That’s obviously not Atlantis on the book cover. If anything that’s Anti-Atlantis, with it’s central sea in there, surrounded by land and ringed by mountains. That’s an almost complete inversion of Plato’s idea of an Island nation out in the Atlantic.
The picture is Greenland of course. But not the Greenland we know, it’s Greenland without the ice. This is a topographic radar map of Greenland’s elevations. It plays a little trick on us – blue is the colour designated for sea level elevation, so everything on the radar map that’s coloured in blue is at sea level elevation or lower. The green parts are just above sea level. The reddish brown represents mountain country.
It actually gives you a decent idea of what Greenland was like, or would have been like without all that ice. Not a perfect idea, there’s a thing called ‘Isostatic Rebound.’ Basically, most of Greenland is under two miles of ice. That two miles of ice is compressing the bedrock. Take it away, and Greenland will probably lift. But I suspect that mostly, that lift won’t dramatically change what we see I think it’s a fascinating map. It’s filled with possibility, potential. It’s so much better than most homegrown fantasy maps.
That’s the explanation for the Map that isn’t Atlantis, on a book titled Fall of Atlantis.
In a sense, like The Dawn of Cthulhu, this is a book about world building. It’s speculative fiction of the plainest, barest kind, taking ideas like ‘What would Greenland be like without the Ice?’ Or ‘What’s a plausible pathway for the Romans to get to the New World?‘ And just spinning them out and extrapolating. No plot, no characters, but fiction all the same.