I am continually gob-smacked by the obsessive public interest in Atlantis.  Why, oh why, does a mere mention of this fabled continent quicken the heartbeat of so many?  Google, as I just did, “continent of Atlantis,”  and you will turn up a whopping  1,020,000 hits.  And a depressing number are devoted to bizarre lunatic-fringe theories concerning the location of the sunken continent  (my current favorite puts Atlantis somewhere off the coast of the Indonesia).

By contrast,  try mentioning Beringia to your friends and kids.  How many of them have heard of it?   It’s a real, honest-to-goodness sunken land–a huge chunk of northern real estate that once connected Alaska to Siberia and that now lies at the bottom of the Bering Sea.  It drowned,  as many of you undoubtedly know,  when huge ice sheets melted at the end of the last Ice Age and topped up sea levels by some 330 feet. Read more…