Thera (Santorini)

Thera, now Santorini, is a ring of islands around a flooded volcanic caldera in the southern Aegean. Around 1600 BCE it produced the Minoan eruption, rated 7 on the volcanic explosivity index and one of the largest eruptions of the last several thousand years. Radiocarbon studies favour dates in the late 17th or 16th century BCE, and the exact year is still argued over.

The eruption buried the Bronze Age town of Akrotiri under pumice and ash. No bodies have been found there, which suggests people fled during earlier warning tremors. Tsunamis struck the coast of Crete. Minoan culture recovered for a time, but it declined within a few generations, and historians still debate how much the eruption contributed.

In the 20th century the Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos proposed that memories of the eruption lay behind Plato's story of Atlantis. The idea is popular, but most scholars do not accept it; Plato's dates, size and location for Atlantis do not match.