Raising A Legend

The utopian civilization that sank beneath the waves more than 11,000 years ago (or so the legend goes) has spawned hundreds of books, placing it everywhere from Bolivia to Sweden to the Sahara. Here are five theories that have surfaced this year:

NOVEMBER
American architect turned mythologist Robert Sarmast announced last week that Atlantis lies off the southeast coast of Cyprus. Sarmast says sonar scans taken earlier this month show man-made structures on the seabed, and that the area matches many of the details of the site given by Plato.

OCTOBER
Maverick Russian astrophysicist Alexander Chechelnitsky asserted that the lost continent was situated in Alaska's Yukon River valley, and that the change in the earth's axis — and the repositioning of the North Pole — brought about its cataclysmic end. Refreshingly undogmatic for an Atlantis hunter, he is quoted as saying: "I don't have any concrete scientific proof for my theory. But I believe in it."

JUNE
German physicist Rainer Kühne argued — based on satellite images that he says show ancient ruins — that Atlantis lies under what are now salt marshes near the southern Spanish city of Cádiz.

SEPTEMBER
Swedish geographer Ulf Erlingsson argued in a new book that Atlantis is in fact Ireland, and the legend was inspired by the fate of the Dogger Bank, which sank into the North Sea in 6,100 B.C.

SPRING 2005
A diving expedition led by French archaeologist Jacques Collina-Girard will try to prove that Atlantis lies just west of the Straits of Gibraltar. His team believes Plato exaggerated the city's splendors, and will look for signs of prehistoric civilization rather than temples of gold.