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Atlantis may be a myth, but there are many actual cities that are now at the bottom of the ocean. From ancient greek metropolises to modern beach towns, sometimes a city is just at the wrong place and the wrong time. Host Erin McCarthy goes through history's most notable sunken cities in today's episode of The List Show. Don't miss a video! Subscribe NOW: https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss?sub_confirmation=1 About Mental Floss: Mental Floss is where curious people come for trivia-tastic information. Mental Floss produces lists of fun facts, debunks common misconceptions, and tells untold stories from history, science, culture and more. Website: http://www.mentalfloss.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mental_floss Facebook: https://facebook.com/mentalflossmagazine Discord: https://discord.io/mentalfloss Copyright Notice: This video and YouTube channel contain dialog, music, and images that are property of Mental Floss. You are authorized to share the video link and channel, and embed this video in your website or others as long as a link back to this YouTube Channel is provided. 2025 Mental Floss 9 Real-Life Sunken Cities | Mental Floss https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss
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When you think about sunken cities, your mind probably jumps right to Atlantis
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that super-advanced island nation mentioned in Plato's works that became really wicked and
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hedonistic and was eventually relegated to the bottom of the ocean after getting hit with some
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earthquakes. Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy, Editor-in-Chief of Mental Floss, and this is The List Show
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Unfortunately for conspiracy theorists and fans of Aquaman, Atlantis probably didn't actually
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exist. As Benjamin Radford writes at Live Science, the island is a moral fable of which
0:27
no trace has ever been found despite advances in oceanography and ocean floor mapping in the past
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decades. But luckily for fans of Aquaman, there are plenty of real-life sunken cities, villages
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and towns we're going to talk about today, from a legendary historical city spotted from the air
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to a village that occasionally ends up back above water. Let's dive in. Being up in a plane provides unique opportunities to see the world as you've never seen it before
0:56
and John T. Cull, a pilot in Britain's Royal Air Force, discovered that firsthand in 1933
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He was flying over Abukir Bay, not far from Alexandria on Egypt's Mediterranean coast
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when he saw something strange under the waves. Ruins. Scholar and Egyptian royal Prince Omar Toussaint got wind of the discovery, and he was intrigued
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A number of ancient historians had written about cities that once existed in the area
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but no one knew exactly where they were. A biography of Toussaint says that he consulted
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with local fishermen who confirmed the presence of ruins in an area about a mile offshore
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A diver employed by Tsun found marble columns, the remains of structures, and a statue of Alexander
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the Great. Or just the head of a statue of Alexander the Great. Sources differ. The site's
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true significance wasn't known until the 1990s, when it was confirmed to be part of the ancient
1:43
Canopic region, featuring towns like, well, Canopus. Canopus wasn't the only sunken city
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lurking in the area. In the early 2000s, divers working nearby hauled up a huge stone fragment
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from under mud and silt on the seabed. Soon they found another six pieces of stone, alongside other
2:00
artifacts like pottery, jewelry, and coins. The stone pieces comprised a statue of Happy
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god of the Nile, which had once stood over the ancient port city of Thonis Heracleion
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Thonis Heracleion was founded more than 2,000 years ago and was spread across several islands
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Both Thonis Heracleion and Canopus experienced rising sea levels The cities may have been condemned to the depths by liquefaction caused by an earthquake that occurred in the 8th century CE The artifacts being brought up by divers hadn seen the surface for more than a thousand years
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Archaeologist Frank Godillo described the process of finding the ruins to the financial times, saying
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There was a long preparatory period before we could even think of putting divers in the water
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It is like modern medicine. A surgeon would not consider doing an operation before gathering as
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much information about the patient from medical records, scans, x-rays, and so on. First, they
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yzed ancient texts to zero in on a location for Thonis Heracleion, which they then mapped with
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advanced technology that further narrowed their target area. Only then could divers get into the
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water. Among the discoveries they made on the seafloor were huge statues, a massive temple
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and more than 60 ships. One of the artifacts brought up from the depths was a stele that
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Godio said, solved an ancient mystery by showing that the cities of Heracleion, its Greek name
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and Thonis, its Egyptian name, were the same place. Founded in the 5th century BCE on the
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coast of North Africa, Neopolis did major business in the fermented fish-based sauce
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garum. In fact, it may have been the largest manufacturer of garum in the ancient Roman world
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Unfortunately though, most of the town was wiped off the map in July 365 CE after a strong earthquake
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maybe 8.5 magnitude by modern measurements, triggered a huge tsunami that also damaged
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Alexandria and Crete. In 2017, ruins of the city were discovered near Nabul on the northeast coast
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of Tunisia. The site, which was around 50 acres, included not just streets and monuments, but also
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somewhere in the area of a hundred tanks to make garum. Probably the notables of Neapolis owed their
3:55
fortune to garum, the expedition head said after the discovery. One of the oldest submerged cities
4:00
in the world can be found in Vatika Bay in southeastern Peloponnese, Greece. The Bronze Age
4:04
settlement, whose modern name is Pevlo Petri, is more than 5,000 years old. According to the World
4:09
Monuments Fund, the city was inhabited from the 3rd millennium until about 1100 BCE. Like the other
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cities we've discussed so far, at least one natural disaster sent it to the bottom of the sea
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And maybe an earthquake as well. Man, natural disasters really have it out for ancient cities
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huh? The site was discovered in 1967. There are streets, buildings, and even burial areas
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Sadly because many ships anchor in Vatica Bay Pevlo Petri is threatened by pollution And because access to the site isn restricted looting So far all of the sunken cities we featured have ended up underwater because of natural disasters but that not
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always the case. Take, for example, Shechen, or Lion City, in China's Zhaizhang province
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The more than 1,300-year-old city was flooded in 1959 to create a reservoir and hydroelectric
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station for a nearby town. For decades, Shechen sat quietly forgotten about 130 feet under the
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surface of Chandao Lake, until the Chinese government sent an expedition there in the
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early 2000s. The ruins, which include streets, entrance gates, and archways featuring carvings
5:09
of lions, dragons, and phoenixes, as well as walls that the BBC says date back to the 16th century
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are remarkably well preserved by the water. In the mid-1900s, after its residents were relocated
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several stone houses and a church that comprised the 12th or 13th century village of Fabriquet
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di Corregina were flooded for a new hydroelectric dam. The difference between this town and our
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other sunken cities is that it occasionally resurfaces when the lake that it's under
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is emptied to allow maintenance on the dam. The lake has been emptied four times so far
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The last time, in 1994, attracted around a million spectators. There's been talk in recent
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years of draining the lake again. According to an Italian news outlet, a previously planned
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draining was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Bay Ocean, Oregon, a resort town once known as
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the Atlantic City of the West, was the brainchild of the Potter family. Patriarch TB Potter was a
6:00
real estate tycoon. According to Oregon field guide Potter's teenage son, Thomas, was vacationing
6:05
in Oregon and spotted a narrow, four-mile-long piece of sand in Tillamook Bay, which he supposedly
6:10
got to hike firsthand when retrieving the carcass of a goose heat shot. Portland resident Jerry
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Sutherland told Oregon field guide in 2020 that from the high ridge line that ran down the southern
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portion of the spit, you could see both the bay on one side and the ocean on the other
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Potter and his father bought the land and made plans to build a hotel, heated pool
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dance hall, and bowling alley. And sell land so people could build summer homes
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They even worked with the Army Corps of Engineers to construct a jetty to ensure the water around
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their resort town was nice and calm. Things were good. Until they weren't
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Bayocean's spit was made of sand, and you can't always depend on features like that to stay the
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same. Two families who owned summer cottages in Bayocean found that out firsthand, when they
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showed up for the summer only to find that their homes had vanished into the sea Other homes followed The jetty that calmed Bay Ocean waters also caused its sand to be washed away making the situation worse Before
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long, the bottom of Bay Ocean's pool was exposed over the beach. It was eventually destroyed in a
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storm in the 1930s, and the population of the town dwindled. By the 1950s, the town was abandoned
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About two decades later, the sea took the spit's last structure, a garage. In the early 1700s
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the French built a fort on what would later become Plaquemine Parish in Louisiana and named it
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La Belize. The place was apparently infested with alligators, leading one explorer to comment
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it seems a mystery how these obviously voracious creatures are able to find prey enough to still
7:34
their hunger. And that wasn't its only issue. La Belize was basically in a low-lying swamp
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and it was extremely vulnerable to hurricanes. It first got wiped out in 1740. The town was
7:45
rebuilt in a slightly different location, but it wasn't long before it got destroyed again
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Because the settlement was strategically important, the town persevered despite being repeatedly battered by storms. The settlement was abandoned in the 1860s, and a new town was
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built a few miles upriver. About 100 years ago, all that remained of the settlement were some
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headstones and an ancient iron tomb, in the words of one visitor. Let's finish up with a sunken city
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discovered relatively recently. In 1362, Rungholt, a trading hub on the German coast of the North Sea
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was swept away by a storm surge. Its ruins were found in the mud near Hallig-Südfall Island with
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the help of magnetic surveys, which identified a number of mounds the settlement was built
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on, as well as the foundations of what researchers believed to be a church, which was found in 2023
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Legend has it that the town was wiped away because of its wickedness, but Rungholt's
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demise may have had more to do with where it was built. According to archaeologists from Kiel University in Germany, Rungholt's builders radically
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altered the landscape of the area, which was basically uninhabitable, when they constructed
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the settlement. backfired on them because they created huge vulnerabilities. With rising sea levels and
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increasing storminess, one day these dikes they built were not sufficient enough, and these
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settlements just drowned. Everything was destroyed. Earth was also in the midst of a little ice age
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which made conditions even more volatile. Historian Mitchell Hammond, who was not involved
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in the research, told the CBC that Runghold is a cautionary tale for coastlines today in an era of
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even more profound climate upheaval. That wraps up another episode of The List Show
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Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time
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