The flooding of the Black Sea area some 7000 years ago would have made for better legend creation, being a gradual rise that allowed or forced an orderly migration, than a catastrophic disaster such as was described by Plato.
Atlantis fell too quickly to have been anything gradual, and disappeared too utterly to have been easily located.
I’m still very intrigued by what may be yet discovered in the ancient shoreline of the Black Sea, which may be an anoxic icebox for preservation.
Similar discoveries may yet tell us fascinating aspects of time spent in other lost lands such as Beringia and Doggerland.
But nothing will be more rewarding than tangible aspects of that fabled lost Atlantis!
And yet, the only remotely compelling legend about the Black Sea flood they could come up with is from Diodorus’ preservation of a possible account of the glacial meltdown. The Aegean islanders who were the source of this tale were not in the right place, so Ryan and Pitman try to explain them as a transplant — descendants of a group that lost their homes in the flooded area, crossed over the hundred+ miles to an Aegean Island, then transferred their tale of loss and survival to their new surroundings during subsequent generations. Diodorus even states that submerged remains of their lost town could still be seen. IOW, this is probably completely unrelated to the Black Sea flood — the tale may be the result of some submerged ruins from one of the all-too-common quakes during classical times, and during Mycenaean times.
Experts Face Off on ‘Noah’s Flood’
by John Noble Wilford
January 9, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/09/science/09FLOO.html?pagewanted=all
... “The large claim connecting the Black Sea flood and Noah’s flood can no longer be sustained,” Dr. Andrew M. T. Moore, an archaeologist and dean of liberal arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said in an interview afterward.
Dr. Stephanie Dalley, a historian at Oxford University in England and a specialist on Babylonian mythology, said that the “supposed similarities” between the Black Sea event and the flood story of Gilgamesh “are random and wrong.” ...