What other candidate for the Atlantis myth could their be?
There have only been just two candidates -- either outside the mouth of the Mediterranean at Gibraltar, or Plato's imagination.
“What other candidate for the Atlantis myth could their be?”
There is a possibility that an Atlantis did exist in the Atlantic ocean. This is discussed at some length in Graham Hancock’s “Underworld”.
The knowledge of Atlantis was supposedly imparted by an Egyptian priest during a visit of Plato’s relative Solon to Egypt in the 6th century B.C. which was then presunably passed on to Plato through family lore. Per the story, Atlantis had been destroyed 9,000 years prior to Solon’s visit to Egypt.
Around the time of Atlantis’ supposed destruction the glaciers covering North America and Britain failed catastrophically as the ice age was coming to an end. The glaciers had acted as giant dams for melted water and when the ice dams failed vast amounts of water were relased at once into the world’s oceans.
The Laurentide glacier released an estimated one million cubic kilometers of water at once which then raised sea level world wide. The glacier that covered Britain also collapsed in a similar manner. The weight of the British glacier had compressed the land underneath by about half a mile. At the same time land had bulged apparently somewhere to the south of the island. When the glacial dam failed the land underneath rebounded and the bulge that may have been above water collapsed.
What I found most interesting is that the dating of the glacial collapses coincided with the date given for the destruction of Atlantis. I discount the explosion of Santorini as the origin for the Atlantis legend since the priest that passed the legend on to Solon did not date it as 1000 years previously to his visit but 9,000. Charles Pelegrino in his book “Unearthing Atlantis” had the date of the explosion of the Santorini volcano of 1628 BC, about 1000 years prior to the visit by Solon.
Even if the collapse of the glaciers don’t explain Atlantis they appear to be the source of the legends of the great flood that occurs in the Bible and the folklore of other civilizations and cultures. What I find most interesting of all is that the incidents were preserved in legends for almost 10,000 years.