The Drowned Meridian: Crustal Displacement and the Atlantis of the Seventy-Second Degree

This paper proposes that the Lost City Hydrothermal Field on the Atlantis Massif (30°07′N 42°07′W) is the likely site of Plato's Atlantis before the close of the Pleistocene. My observations place the Lost City 73°15′ west of the Great Pyramid, on the meridian marked by omicron Virginis, and Angkor Wat 72°43′ east of Giza. In the model, a rigid rotation of the crust of 11°57′ about an axis through 53°19′N 176°40′E (Bering Sea) and its antipode 53°19′S 3°19′W places the Lost City ground, before the event, at 25°05′N and exactly 72°00′ west of Giza. To hold Angkor Wat 72°43′ east of Giza, the Sunda plate would be required to move 4°22′ east on its own in the same catastrophe, and the symmetry of seventy-two then framed both sides of the former world. The same turn carries the ground that stood at the Lost City's present coordinates 1,329 km (825 miles) east to 33°55′N 28°43′W, beside the Great Meteor Seamount, and sets the Temple of the Sun at Sogamoso 1°09′ south of the former equator. The model treats the displacement as an event, distinct from ordinary plate motion and polar wander, and places its occasion in the Younger Dryas of about 12,900 years ago: the impact and biomass-burning horizon of Firestone, West and colleagues; the solar-proton spike dated by LaViolette in the Cariaco Basin and Greenland ice; Peratt's Z-pinch aurora recorded in rock art on every continent; and the geomagnetic excursions of that age. A passing star or a nearby supernova, Vela among the candidates, could have sent the giant comet of the Taurid stream inward. Behind the Sun stand the planets, whose barycentric motion and tidal alignments appear to pace the solar cycle, and the Sun's outbursts, driving currents through the crust, would load the ridges and faults. The mantle stands prepared to yield: ringwoodite in the transition zone and water-rich rhyolitic chambers weaken the rock; two continent-sized dense provinces at the core-mantle boundary govern the planet's balance; and the rocky shell has already turned some 12° over the liquid core, 84 million years ago. The model predicts a sudden change in magnetic inclination equal to the change in latitude at each site, a redistribution of the equatorial ocean bulge recorded in Younger Dryas shorelines, and a corresponding shift in the Greenland ice-core latitude. Those three records can test it. Companion paper to The Eye of the Maiden: The Star of the Younger Dryas over Giza and Angkor (Lucky Bird Press, 2026).