The Eruption of Thera

The island of Thera, today's Santorini, is torn apart by one of the mightiest eruptions of the last few millennia: the centre of the island sinks beneath the sea, leaving a ring of cliffs around a bay. The town of Akrotiri is buried in ash almost without human remains — its people, it seems, had time to leave. Ash falls across the eastern Mediterranean, a wave strikes the northern coast of Crete, and the Minoan palaces never regain their former strength. The exact date is disputed: radiocarbon pulls toward the seventeenth century BCE, Egyptian chronology toward the sixteenth — and the argument touches the dating of the entire age.