Atlantis speculation is fun. It’s also wild that aboriginal stories exist about the flooding that happened circa 15,000 years ago with the meltwater pulse of the last ice age. Neolithic history had to put up with climate change that was an entire order of magnitude more dramatic than anything we are worried about, as Europe and North America shed enormous land ice sheets that were miles thick.

It's the Richat Structure lol. Totally makes sense they built concentric ringed canals on top of a natural formation from an ancient volcano. There isn't that many of these in the world. I dunno if you have read "The Apocalypse of Yajnavalkya" but the big picture they paint in that book really convinced me. Their thesis is based on the geological history involving the cold period known as the Dryas that led to the Stone Age, about 12000 years ago. Their hypothesis was that it was triggered by a massive meteor storm that struck the earth across north america, the atlantic and europe, up to the Black Sea. (btw, there's good reason to believe that Noah lived in what is now Bulgaria and his boat floated into the black sea and out into the greek archipelago). It goes further also, and says that they predicted the coming of the storm and relocated their settlement to what is modern Egypt, amongst other things building the great pyramids and the Sphinx, and the egyptians of modern times were mostly descendants of peoples who discovered the abandoned structures after the Atlanteans took off in the direction of the Taurus constellation, specifically the legendary Pleiades. Tartarus is underneath Tenerife tho. The name itself kinda hints at it, ten- as in tension, peniTENt, and now I am in portuguese speaking land, the word for "hold" or "have" is also related to this root. I kinda didn't realise just how much influence Latin had on Bulgarian quite until I started to learn a bit of Portuguese. The grammar of the two languages is very very close. I always thought the phonetics were connected, the portuguese love the SH consonant a lot, just like the slavs, though they use it mostly for plurals. Also, Madeira was known by the ancient greeks as "The Blessed Isles" and its only downside was the rough coastline which apparently was seen to have whales dashed on it by the ancient greeks. Having spent some time around the coast of this island I can understand. It's a meatgrinder of a coastline. Really young. Mostly still pretty much sharp stones. The chinese shop in Santa Cruz had beach rock protection shoes pretty much right at the front of their showroom. I got a pair, they are essential if you wade into the beaches. The sea is intense, to be honest, you have to be really strong swimmer to go out there in most parts, it's not gentle. Not intense, most of the time, but rarely still enough that you can chill, and absolutely zero natural sandy beaches. Anyhow, there's my crazy piece on it. I'm sure the Azores are important in some way to this whole story, but they are the upper edge of the cluster of islands that goes down through Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verde. The climate there is very suitable for cows. The land is substantially older than here in Madeira, and as such a lot more plains land that you can grow grass on.