Original subtitles

[Narrator] In Santorini, Greece,

a team of archaeologists prepares to dive into the

remains of an underwater volcano.

-You will start from the depth of 30,

30 meters, up to 18.

[Narrator] They’re hunting for clues to the fate of

a lost civilization.

-We are leaning towards it being something that

is human made.

-Good luck.

[Narrator] And the truth behind a volcanic mega eruption

100 times more powerful than at Pompeii,

which transformed the ancient world.

The wonders of Ancient Greece are among

the greatest ever known.

Greece was the birthplace of democracy,

and the cradle of western engineering and architecture.

From inspiring inventions to epic heroes and legends,

the legacy of Ancient Greece

still shapes the modern world.

Three and a half thousand years ago the volcanic archipelago

of Santorini was home to one of Greece's earliest civilizations.

Until one of the most powerful eruptions in human history

brought it to a violent end and transformed the shape

of the island.

-Even though the landscape is magnificent, it’s fascinating,

it’s also dangerous.

[Narrator] The eruption has been linked with the decline of

civilizations across the eastern Mediterranean,

and even the myth of Atlantis.

But much remains unknown.

No one has found any of its victims on Santorini,

or conclusive proof for when it happened.

-We’ve been trying to date this timing of the Santorini

eruption for decades.

[Narrator] Now, new discoveries could shed light on this

sudden apocalypse and its impact on the ancient world.

-In order to better understand the deposits that we find far

away from Santorini,

you need to come to ground zero.

[Narrator] When was this catastrophic eruption

and what happened to Santorini and the people

who lived there?

Santorini is a group of islands in the Aegean Sea,

together they form the rim of a cauldron-like crater,

and on the southern coast lies Akrotiri,

one of the most remarkable sites in Ancient Greece.

Akrotiri is a town frozen in time,

and the only one ever found in Santorini from

before the eruption.

Excavations began here in the 1960s.

The buildings, protected today by a huge canopy,

date back more than 3,500 years.

Marine Geoarchaeologist Beverly Goodman explores the

ruins to investigate what became of this city

in the eruption.

[Beverly] Akrotiri’s been referred to as the

Pompeii of the Aegean.

And on a certain level that's true because we're

looking at a site that's been totally buried.

But unlike Pompeii we don't have the people.

[Narrator] In 79CE, the volcano Vesuvius erupted

entombing the town of Pompeii under 20 feet

of ash and pumice.

Akrotiri reached its height much earlier,

around 1650 BCE,

nearly 800 years after the Pyramids of Egypt,

and at the same time as a similar Greek civilization

on Crete called the Minoans.

[Beverly] The people that lived here are often

referred to as Minoan,

and this comes from a broader culture that is seen in

Crete to the south,

unfortunately we don't have the written records

to be able to know how they saw their world,

so we have to rely on these physical objects.

[Narrator] There may be no history of the

ancient people here,

but the astonishing preservation of their

settlement reveals an insight into their society.

[Beverly] The people of Akrotiri are characterized by

some really amazing technological advances and

sophistication that isn’t seen in early periods,

so we’re talking about plumbing,

we’re talking about frescos.

[Narrator] Akrotiri was a sophisticated town where around

2,000 people lived,

with multistory homes and a thriving port.

Its artisans produced pottery on an industrial scale.

Standardized designs point to a thriving trade network

across the Aegean.

Some houses even boasted flushing toilets,

using water to wash waste into underground channels.

And many houses were decorated with vibrant frescos

in a style unlike those found on the Greek mainland.

The town's culture has many similarities with

the ancient Minoans,

but exactly when Akrotiri collapsed is unknown.

-If you go somewhere like Pompeii you know when the

eruption happened because people wrote about it,

because we have better historical records,

but in this place we don’t have that.

[Narrator] The fate of Akrotiri is more than just

a Greek tragedy.

The fallout from the eruption has been linked with

the decline of the Minoans in Crete

and even the rise of the New Kingdom

pharaohs in Egypt.

[Beverly] It’s not just an academic curiosity,

it ends up influencing everything we know about the

ancient Mediterranean world from that same period.

[Narrator] Beverly is determined to find out when

the eruption happened.

The problem is that it drastically altered the face of

the island.

So at the shoreline close to Akrotiri,

she teams up with Marine Geologist Evie Nomiku

for an underwater investigation.

-How many?

-Let’s do eight, afterwards I’ll take notes on it.

-Yes.

[Narrator] For Evi, exploring this island is her life’s work.

-I was born in Santorini so from the early age it was for me,

it was fascinating to live in an active volcano.

And when I grow up I studied geology,

and becoming a marine geologist give me passion

to understand how this volcano was working.

[Narrator] Beverly and Evi think the answer to solving

Santorini's many mysteries could lie with its unique

geology beneath the waves.

The azure waters at the center of Santorini look peaceful,

but this is a caldera, the flooded crater of an ancient

volcano, more than 1000 feet deep.

Hidden more than 10,000 feet beneath that crater is a huge

network of chambers filled with an estimated four trillion

cubic feet of molten rock.

Pressure from deep inside the Earth pushes

this magma up through vents,

that surface on two eyelets in the heart of Santorini.

The whole island is a huge, active volcano system that has

erupted at least 12 times over the last 360,000 years.

To understand the effects of the ancient eruption,

the team wants to find traces of the island

as it used to be,

and investigate if Akrotiri really was the only

Bronze Age city here.

-It’s very important for us to understand how was the

landscape of Santorini before the Minoan eruption.

That eruption was a catastrophic one so the

landscapes have changed completely.

[Narrator] The first step is to look beneath the waves.

Volcanic eruptions often cause coastlines to sink

So Beverly and Evi scour the seabed for

so called beach rock,

a type of rock that is formed only at the coast.

It can form over centuries and incorporate materials

like ash from volcanic eruptions.

[Beverly] We know from other sites that sometimes where we

have the submerged area with beach rock,

it can blanket more or less archaeological sites.

So you can have entire homes,

neighborhoods that are covered in beach rock,

and it’s a wonderful thing because it essentially seals it

in so we get that time capsule, so a lot of potential here.

[Narrator] They wade out from the beach and scour the seabed

for signs of beach rock.

Beverly finds some examples.

[thudding]

But it’s as hard as concrete.

They take some scraped samples for analysis...

...and log the position.

The team emerges from the water already excited at the findings.

[Narrator] Wherever they find beach rock that includes

material from the eruption,

there could also be ancient

land and archaeological evidence directly beneath.

Back on land,

Beverly assesses the samples she took,

comparing their make up with the volcanic layers of

rock on the island.

-We have the deposits here that are from the later phases,

so we know from other parts of the island and

these beach rocks,

you can see that it has basically the same lithology,

the same materials so we’re expanding the lateral

picture of the eruption very quickly just

with these simple observations.

-That was very good, that, a very good time.

-That was amazing. -Yeah, good.

-Yay!

[Narrator] The existence of beach rock underwater suggests

the land was extended much further than

the current shoreline.

The team’s next step is to find out what the interior

of the island looked like.

To do that they need to head to ground zero,

when and where did this eruption start?

[Narrator] The volcanic eruption that destroyed the

island of Santorini

also buried much of the evidence for what happened.

But clues about this ancient disaster can be found far

beyond the island itself.

150 miles north east on the coast of modern Turkey lies the

ancient settlement of Liman Tepe.

Here, archaeologist Vasif Sahoglu,

from Ankara University,

works closely with a team on Santorini.

Vasif first dug at this site as a student 33 years ago.

[Vasif] My first excavation,

archaeological experience it was in here

in Liman Tepe and not far like er,

I don't know five meters away from this

particular point, right there.

Liman Tepe is an important site in Turkish archaeology,

its continued occupation since the 5th millennium BCE

acts as a key historical record.

The site kept continued to be used as a settlement all

through time, so life never stopped at Liman Tepe.

It started roughly 7,000 years ago and continues

to be living.

[Narrator] Vasif wants to find out how the eruption

might have affected Santorini's neighbors.

This settlement was a major trading hub,

it connected networks from the east with busy

shipping routes across the Aegean Sea.

-From the beginning of the second millennium BC,

the Middle Bronze Age,

we now this time start to see the rise of Crete with

is maritime power,

emerging from the southern Aegean.

We then see a big Minoan influence er, on these sites.

[Narrator] The challenge is that he too must first pinpoint

exactly when the eruption happened.

Back on Santorini itself,

Beverly and Evi explore what the island looked like before

the eruption, so they can narrow down its date.

Could there be what was once dry land or even other

settlements now buried beneath the waves?

Clues may lie in this abandoned mine.

[Evi] This is my favorite place,

you can distinguish all the pumice layers.

[Narrator] A decade of pumice mining here has cut

a sharp cross section through the volcanic deposits allowing

them to see all the way back to the first moments

of the eruption.

[Evi] So I think the mine is the ideal place to understand

the mechanism of the Minoan eruption,

the old mines of Santorini.

For us the mine is an open geological museum.

Also it gives you the sensation of the volume of the eruption.

These are the thin layers, you can see,

the stratified pumice layers.

[Narrator] The exposed hillside reveals there were

several phases of the eruption,

each dumping enormous amounts or rock,

ash and lava over the island.

[Evi] Okay let’s leave that here.

[Narrator] Evi and Beverly hunt for the earliest phase.

-Look! -Oh my gosh!

[Evi] This, here, here, here, this is phase zero.

This is phase one, this is pumice from phase one.

This is ash plume so the height of the eruption

was almost 40 to 45 kilometers in the stratosphere,

that was a huge eruption, huge.

[Narrator] 200 feet of ash and pumice lie above the

pre-eruption ground level,

the sheer scale of material illustrates just how

gargantuan the eruption was.

[Evi] This is the soil of the pre-Minoan eruption,

the landscape,

and you can see a lot of signs of oxidation over here.

[Beverly] This was the surface of the Minoans.

[Evi] Exactly, the surface of the pre-Minoan eruption.

[Narrator] During the Bronze Age,

this would have been the land where the

Ancient Greek people of Santorini lived their lives.

What can these layers tell us about the island

before the eruption?

Experts have been able to estimate the total amount of

material the volcano ejected.

-The volume of the eruption,

of the Minoan eruption was almost 40 to 44

cubic kilometers.

[Narrator] This enormous volume of material would

take up much of the modern water filled caldera.

[Evi] Before the Minoan eruption,

the caldera was almost the same shape,

but only the northern part was filled by water.

[Narrator] Evi believes that most of Santorini’s area

was dry land, the eruption obliterated it.

And what was left then collapsed into

this huge caldera.

It raises the possibility that there were once other towns or

settlements across this ancient island.

If so, what happened to the people who lived here?

At Akrotiri,

Beverly explores the beautiful houses and frescos

to find out.

[Beverly] All over Akrotiri we see cracks in buildings,

broken staircases, some of which have been repaired,

some of which have not been repaired.

[Narrator] The presence of repair work suggests that some

of this structural damage occurred before the eruption.

-There's a disturbing similarity between what we see

at Akrotiri and what we see at Pompeii.

[Narrator] The city of Pompeii suffered a large earthquake

years before its volcano erupted.

The damage was repaired and life carried on until the

eruption that destroyed it.

The timeline of events here is much less clear.

-We can see at Akrotiri that there were tremors,

there were earthquakes.

Whether or not the people of Akrotiri understood that

they were sitting on a volcano and that there was

the potential for an actual eruption,

we can’t really know.

But by the time the eruption itself happens,

the area would have been impossible to stay in.

[Narrator] The quakes and tremors,

cracked walls and damaged buildings,

a first warning the volcano under Santorini was stirring.

An initial eruption threw debris six miles into the sky

and coated Akrotiri in suffocating ash...

...and worse was yet to come.

Weeks later the main eruption showered the town in pumice,

a deadly rain of stone that smashed through roofs and

buried it under feet of debris.

It’s possible that Akrotiri’s residents had a

window to escape.

But even if they heeded the early warning signs,

there’s no guarantee they reached safety.

-The absence of evidence for victims in Akrotiri

certainly does not mean that there weren’t any victims.

[Narrator] At the Roman town of Herculaneum,

most victims of the Vesuvius eruption were

discovered at the harbor,

burnt to death as they waited for boats.

-Perhaps in Santorini we also have the

same sort of scenario,

but it’s much more complex because when the

volcano is active,

we can have uplift, we can have subsidence,

there’s all kinds of dynamics going on that are changing

where the coastline is.

[Narrator] The huge volume of rock and ash buried any

ancient harbor Santorini might once have had,

and brought the island’s thriving civilization

to a sudden end.

But exactly when this happened is a mystery.

The answer could lie with finding out how far

the devastation spread.

[Narrator] For decades,

the eruption of the volcano on the Greek island

of Santorini has baffled archaeologists.

Tests on wood preserved in the island’s ash layer point

to an event that took place around 1600 BCE.

But archaeological evidence tells a different story.

At Luxor in Egypt,

Egyptologist Arto Belekdanian investigates a broken

inscription found at the Temple of Karnak.

It dates to the time of Pharaoh Ahmose I who founded

Egypt’s New Kingdom and reigned in the

16th century BCE.

It’s known as the Tempest Stele.

[Arto] This stele was discovered between

1947 and 1951, and it is estimated to have

stood nearly two meters tall.

In this text King Ahmose recorded this exceptional

weather event.

[Narrator] According to the stele,

the gods darkened the sky in the west,

and the roar of the storm was louder than the cries

of the masses.

Bodies of flood victims floated across the burst banks

of the swollen River Nile.

Some believe the stele describes the effects of the

Santorini eruption.

Volcanoes can influence the climate,

ash clouds can cool the atmosphere,

and particles fall out of the clouds in rain.

And on Crete,

which lies between Santorini and Egypt,

archaeologists have discovered ash from the eruption.

[Arto] It is possible that King Ahmose actually witnessed

the effects of this

powerful eruption on Egyptian weather.

But there’s a problem, the eruption is

generally seen to have taken place around 1600 BC.

King Ahmose is believed to have reigned roughly

50 years after.

[Narrator] If the Tempest Stele indeed records the eruption,

that must mean that the commonly accepted date of

around 1600 BCE is wrong.

This discrepancy has baffled archaeologists for decades.

Could another dig site far from Santorini help

solve the mystery?

At Liman Tepe in Turkey,

Vasif continues his search for evidence of

the eruption beyond Santorini.

The team peels away layer after layer of the ancient site.

And one of Vasif's assistant directors, Umit,

makes a discovery.

[Narrator] Umit's delicate excavation reveals sections

of a broken pot.

-The good thing with this one is we have the rim,

we have the base and all of them are joining,

so we can clearly say what kind of shape it is.

[Narrator] Archaeologists can date ancient sites by

matching certain pottery styles to specific time periods.

Finds like this one are essential

to Vasif’s investigation.

[Narrator] This is long before the period of

the Santorini eruption.

[Vasif] If there was an ash layer here in Liman Tepe it

could have been from where we stand upwards, up here,

but we didn't find any in this site.

[Narrator] Ash clouds from large volcanic eruptions can

spread for hundreds or even thousands of miles.

[Vasif] We know from other sites further inland

that there was ash,

so the ash must have arrived to Liman Tepe for sure.

[Narrator] The absence of an ash layer here suggests that it

was simply cleaned up,

meaning Liman Tepe escaped destruction.

But clouds of ash are not the only deadly fallout

from a volcano.

And Vasif has another site to investigate for

traces of this ancient apocalypse.

[Narrator] On Santorini in Greece,

Beverly Goodman and Evi Nomikou

have moved sites to a beach in the north of the island.

They're hunting for deposits caused by the eruption.

-So it’s a mix. -Yeah, all of this here.

-Yeah, so it’s a mix.

[Narrator] They find some rock layers containing

churned up materials mixed with small shells and

other sea life.

How did this strange mix of volcanic pumice and

marine life get here?

They think the answer lies with the next phase of

the volcanic eruption.

As the eruption peaked,

towering columns of ash and gas rose

high to the sky.

Some eventually collapse under their own weight

unleashing searing hot avalanches of ash,

gas and rock called pyroclastic flows.

They tore down the volcano towards the sea destroying

everything in their path.

Evi has studied volcanic deposits above and below the

waterline to estimate the size

of Santorini's pyroclastic flows.

-We are sure that it is approximately 42 to 44 cubic

kilometers because we measure the onshore deposit

not also the offshore deposits and this is very crucial.

-Yeah.

[Narrator] The pyroclastic flow were not just bad news for any

people still on the island.

That much material is enough to fill over

15 million Olympic sized swimming pools.

Hitting the sea at speed,

it would have displaced a gargantuan amount of water,

creating a tsunami that could travel hundreds of miles.

[Beverly] That means that there is a mechanism in the

Mediterranean that can produce a tsunami that can impact the

shorelines throughout at least the eastern

Mediterranean and Aegean.

[Narrator] Beverly examines the remains of this tsunami,

a mix of shells and rocks on the shoreline.

Archaeological evidence reveals the tsunami reached

as far north as the west coast of Turkey.

Experts have also found tsunami deposits in Crete,

and as far east as Caesarea on the coast of Israel.

Some scholars suggest the devastation caused by this

mega wave is what started the collapse of the

Minoan civilization on Crete.

-If the date of the eruption doesn't match with

that societal collapse, well then, you know,

the tsunami and the eruption is innocent.

If the date does fit,

this changes how we understand the experience and

the sequence of events that led to where we are today,

so this is why it's so important.

[Narrator] Dating the material and artifacts found

in the tsunami deposits on Santorini

is extremely difficult.

But might there be dating evidence across the

sea in Turkey?

At Liman Tepe,

while the team continues to dig,

Vasif investigates evidence from further along the coast.

[Vasif] We are also working on Cesme Baglararasi, which is

another site 50, 60 kilometers west of Liman Tepe.

[Narrator] Cesme Baglararasi also sits on the coast and

crucially is closer to Santorini,

towards the end of a peninsula.

Here, Vasif has found evidence of a Tsunami deposit,

a mix of shells and rock.

And on top of it a layer of Santorini ash.

-In Cesme, after the Santorini eruption and

the arrival of the tsunamis, life ended forever on the site.

So there was no more human activity right at that location

that would destroy the presence of the ash.

We managed to find it sandwiched between these layers

in the settlement.

[Narrator] Finding the Santorini ash layer preserved

within the tsunami deposits is so important,

because it is the same ash falling at the same time that

has also been found across the eastern Mediterranean.

[Vasif] Imagine finding this volcanic ash layer

in Cesme Baglararasi

and finding it in a site in Egypt for example.

That means we are looking at the very same moment

in time of human history,

there is no other line like this in the history of humanity.

[Narrator] The holy grail is to find an exact date

for the eruption

giving archaeologists a precise marker to use in

working out the timelines of their dig sites.

[Vasif] If we can manage to date this layer of tsunami in

Cesme Baglararasi, that would be a great,

great news for archaeology.

[Narrator] And deep within the deposits,

Vasif’s team might have found the key to

unlocking that date.

[Vasif] So as we were excavating in a deeper area we

came across a skeleton.

[Narrator] Lying on their side in the devastated city

is the first victim of the eruption ever discovered.

If Vasif can date these remains,

he could confirm when the Santorini eruption happened.

[Narrator] The catastrophic Santorini eruption has been

investigated for decades.

No evidence for any of its victims has ever been found...

...until now.

In the conservation lab of the Liman Tepe dig site,

Vasif works with anthropologist Yilmaz to assess the bones.

The first clue is the body’s pose,

lying on their back, not curled on their side.

[Yilmaz] This is not the common burial tradition in our region,

it cannot be an intentional internment.

[Narrator] This person never had a proper burial,

they were entombed in rubble at the very moment

of their death.

-The morphological sex looks like the male,

as you see on the pelvic area,

15 to 16 years old.

We saw one pre-mortem or antemortem cut marks

on the knee.

If you have this type of cut on your ligament,

you cannot walk.

[Narrator] This young man was a teenager and his bones

reveal that he had suffered earlier injuries

which prevented him from fleeing the lethal waves

created by the eruption.

-This person couldn’t run away from the effects

of the tsunami.

[Narrator] Fresh marks on the bones hint at how he died.

[Vasif] This cut doesn’t have any sign of healing,

and it means that it might be done on or around

the time of death.

And there is also one breakage on the left femur,

and these type of fracture is named as butterfly fractures,

and these type of fractures can only be done on the very,

the heavy trauma.

[Narrator] The tsunami smashed into the Cesme shoreline,

pounding this victim with water and debris.

[Vasif] We can guess that this individual died due to

the wave of the tsunami.

[Narrator] When pyroclastic flows from the eruption slammed

into the sea, they displaced trillions of gallons of water,

triggering a series of tsunami waves.

Of the many waves generated,

at least four were powerful enough to tear across

the Aegean, swelling into walls of water up

to 85 feet tall as they neared land.

Loaded with ash and volcanic debris,

they unleashed destruction on Santorini’s neighboring

islands and the mainland.

The injuries on these fragile remains confirm

this young man died in the violent tsunami.

[Narrator] The critical question is when.

Vasif hopes that if these bones can be dated

by radiocarbon testing,

they might finally solve the mystery of when

the eruption occurred.

Back on Santorini,

Evi and Beverly investigate one more mystery while they

wait for Vasif’s results.

They travel to the westernmost island, Thirasia.

[speaking in foreign language]

[Narrator] In search of an intriguing underwater spot.

-There’s a feature that looks like it could be an

ancient quarry of some sort, but we’re not 100% sure.

So it’s a very exciting area because it’s still a

question mark as far as whether or not it was altered

by people or if this an entirely natural geological formation.

[Narrator] A possible submerged manmade structure has

an eerie echo of one of the most famous

ancient myths of all time.

Some have argued Santorini's eruption could

be the inspiration for Atlantis.

The Greek philosopher Plato tells of an advanced

island city laid out in perfect circular rings

of land and water,

a marvel of ancient engineering.

But in a single day and night of earthquakes and fire,

the entire city sank beneath the sea,

vanishing without a trace.

It's thought that much of Santorini's interior

was once land.

So could a kernel of truth lie behind the mysterious

myth of Atlantis?

Beverly and her colleague, Willy begin their dive...

...to find out what's beneath the water.

[Narrator] In the crystal clear waters off Santorini,

Beverly and her colleague, Willy come face to face

with the strange, rectangular structures.

The steps and blocks look neat and square,

like quarried stone.

But when the team tries to take samples,

something isn’t quite right.

Taking what they can, and making notes,

they head back to the surface.

[Evi] But you tried to touch the rocks, it,

it was hard to take a sample, yeah.

-Oh yeah, yeah, it's...

-It, it is lava. -It’s lava.

-It’s lava, okay. -Nature can make sharp angles...

[laughs]

...very easily.

-Yeah, yeah, of course, of course,

nature and especially, especially this type of lava,

okay, especially this type of lava.

-Absolutely.

[Narrator] The neat square ledges might look manmade,

but they are natural lava formations.

-What I hoped for was that it would be definitively quarry,

that we would see okay, this is manmade.

And unfortunately that’s not what we saw and, and in nature,

just because you have sharp angles submerged underwater

doesn’t mean that humans had to make it,

because these are shapes and formations that can

be created by nature.

[Narrator] But finding lava here was still useful.

The undersea slope inside the caldera was clearly much

steeper than on the other side,

this is a sign of a landslide on the island’s

newly formed interior,

and backs up Evi’s model for what happened.

By combining all the evidence,

the team can reconstruct the complete sequence of events.

An initial blast of ash and pumice shot high to the sky,

reshaping the island and forming a mountain of soft rock.

But pressure kept rising,

the volcano tore through fresh vents,

ripping the island apart from within.

Towering ash columns collapsed,

sending waves of gas and burning rock in every direction.

The city of Akrotiri was buried, its harbor destroyed,

an avalanche of debris surged into the sea,

unleashing tsunami waves across the Aegean.

For a time only a fragile ash mound stood

at the heart of the collapsed island.

Then the sea broke through

and Santorini as we know it today, was born.

Anyone still on the island didn't stand a chance.

But understanding the full impact of the eruption on the

ancient world depends on knowing when it happened.

At Liman Tepe,

Vasif has received the results from the radiocarbon tests to

determine the exact age of the Cesme victim's remains.

He connects with Beverly in Santorini to share his news.

-Hi Bev, how are you?

-I'm a little bit nervous here Vasif...

[laughs]

I mean it's...

[Narrator] They run the readings through

calibration software.

-Alright so I’ve got the calibrations here, oh my God!

Okay.

[laughs]

[Narrator] To give them the year BCE when the

tsunami happened.

[Beverly] Pffff, okay here is the range, oh my gosh!

Woah!

-Wow! -Vasif, am I understanding this?

-Ah, look at that.

[Narrator] The new radiocarbon dating of the

Cesme victim's skeleton,

coupled with other evidence around the find,

shows a date close to 1500 BCE,

with only two decades or so variability.

[Beverly] Oh my gosh, okay, this means that basically,

on the age that we have, fits with the relative dating,

it fits with the archaeology and essentially the eruption

does in fact happen at the time when we see

the massive changes.

[Vasif] Exactly, so archaeological record

actually fits, fits well with this date.

-Oh my gosh!

[Vasif] Wow!

-So, so essentially like now it, it, things finally make sense.

[Narrator] These new findings are almost 100 years

later than the commonly accepted date of

around 1600 BCE.

They also contradict the date of the

Tempest Stele from Egypt,

but crucially they fit with the decline of the

Minoan civilization which began over the next 50 years.

[Beverly] This is unbelievable.

You know, as a, as a scientist,

I'm very excited about solving this question,

as a person and a mom I'm like oh my gosh,

you know it just,

it's, it's so sad that you know,

that you know there's this person who was basically,

like he was lost,

they never managed to find him,

and like now we have and not only is he found but

he's actually giving us the answers.

[Vasif] He is changing the whole picture.

[Narrator] The publication of these results could transform

experts’ understanding of the Minoan civilization.

They also form a baseline for the precise dating

of Bronze Age sites across the entire region.

-Dating this event is very important for many reasons,

for correlating the cultures and how life was going

in the Mediterranean at that time,

it’s going to be like a starting point for chronology.

[Narrator] For as long as most of this island’s ancient

surface lies hidden beneath lava and pumice,

the mysteries of Santorini will persist.

But this season’s finding reveal the

full scale of the disaster,

and could for the first time indicate

when it happened.

The eruption changed the shape of the island and

destroyed a vibrant culture.

The tsunami spread out for hundreds of miles leaving

a trail of devastation and

transforming the ancient world of the Bronze Age.

Today, underwater tremors continue to rock Santorini.

They are a reminder of what happened

3,500 years ago,

a culture ending catastrophe and one of the most devastating

natural disasters of the Ancient World.