Athanasius Kircher treats the earth as a house of hidden stores. Water, fire, air, and earthy matter sit in receptacles inside the globe. The weight of the sea drives water through canals into the mountains, and those stores feed the rivers. Fires under the earth feed the volcanoes.
In the second book he takes Plato’s Atlantic island as true history, not a fable. He prints a map of it in the ocean between Spain, Africa, and America, and says the island and its people were swallowed by a flood or by earthquakes. He does not date that end. In the second tome he refuses the opinion that the mountains first rose out of the mud after the flood. The ark, he says, rested on the mountains of Armenia, above Ararat, which were already there.