Ancient world geography and points of interest

[Lurina]

If I remember right, you can make out some details of the former geography of the planet from space during the Amaurot duty. My conclusion at the time was that it looked like Vylbrand used to be much larger, and was a peninsula rather than an island.

It's hard to say if this was remotely the writers intentions at the time - they have explicitly said Amaurot in its current form wasn't conceived yet, but they could have had some idea of it - but in Encyclopedia Eorzea I, it's mentioned that the road running through Eastern La Noscea was "already old in the days of ancient Allag". If you look at the environment, the road passes under a series of stone archways that are a little too perfect to be natural and resemble the ones you see in the upper parts of The Tempest.

The entire map has really weird geology (I'd encourage you to fly up high and look around the bloodshore area specifically), so I'd hypothesize the whole area was urbanized, and the entire region around Amaurot was probably relatively developed.

As for Elpis, you can look down on a clear day and see that it's probably over the ocean, unless those are some extremely blue clouds actually I looked again and I probably just judged it as a bad time of day before, since the void below does seem like it's meant to be cloud cover after all. Still, the only guess we can make as to its location is that if Pandaemonium reappeared in the same place it was originally, that would put it in the skies over what would become Sharlayan; I'd take that further and say the island chain was probably formed by Elpis dropping out of the sky if so, since the surrounding ocean is so empty otherwise. But we won't know for sure until the final part of the raid comes out and we learn what's actually going on.

If we go under the knowledge that the various calamities have moved everything around, and that the area under steep cliffs of Kholusia are actually the water UNDER Limsa Lominsa on the source (remember, there was a great flood and water levels rose), then it's likely Amaurot was a good ways away off the coast of La Noscea.

I don't think those cliffs are underwater - Western and Middle La Noscea are dominated by sharp cliffs leading increasingly upwards on the approach to Mt. Ghomoro. They're just more broken up than the single one dividing the approach to Mt. Gulg.

The waters of the Sixth Umbral Calamity receded after it was over. That's how you have stuff like the boat just hanging around on the mountains in Gyr Abania, and the ruins of destroyed places like Mhach and Amdapor now at ground level again.