Lost island 'Atlantis' may be found

An undersea island hit by a tsunami 12,000 years ago may be the source of Plato's Atlantis myth, according to a geologist and a report this month in the journal Geology.

Marc-Andre Gutscher, a geologist at University of Western Brittany in Plouzane, France, discovered a coarse-grained sedimentary deposit that could be a tsunami remnant on the submerged Spartel Island, the BBC reported. The island is 60 meters under the sea in the Gulf of Cadiz, which sits between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.

The sediment dates to 12,000 years ago, or about when the philosopher Plato said Atlantis was destroyed in a tale more than 2,000 years ago. Plato said Atlantis had been demolished in a single day and night, disappearing below the sea.

Gutsher's findings lend proof to an earlier theory that Spartel inspired the legend of Altlantis. In 2001, French geologist Jacques Collina-Girard first proposed Spartel as the lost civilization.