Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
A recurring public claim identifies the Azores Plateau with Plato's Atlantis: a landmass exposed at the last glacial lowstand, drowned since, on a timeline that Plato's "nine thousand years" is taken to record. This technical note isolates two specific, checkable propositions that the reading rests on and reports what standard published data return for each, taking no position on whether any lost civilization existed. Test 1 (mechanism). Across two deglacial reconstructions (ICE-6GC and ICE-7GNA), the Azores surface was below sea level even at the 21 ka lowstand (−1, 049 to −2, 844 m; never subaerial). The vertical lowering the drowning claim requires (~95 mm/yr, threshold T ≈ 2, 000 m) exceeds the fastest motion the islands' geodetic record shows by more than an order of magnitude (all 26 Azores GPS stations subside; fastest −3. 99 mm/yr), and cumulative glacial-isostatic-adjustment-plus-eustatic drowning (110. 6–112. 6 m) is ~10–20× short of T. The isostatic-seesaw mechanism falls one to two orders of magnitude short. Test 2 (date). Plato's figure maps to ~11, 550 cal BP, 103 yr from the Younger Dryas termination / Holocene boundary — a real, well-dated event. A pre-registered choice-space test shows that a round deep-time number lands within tolerance of some late-glacial event roughly 1-in-6 to 1-in-20 of the time by chance (highest on the proponent's most favourable menu), so the correspondence is unremarkable rather than impossible by chance; and a bare integer cannot in any case preserve a specific value across the transmission interval involved. Both results falsify specific sub-claims; neither bears on lost-civilization questions in general. All quantitative claims are extracted programmatically from the two deposited results files; every reference DOI was verified against CrossRef.
Elliot Allan (Fri,) studied this question.