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Concept
List of lost lands
Summary
Lost lands are islands or continents believed by some to have existed during pre-history, but to have since disappeared as a result of catastrophic geological phenomena.
Legends of lost lands often originated as scholarly or scientific theories, only to be picked up by writers and individuals outside the academy. Occult and New Age writers have made use of Lost Lands, as have subaltern peoples such as the Tamils in India. Phantom islands, as opposed to lost lands, are land masses formerly believed by cartographers to exist in the current historical age, but to have been discredited as a result of expanding geographic knowledge. The classification of lost lands as continents, islands, or other regions is in some cases subjective; for example, Atlantis is variously described as either a "lost island" or a "lost continent". Lost land theories may originate in mythology or philosophy, or in scholarly or scientific theories, such as catastrophic theories of geology.
With the development of plate tectonic simulation software, new lost land has been discovered and confirmed by the scientific community (like Greater Adria in 2019).
Although the existence of lost continents in the above sense is mythical (aside from Zealandia and Greater Adria), there were many places on Earth that were once dry land, but submerged after the ice age around 10,000 BCE due to rising sea levels, and possibly were the basis for Neolithic and Bronze Age flood myths. Some were lost due to coastal erosion or volcanic eruptions. An (incomplete) list follows:
A large island in the Mediterranean Sea, of which Malta is the only part not now submerged.
Dadu Island, which was legally the southernmost point of the United States of America, located at Palmyra Atoll (an incorporated U.S. territory) and still shown on the map, was a bare sand islet washed away by a storm in 2014. (It was named after a dog, "Dadu", that had lived at the atoll.)
Balkanatolia, a sunken land in the Mediterranean Sea.
Beringia, connecting Asia and North America.
Official source
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Related concepts (5)
Mu (mythical lost continent)
Mu is a mythical lost continent introduced by Augustus Le Plongeon (1825–1908), who identified the "Land of Mu" with Atlantis. The name was subsequently identified with the hypothetical land of Lemuria by James Churchward (1851–1936), who asserted that it was located in the Pacific Ocean before its destruction. The place of Mu in both pseudoscience and fantasy fiction is discussed in detail in Lost Continents (1954, 1970) by L. Sprague de Camp.
Lemuria
Lemuria (lɪˈmjʊəriə), or Limuria, was a continent proposed in 1864 by zoologist Philip Sclater, theorized to have sunk beneath the Indian Ocean, later appropriated by occultists in supposed accounts of human origins. The theory was discredited with the discovery of plate tectonics and continental drift in the 20th century. The hypothesis was proposed as an explanation for the presence of lemur fossils in Madagascar and the Indian subcontinent but not in Africa or the Middle East.
Atlantis
Atlantis () is a fictional island mentioned in Plato's works Timaeus and Critias as part of an allegory on the hubris of nations. In the story, Atlantis is described as a naval empire that ruled all Western parts of the known world, making it the literary counter-image of the Achaemenid Empire. After an ill-fated attempt to conquer "Ancient Athens," Atlantis falls out of favor with the deities and submerges into the Atlantic Ocean.