<begin transmission>
Atlantis was an early attempt at creating an artificial continent. It
got nowhere near as big as often depicted in legend, but it did get
fairly large before the materials wore out and dunked the whole thing
into the ocean.
Its primary material was wood - it could float well enough long enough
for a good-sized civilization to emerge, but eventually, some of the
lesser well-maintained sections of the continent became waterlogged
and rotted.
Trees and rocks and buildings all floating on one great big giant
glorified "raft" - with some of today's materials, it could be made to
work. But the people who designed it in that day and age were
unguided, and were much more ignorant about such matters.
The concentric circle arrangement served a very simple purpose:
Wave-breakers. As a giant raft, the place would have bobbed and
weaved every which way just like anything else that floats on the
ocean. Outer layers were constructed to serve as a damper for the
transatlantic tides. The outermost two or three layers were designed
to be buoyant - they could bob and weave and float, but absorbed some
of the tidal energies before the tide moved in to the next layer,
which could bob & weave but much less than the outer two. By the time
the tides made it past the first 7 or 8 circles, the sea within the
heart of Atlantis lay as smooth and still as a sheet of glass.
It was such a beautiful thing. And they understood about not blocking
too much of the sun from the ocean below, because they knew of the
creatures that depended upon the ocean sun for survival. Some
buildings were made of crystal constructed in such a way as to collect
light from the sun and disperse it into the ocean beneath the floating
behemoth. It was a kind of "fiber optics", old-world style - the
sunlight could be collected in arrays of crystalline structures and
funneled around the buildings and the streets of Atlantis, beneath
which it streamed into the ocean even deeper than it would have had
Atlantis not been there.
Naturally, some of the flotation chambers rotted and rusted away, and
once they began filling with water, the end of Atlantis was
inevitable. Her citizens became complacent after a time, having every
faith in the ability of their glorious city to uphold them from the
ocean depths forever, even after they stopped paying so much attention
to her maintenance.
Very few remains - the wood and the steel have all dissipated into the
ocean, the stone all barnacle-covered and unrecognizable. Some areas
of the world did construct floating land-bridges to Atlantis, but
those were pulled down with her when she sank. Very few traces of
them remain today.
Atlantis can be rebuilt in the modern world, much more effectively.
But should it? There are some of us who ache to see her reborn, yet
perhaps she's just too ambitious an endeavor for humanity's level of
maturation.
<end transmission>
I miss her almost as much as I miss The Source - and that's probably
why she sank. :-(
- Katie
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