, bringing with it their
fleet, from fishing boats to great trading
ships would have all come crashing through
here and got all the way to the foot of the
mountains over there, ripping away at
this architecture. Rubble, and trees,
and smashed up ships come crashing back through here
and over back into the sea. NARRATOR: This
scene of destruction was repeated all along the
coast of Crete and far beyond. Not even the brilliant builders
of the great reinforced walls at the Palace of
Knossos could have foreseen the power of the
tremors that accompanied these waves. They rocked the island. Massive earthquakes
caused by the volcano shook the palace
to its foundations. The devastation of this ancient
civilization was complete. Today, long after
the destruction that struck the
Mediterranean, the search for the links that bind these
places to the story of Atlantis has taken a new turn. The final extraordinary clue
leads east to the ancient land of Egypt. [volcano erupting] For the survivors of the largest
volcanic eruption in history, life in the Mediterranean
became hell on Earth. Thousands were dead. Tsunamis had poisoned
the land with salt water, and the air was thick with
ash and noxious gases. Just as Plato wrote when he
described the end of Atlantis, the island of Santorini, at the
center of this newly discovered world, had been destroyed. It had been blown to smithereens
then swallowed by the sea. And 100 miles away, the
great palaces of Crete had been devastated
by quakes and engulfed by terrible tidal waves. In their search for
evidence of the survivors of this devastating
cataclysm, our investigators are piecing together
the final chapter in the life of this
extraordinary civilization. When the tsunami swept through
here and reduced this building behind me to foundation level,
the best way for the survivors to cope was to go to
the most powerful nation and the wealthiest nation
of the time to ask for help. NARRATOR: Alexander MacGillivray
believes that the survivors turned to their
long-term trading partners, the Egyptians. There may have been people
brought in from elsewhere to help with all of this,
with the Pharaoh in Egypt contributing the wealth
and perhaps the manpower. NARRATOR: This close
relationship with Egypt is probably the single most
important link that researchers have established between this
newly discovered civilization and the stories of Atlantis. Because the origin of the story
of Atlantis was not Greek, it was Egyptian. In 590 BC, in the holiest
shrine of Egypt's capital, the great Greek
statesman, Solon, was shown ancient inscriptions. They date back to almost
1,000 years before, 1450 BC. These documents told of the
existence of a civilization of great power and prestige,
ruler of all the lands to the west of Egypt. When Solon returned to his
homeland, the story of Atlantis became part of Greek folklore,
a tale told at parties and passed down through
the generations, until in 370 BC, Plato
penned his version of this Egyptian tale. Now on the wall of
an Egyptian tomb, researchers have
discovered inscriptions that they believe are the
original texts that were shown to Solon. It turns out that Solon
must have invented the name Atlantis, because
the Egyptians called the people of this ancient
world by another name. That name was Keftiu, and
Keftiu is the Egyptian name for the people of Crete,
the very island at the heart of this lost world. So what happened
to the survivors from this remarkable
civilization? There are signs on
Crete that the Keftiu did begin to recover
after the effects of the catastrophic volcano. But the survivors were
dangerously vulnerable. And soon after the
catastrophe, warriors from the Greek
mainland invaded Crete. The Minoans did not have
the strength or the numbers to repel the invaders,
and the island fell. This finally spelled the
end of one of the greatest civilizations in human history. The sophisticated
engineering techniques and the extraordinary
architecture that gave them their unique
identity disappeared forever. The Greeks went on to dominate
the entire Western world. They gave birth to a culture
on which Western societies are based. But things could have
been so different. If I weren't for the tsunami
and the Theran eruption, we would probably be
reading Plato in Minoan. The Minoans would have
continued to expand their empire on to the Greek mainland. The White House would
probably look more like the palace at Knossos than
classical Greek architecture. NARRATOR: There are
still many questions to be answered that
could shed light on the links between the
great palaces, towns, and temples of
Crete and Santorini, and the mysterious legends
of the Egyptians Keftiu and Plato's Atlantis. On Santorini, vast areas
wait to be excavated, and the ocean bed remains
largely unexplored. But time may be running out. At the heart of the caldera,
beneath the towering cliffs of the modern day Santorini, is
the Nea Kameni, or new furnace. It is the site of
the present volcano, and it is still very much alive. When the volcano collapsed after
the eruption 3,500 years ago, it left behind a hole in
the ocean 1,000 feet deep. Since that time, the volcano
has been growing again, pushing back up through the ocean. Today, it rises 400
feet above sea level, back almost to the
size that it was when it erupted 35 centuries ago. [volcano erupting] Seismologists believe
that it will erupt again. The question is when. FLOYD MCCOY: When that
next big of a blast comes, the best we can do is hope that
we can predict it and get away. If we don't, if we stay here
for that next big explosion, we'll be a piece of the
volcanic ash deposit. NARRATOR: When the
volcano does blow, it will engulf the surrounding
islands again, freezing life in a moment of time,
burying it under a new layer of volcanic ash. A new lost world
will be created. [volcano erupting] [music playing]
