Is Atlantis in the Sahara? The Richat Structure, Plato and the Green Sahara
What if we’ve been searching for Atlantis in the wrong place?
In this episode, I take you with me into one of archaeology’s most intriguing possibilities: maybe Atlantis didn’t sink into the sea at all… maybe it vanished beneath the sands of the Sahara.
At the center of this mystery sits one of the most striking formations on Earth — the Richat Structure in Mauritania. A perfect, 25-mile-wide bullseye carved into the desert.
Scientists still can’t agree on how it formed… and maybe that’s because it wasn’t shaped by nature at all.
And when you compare it to Plato’s description of Atlantis?
The similarities are impossible to ignore.
In this episode, I connect the threads of myth, geology, and ancient memory — and together, we’ll explore the possibility that Atlantis didn’t sink… it dried up.
The Sahara Event
This is exactly the kind of idea that gets under my skina nd shows up in my fiction. My new book, The Sahara Event, takes the question we’ve been asking — what if we’ve been looking for Atlantis in the wrong place? — and runs with it.
Here's what The Sahara Event is all about:
When an archaeologist dies protecting an impossible secret, her final message sends Eden Black racing to uncover an ancient crystal encoded with the knowledge of a lost civilization — a power that once turned a paradise into a wasteland.
From high-speed chases through Marrakech to an underground chamber older than recorded history, Eden must face a rogue scientist determined to use the crystal to reshape the world.
The last time it awakened, the Sahara was born.
This time… it could end everything.
Available in paperback and eBook.
Takeaways:
- The Richat Structure, located in Mauritania, may hold the key to Atlantis's location.
- Plato's description of Atlantis aligns remarkably well with the features of the Richat Structure.
- Ancient civilizations may have thrived in the Sahara when it was a lush green landscape.
- Legends such as Zerzura suggest that historical memories may echo through time, connecting cultures.
Got a Story Idea?
If you have a mystery, legend, or adventure you’d like me to explore, drop a comment or email me at hello@lukerichardsonauthor.com. I’d love to hear from you!
Join the Adventure Society!
Need more adventure in your life? (And let’s be honest, who doesn’t?) Join The Adventure Society, my weekly newsletter, where I share real-world explorations, book updates, and exclusive podcast insights. Sign up at:
LukeRichardsonAuthor.com/AdventureSociety
Get a Free Adventure Thriller!
A missing Picasso... A master thief... A thrilling race against time!
When a priceless Picasso disappears in Paris, legendary thief Bernard Moreau is the prime suspect. But as two unlikely allies—Eden Black and Adriana Villa—hunt him down, the chase turns deadly. It’s a race through the shadowed streets of Paris, where every twist is as unpredictable as the city itself.
Grab your FREE COPY of The Paris Heist here:
LukeRichardsonAuthor.com/Paris
Love Adventure Stories?
If you enjoyed today’s episode, you’ll love my books—fast-paced thrillers packed with action, history, and mystery.
Check them out at LukeRichardsonAuthor.com
Thanks for tuning in! See you in the next episode of The Adventure Story Podcast. 🏆🎙
Transcript
An advanced civilization with technology to surpass our own.
Speaker A:An unprecedented naval force with engineers who carved through solid rock to build a city of concentric rings.
Speaker A:A city that was then lost to time in a single day and night.
Speaker A:That's right.
Speaker A:Today, we're talking about Atlantis, Described by Plato 2,400 years ago, hunted for ever since, but never found.
Speaker A:Here's the question, though.
Speaker A:What if we've never found it because we've been looking in the wrong place?
Speaker A:What if the sea that swallowed Atlantis wasn't made of water, but made of sand?
Speaker A:Today, we're investigating one of archaeology's most tantalizing possibilities.
Speaker A:Maybe the legendary lost city of Atlantis lies not beneath the waves, but beneath the Sahara.
Speaker A:And perhaps marking its location is one of the most striking geological formations on the planet.
Speaker A:Hey, I'm Luke.
Speaker A:I'm an author of archaeological adventure novels.
Speaker A:Now, this is the Adventure Story podcast, where we chase legends, uncover history, and, of course, look for the truth.
Speaker A:Now, this legend starts at the eye of the Sahara, or the Richad structure, which is a massive geological formation in Mauritania.
Speaker A:It's giant.
Speaker A:It spans 25 miles from side to side.
Speaker A:Now, picture this.
Speaker A:A giant bullseye carved into the Earth with concentric rings of different colored rock radiating outward from a central point.
Speaker A:And that's basically what this is.
Speaker A:In fact, it's so perfectly circular and so enormous that early astronauts used it as a landmark while orbiting the Earth.
Speaker A:For decades, scientists have argued about it.
Speaker A:Some think it's a meteor impact crater, while others think it's some kind of volcano.
Speaker A:And I'll tell you this, both of them are wrong.
Speaker A:The rocks show no impact damage, and there's no volcanic material nearby.
Speaker A:Now, some experts have come forward to say it's a dome that's eroded over millions of years.
Speaker A:But that explanation has problems, too.
Speaker A:The symmetry is just perfect, and the central plateau is just too flat.
Speaker A:And there are signs of hydrothermal activity that don't quite fit in.
Speaker A:Now, could it be that the experts can't agree because they're all asking the wrong question?
Speaker A:They're all asking how nature created this.
Speaker A:What if it wasn't shaped by nature at all?
Speaker A:What if it was shaped by human hands?
Speaker A:What if the rich ad structure is the foundation of a once great city, its walls, its canals, its towers now long eroded beneath the sand?
Speaker A:Imagine looking back at New York City 10,000 years from now.
Speaker A:The glass towers are gone.
Speaker A:The bridges have crumbled.
Speaker A:The streets are buried beneath layers of dust.
Speaker A:But from above, patterns still remain.
Speaker A:The grid of Manhattan, the circular Sweep of Central park, the faint outlines of what was once a living, breathing metropolis.
Speaker A:And here's where things start to get really interesting because this has been Described before, over 2,000 years ago, you guessed it, by Plato.
Speaker A:As you'll probably know, Plato described Atlantis as a mighty island empire lying beyond the pyrrhors of Heracles, what we now call the Strait of Gibraltar.
Speaker A:Its people were powerful seafarers who ruled parts of Europe and North Africa until the entire civilization vanished in a single day and a single night.
Speaker A:But that's not all he said.
Speaker A:Here are some of his descriptions and stop me when these start to sound familiar.
Speaker A:Plato described the capital of Atlantis as a circular city made of concentric rings of land and water, three rings of ocean and two of land perfectly centered around a small island.
Speaker A:Yep, that's right.
Speaker A:The Richad structure has exactly the same pattern.
Speaker A:He said Atlantis stood around five and a half miles from the ocean.
Speaker A:Alright, right now the Richat is much further from the ocean.
Speaker A:But this hasn't always been the case.
Speaker A:When sea levels were higher, the edge of the structure would have been roughly that distance from the ancient Atlantic coastline.
Speaker A:And at the center of Atlantis, Plato described a flat island surrounded by walls of red, of white and of black.
Speaker A:Some of the very colours that appear naturally in, in the Rich ad's rock layers.
Speaker A:And he wrote that the city lay with mountains to the north.
Speaker A:Of course, the Rich ad sits south of the Atlas Mountains, exactly where you'd expect them to be.
Speaker A:Even the scale matches up surprisingly well.
Speaker A:Plato said the entire island was roughly 15 miles across.
Speaker A:The richat around 25 miles wide.
Speaker A:Not exactly, but close enough to raise an eyebrow.
Speaker A:I, I think now Plato was writing about philosophy, not a history textbook.
Speaker A:His story of Atlantis was meant to be an allegory about pride and downfall.
Speaker A:But when the geography, the scale and even the colors of the rock line up this neatly, it just makes you wonder, doesn't it?
Speaker A:Could it be that the legend of Atlantis didn't sink beneath the ocean at all, but was buried beneath Saharan sands?
Speaker A:Okay, so far we've got some similarities, but that could just be a coincidence, right?
Speaker A:I'd agree if Plato were our only source.
Speaker A:About 400 years later, the legend surfaces again, this time in the hands of a Roman geographer.
Speaker A:Around 43 CE, the Roman scholar Pomponius Mela set out to map the known world.
Speaker A:A daring task in an age when much of it was still a mystery.
Speaker A:And guess what he wrote on the map in the position of what is today known as North West Africa.
Speaker A:Just south of the Atlas Mountains.
Speaker A:Yep, right there where the Richat lies.
Speaker A:He marked something very intriguing in that region.
Speaker A:Roughly where the Richat structure lies today.
Speaker A:Meller wrote a single word.
Speaker A:Atlante.
Speaker A:Okay, so it's not Atlantis, nor Atlanteans, but close enough to make you pause.
Speaker A:Now, Mellor probably wasn't talking about mythical sea people or a sunken island.
Speaker A:The way I see it, he was either describing a real civilization that existed there at that time, or he was drawing on a much older source.
Speaker A:Maybe it came from earlier traders or explorers or even Egyptian records.
Speaker A:Almost certainly it came from a source that no longer exists today.
Speaker A:If these early seafarers passed down stories of a powerful culture somewhere beyond the Atlas Mountains, it's not impossible that Mela's Atlante was a faint echo of that memory.
Speaker A:But the Sahara's a desert, right?
Speaker A:How could any civilization have thrived there?
Speaker A:Well, that's not exactly true.
Speaker A:We know for certain that the Sahara wasn't always a sea of sand.
Speaker A:And this isn't speculation.
Speaker A:This is scientific fact.
Speaker A:Every 20,000 years or so, shifts in the Earth's axis cause the African monsoons to drift north.
Speaker A:When that happens, the desert transforms into a vast green savanna, a landscape filled with lakes and rivers and life.
Speaker A:The last green Sahara ended around 5,000 years ago.
Speaker A:Recent enough.
Speaker A:The early hieroglyphs show giraffes and elephants and hippos living where there's only now dunes.
Speaker A:Cave paintings even show people swimming, herding cattle and hunting crocodiles.
Speaker A:In wide, grassy valleys.
Speaker A:Archaeologists have found stone tools, pottery shards, and burial sites scattered across what are now some of the most remote parts of the desert.
Speaker A:This is evidence of thriving human communities that vanished as the rains retreated.
Speaker A:Some sites are so eroded that they're only visible from satellite scans, revealing entire lost settlements beneath the dunes.
Speaker A:And then there's the hidden water world below.
Speaker A:Ground penetrating radar has mapped massive ancient river systems under the sand, including one as large as the Nile, the Tamandrasset river, which once ran from the Mauritanian coast near the rich ad structure, all the way to the Mediterranean.
Speaker A:We've even found whale fossils in the Western Sahara, proof that parts of it were once the seabed.
Speaker A:Combine that with the buried river systems, and it's entirely possible that thousands of years ago, ships could have sailed inland from the Atlantic, right towards the heart of what is now the desert.
Speaker A:Imagine standing at the Richad structure today with sand stretching to every horizon and realizing that 5,000 years ago, you'd have been standing beside a riverbank surrounded by Forests and grasslands and herds of antelope.
Speaker A:If the Sahara was once green, a land of rivers, lakes, and thriving settlements, then one question remains.
Speaker A:Could a civilization that vast be have existed without anyone else noticing?
Speaker A:Maybe not.
Speaker A:There are several legends about lost cities in the Sahara, but one of the most captivating is the story of Zerzuara.
Speaker A:Called the Oasis of Little Birds.
Speaker A:In Arabic, Zerzuhra was a mythical white city said to be hidden somewhere in the Western Desert.
Speaker A:Medieval Arabic texts describe it as a city of sleeping kings and queens guarded by giants, where buildings are made of white stone and filled with treasure beyond imagination.
Speaker A:But here's the thing.
Speaker A:This isn't just folklore whispered around campfires.
Speaker A:It's mentioned in a 15th century Arabic text, which gives specific, although cryptic, directions to zura.
Speaker A: In the: Speaker A:Real expeditions led by members of what became known as the Zozura Club, a group of English adventurers obsessed with finding the lost oasis.
Speaker A:While they didn't find a gleaming white city of sleeping kings, they did find ancient trade routes and several ruined settlements long buried by the sand.
Speaker A:Whether Zazura was a myth, a memory, or the remnant of something far older, maybe even that distant echo of Atlantis, we will never know.
Speaker A:But it reminds us that the desert's history runs deeper than we imagine and that stories buried in the sand sometimes turn out to be real.
Speaker A:But what I find truly fascinating about these stories is how they echo one another.
Speaker A:A lost city buried in the sand, a civilization swallowed by time.
Speaker A:A promise of treasure, of knowledge and of mystery just out of reach.
Speaker A:When you step back and connect the dots, Plato's Rings, Mela's Atlante, the Green Sahara and the legend of Zazura, you begin to see the faint outline of something larger.
Speaker A:Something that feels less like coincidence and more like a shared memory across culture and time.
Speaker A:That suggests to me that these legends perhaps aren't separate myths at all, but different fragments of the same story retold across centuries and cultures handed down from people who once lived through the end of a real civilization.
Speaker A:All right, I get it.
Speaker A:This isn't proof.
Speaker A:I'm not saying it is, but it's a suggestion, and that's what gets under my skin.
Speaker A:And it's exactly the kind of idea that ends up in my fiction.
Speaker A:In fact, my new book, the Sahara Event, takes the question we've been asking in this episode.
Speaker A:What if we've been looking for Atlantis in the wrong place?
Speaker A:And runs with it?
Speaker A:Here's what the book's all about.
Speaker A:When an archaeologist dies protecting an impossible secret.
Speaker A:A Her final message sends Eden Black racing to uncover an ancient crystal encoded with the knowledge of a lost civilization, a power that once turned a paradise into a wasteland.
Speaker A:From high speed chases through Marrakesh to an underground chamber older than recorded history, Eden must face a rogue scientist determined to use the crystal to reshape the world.
Speaker A:Last time it awakened, the Sahara was born.
Speaker A:This time, it could end everything.
Speaker A:The Sahara event is available in paperback and ebook.
Speaker A:Wherever you get your adventures this is the Adventure Story Podcast thank you so much for hanging out today.
Speaker A:It's been great to spend some time with you.
Speaker A:If you've enjoyed the show, please subscribe.
Speaker A:Please like and of course share.
Speaker A:It'll take you just seconds, but really helps me spread the word about this show.
Speaker A:If you have a story you'd like me to explore in the next series, let me know in the comments or on the email helloukerichardsonauthor.com and if you need some more adventure in your life, and let's be honest, who doesn't, you might like to join the Adventure Society.
Speaker A:This weekly newsletter is your ticket to travel with me to share real world adventures.
Speaker A:And to find out first when a new story or new season of the podcast drops, head to lukerichardsonauthor.com Adventure Society lukerichardsonauthor dot com Adventuresociety and if you're a fan of adventure stories like the one I've told today, check out my books@lukerichardsonauthor.com Bon voyage.
Speaker A:Enjoy the adventure and I'll see you next time.
