Just days after the world witnessed the devastating power of natural disasters in Japan, some scientists say they have strong proof of the location of the mythical “lost City of Atlantis,” destroyed by a tsunami thousands of years ago.
Historically, the lost city has been commonly believed to be in the middle of an ocean. The new proposed site of Atlantis is 60 miles inland, submerged in the swampy Dona Ana Park north of Cadiz, Spain.
(More on TIME.com: See the top 10 Google earth finds)
“This is the power of tsunamis,” Professor Richard Freund of the University of Hartford told Reuters. “It is so hard to understand that it can wipe out 60 miles inland, and that’s pretty much what we’re talking about.”
In 2009 and 2010, the team of archaeologists and geologists used deep-ground radar, digital mapping and underwater technology to survey the marshlands of the Dona Ana Park. Freund’s team discovered a series of memorial cities, believed to be built by Atlantis refugees, which gave the researches added confidence in their findings.
The team’s findings were unveiled Sunday evening in “Finding Atlantis,” a Discovery Channel special.
The legend of Atlantis dates back to the Greek philosopher Plato, who described the island as “larger than Libya and Asia put together” in 360 B.C.E. Plato wrote that “in a single day and night…[Atlantis] disappeared into the depths of the sea,” siting earthquakes and flooding 9,000 years earlier as the causes for the city’s destruction. Plato’s Atlantis is located in front of the Pillars of Hercules, the ancient name for the Straits of Gibraltar, the narrow piece of water separating Morocco and Spain.
The most recent alleged Atlantis finding came in 2009, when a British man found an unnatural pattern in the Atlantic Ocean off the cost of North Africa while searching on Google Ocean.
(More on TIME.com: See one search for the lost city of Atlantis.)