← Back to the front page

Unusual Historic Crises and Calamities

Khalid Elhassan April 16, 2020 34 min

3. The Calamity Behind the Legend of Atlantis

Sometime between 1642 – 1540 BC, Santorini in today’s Greece experienced one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded history. It was about four times as powerful as the gigantic Krakatoa eruption of 1883. The explosion sundered the island of Thera, and wiped out the flourishing Minoan settlement of nearby Akrotiri and surrounding islands.

Known as the Minoan Eruption of Thera, the event gave rise to the legend of the vanished civilization of Atlantis, which was doomed by a natural catastrophe and swallowed by the sea. Beyond legend, however, the Minoan Eruption was one of history’s most impactful natural disasters, with consequences not only to its own era, but with knock-on effects and a chain of causation leading directly to the world in which we live today.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.