Race to Atlantis

Not good.

It appears that dastardly Dr. Dawkins, the gentleman thief (and, incidentally, my life-long rival,) has actually succeeded in discovering the location of Atlantis.

I must find out where he's gone and stop him, before he plunders the site for his own personal gain!

Searching his office, I've found the notes he left behind:

• I think I have the altitude figured out, but not the latitude yet... I feel like this is one of the puzzles that will bug me forever because I got so "close" but never solved it :P Very nice pictures, btw! – user14478 Sep 8 '16 at 16:29
• Do the vertical lines offer a key to deciphering the K2 text? – Mad Physicist Sep 8 '16 at 18:22
• @MadPhysicist no... – Yehuda Shapira Sep 8 '16 at 18:22
• Offering this as a suggestion to the other solvers: it may be important that the trees have leaves in one image but not in the other. – Mad Physicist Sep 8 '16 at 19:25

I've decrypted the pictures of the trees into what are probably coordinates, using the center picture as a map,

it seems to be a base 10 system, with a base 5 semibase, causing the background trees.

The coordinates I get are

35.992862, 19.264688 which puts us a ways off the coast of Greece, which seems like as plausible a location for Atlantis as any.

The 'Keys' I imagine are additional pieces of information that need to come together to actually gain entrance.

The first one looks a lot like Pi, and the second seems to be translatable to the English Language alphabet. "W Y V T Q J W B E E V J Z B F M P N F V T M X G S J O C L S B Z H X K O L W U N Y R R P"
or, as pointed out in the comments, XZWURKXCFFWKACGNQOGWUNYHTKPDMTCAIYLPMXVOZSSQ

I've tried a few ciphers on the second set, but haven't found anything worth mentioning yet. It's only one symbol longer than a spaceless version of the words on the gate, but I haven't been able to make anything come of that either.

Although... there should be a connection between keys, trees, and pi.

I see it! A Key Lime Pie! Bring one to the coordinates in question, feed it to whoever you find there to look the other direction, and break in with a sledgehammer!

• Very close... You'll want to re-check all your digits, though :) – Yehuda Shapira Sep 8 '16 at 17:29
• I think the numbers are the indexes, not the positions. I.e. XZWURKXCFFWKACGNQOGWUNYHTKPDMTCAIYLPMXVOZSST – user14478 Sep 8 '16 at 17:34
• @LukasRotter, when I put the nubers into excel, and use CHAR on them I get the last character to be Q – SeanC Sep 8 '16 at 18:20
• You've basically got the answer; the coordinates are correct.Well done! :) The hidden message just gives a clue to the trees' meaning. – Yehuda Shapira Sep 9 '16 at 5:56
• @YehudaShapira. Is it something you can fix? – Mad Physicist Sep 9 '16 at 16:27

The two keys stand for

longitude and latitude

The first picture of trees is most likely

The first key (longitude), also considering that the picture of "one key" might hint to that.

The picture with the cryptic symbols stands for

A map, with which we can decrypt the messages

The K2 most likely stands for

something doing with the second key, the latitude (K = "Key", 2="two"). I didn't figure out what this note is about, yet.

The second pictures of trees is

The encrypted latitude

How to decrypt (at least the first line of trees):

Convert the trees to the corresponding numbers on the map-note, i.e. map it to whatever symbol the tree looks alike. Chopped trees stand for a dot.

So the best guess I have is at this point:

Here (30.774394,-19.419133)

This is most likely incorrect, since it doesn't take the K2 note into consideration. I'm pretty confident about the longitude, since it would match the longitude given here (second picture), but the latitude seems a bit too high, which is surely because I couldn't decrypt the K2 note (I also sneakily put a minus in front of the latitue).

• Nice! Indeed, close. Actually, the keys are not the coordinates, but more information regarding them. There is also a nasty trickiness to this puzzle, but I'll wait before adding a hint regarding it. – Yehuda Shapira Sep 8 '16 at 17:12
• The teeth of the key look suspiciously like a pi, so there may be some calculation or digit-wise operation involved. Could the numbers in the K2 image refer to the digits of pi at this position? – M Oehm Sep 8 '16 at 17:17
• @MOehm Nice observation! I didn't even pay attention to that! – user14478 Sep 8 '16 at 17:20
• altitude == longitude? – Mad Physicist Sep 8 '16 at 21:32
• @MadPhysicist Yes, sorry. I didn't check if the translation (english is obviously not my first language) I had in mind was correct. – user14478 Sep 8 '16 at 21:45