Here's the question, and I know it's late considering the date this thread began: was there an Atlantis or not?
Here is what I came up with, and I found out there were others who said the same thing independently...
It began with a TV show broadcast a few years ago on the National Geographic Channel titled "Finding Atlantis", and some of you probably saw it. The premise of the show was that Atlantis was located in southwestern Spain, and was part of the culture some scholars have identified as "Tartessos", i.e. the Biblical Tarshish, where tin was made, according to the ancients. At the time of the broadcast all I could think of was that it was another crackpot theory regarding the island's location, and there are a lot of crackpot theories out there. The show stipulated that Atlantis was an island within a bay, and this area was hit by a tsunami, wiping out the island and the culture. The researchers in question - some were archaeologists - were shown recovering a few small artifacts within the Doñana National Park, which is northwest of Rota, Spain near the Atlantic coast.
Taking the skeptic's line, I wanted to know if this area would match up with what Plato said about Atlantis, specifically about the mud. Plato said that after Atlantis sunk, there was a muddy shoal making navigation impossible. The above picture is the Doñana area, which is predominantly open or farmland; the park is to the west of the river. It is also flat, low-lying land, and I did see recent Google and Bing maps showing this area as flooded. This is also a mudplain, the sediment having come down from the nearby hills.
This picture is a closeup of the area. Where it says "Parque Nacional" in this image is water damage from at least one tsunami, and some of it extends five miles inland.
The third image is just to the south, with possibly a smaller tsunami responsible for the whitish markings along the coastline; the furthest one inland is about two miles from the shoreline. So, if Atlantis was an island within this bay, it's safe to assume that it was wiped out by a tsunami leaving no trace except a muddy shoal that no one could navigate into. In this respect it does match Plato's account.
Atlantis was also a ringed island, and there is just such a feature within these images; you'll see it in the right-center of the third image. That part of the park was never mentioned in the show. My suggestion for anyone interested is to get ground-penetrating radar over there and see what's underneath.
