I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next girl, and this is one of the best ones I've heard in a while. According to a report by The Sun, some theorists believe that there is actually a hidden city underneath the icy surface of Antarctica -- and it could be the mysterious Lost City of Atlantis.
Rumors surrounding what exactly happened to Atlantis have been swirling for years -- literally years, ever since Plato's "Timaeus" and "Critias" ended with the city being submerged in the Atlantic Ocean. Most historians believe that the city was actually located somewhere near the Greek island of Santorini in the Mediterranean Sea, while others think it was near the Canary Islands.
This new theory, called "crustal displacement," insists that movements in the Earth's crust over the last few-thousand years could have left parts of Antarctica ice-free. Yes, this would have been roughly 12,000 years ago, but people could have lived there at that time. Basically, the theory argues that a city could have existed prior to the Ice Age, which sent the entire continent into a perpetual deep freeze.
Dr. Vanessa Bowman of the British Antarctic Survey once said of climate change near Antarctica, "Go back 100 million years ago and Antarctica was covered in lush rainforests similar to those that exist in New Zealand today."
To further prove this point, there is the 500-year-old Piri Reis map, a world map drawn by an admiral of the Ottoman Empire. The map clearly shows the west coast of Africa, east coast of South America and northern coast of Antarctica -- which is without ice.
As if this wasn't enough to make conspiracy theorists run wild, a mysterious pyramid was recently discovered on Antarctica's surface in the Ellsworth Mountains. The structure is nothing more than a pyramid-shaped mountain at this point, but the Google Earth image of it alone is enough to make you wonder -- did someone create this? Maybe something inside the mountain would answer some of our questions?
What does all this mean, exactly? Well it means that there's a chance Atlantis wasn't covered up by a volcanic eruption + tsunami near Santorini, but was instead covered in ice closer to the South Pole. The half-god/half-human beings that Plato claimed existed 9,000 years before himself remain as mysterious as ever.