Posted on 04/14/2018 2:19:24 PM PDT by BBell
Sweet, when it slips back Im going to go from half way to the North Pole to just South of the Equator. Im planting bananas this spring...
Aren’t there some Columbus era maps that show a shoreline for parts of Antarctica. These maps if they exist could be a lot older, or copies of much older items. Remember that so much was burned at the Alexandria Library, and in 400 BC a Greek explorer (Heroditus?) was told by Egyptian priests about things that were 9,000 years older.
You ever read a book called The Hab Theory?
It is about the sudden - and very catastrophic - shift of the Earths crust, and was immediately discounted, refuted, defamed by scientists worldwide, due to the polar bulge, etc, etc, etc.
Until recently. Recent findings and developments on the fluid flows in the Earths mantle have actually described such a flip.
Herodotus' (and Solon's) tour guides in Egypt were no more reliable than those of today. :^)
The maps usually referred to are the Piri Reis map (see the keyword) and the Orontius Finaeus map; both of them postdate Columbus. The former doesn't show Antarctica per se, the second one shows a very primitive version of the Earth's landmasses as a sort of projection (analogous to Mercator's), with a greatly exaggerated and distorted thing that apparently is based on what little was known about Antarctica.
Since humans have been crossing large bodies of water for a long time (the earliest known was about 800,000 years ago, to Flores Island), there was probably some knowledge of Antarctica, possibly even in ancient times.
Herodotus recounts the earliest known circumnavigation of Africa, and I suspect the reference to "shoals" in their extreme southern route probably means icebergs. Oddly enough, I've been deep off into Tristan de Cunha vids on YT for the past hour or so. :^)
Columbus went to Iceland during his information gathering phase; this led him to conclude that the generally accepted circumference of the Earth, which had been handed down from ancient times, was way off, and that the Icelandic knowledge of the lands which became known as the Americas was actually a folkloric memory of China.
And the Library of Alexandria was burned by the caliph in the 7th century; had it been burned by Caesar (and nowhere does Caesar claim to have burned it) there wouldn't have been a large, long project during the Roman/Byzantine era to copy the texts from the deteriorating papyrus onto parchment. The exciting prospect is, the parchment library was burned (by the caliph, in the 7th century) but the ruins of the papyrus original version may be waiting in an ancient rubbish pile, a la the Oxyrhynchus papyri.
It’s a work of fiction, but thanks for pointing it out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_HAB_Theory
...a very primitive version of the Earth's landmasses as a sort of projection (analogous to Mercator's), with a greatly exaggerated and distorted thing that apparently is based on what little was known about Antarctica.
He called Antarctica "Australis" or something like that -- and the exaggerated size may have been due to the intermittent sightings (some say pre-discovery discoveries) of the actual Australia. Note also that Tierra del Fuego is shown as part of Antarctica on the OF map. Magellan may have been influenced by this or something like it, when he labored through the Strait of Magellan, rather than heading south around the (at that time) unknown Cape Horn.
http://www.gavinmenzies.net/china/maps/
GAVIN MENZIES...lots of ancient maps, I have read his books, quite thought provoking.
Civ,
I never heard of the HAB - I only pointed out (before the mention of the HAB) that to my knowledge the last time Antarctic coast was ice free was around 14 million years ago - a statement to which no one replied. I have recently read that some think the coast (or parts of it) might have been ice free as recently as 1 million years ago.
How did those maps come into existence? We will likely never know the origins that were likely lost in the Great Lisbon Quake in the 18th Century which destroyed the library where the Portuguese kept all their secret maps ... and perhaps the original sources of the maps we have today.
No, as it is not very good fiction. Have you read “Journey to the Center of the Earth”?
I only pinged you to the HAB reply because you'd been pinged to the earlier information.
Those 16th c maps don't show what they're purported (by some) to show, which is an ice-free Antarctica. None of the maps of the early "Age of Sail" can compare with modern maps, even for coastlines that were near to the homes of the mapmakers, much less the "here be dragons" ends of the Earth.
I'd agree that the permanent glaciation of Antarctica as we know it today is a bit more than two million years old, and arose as a consequence of the Eltanin impact. That is, perhaps coincidentally, about when our ancestors started their long hard climb.
I don't agree that it was ever Atlantis.
About Atlantis R Temple wrote that there never was such a place rather it was a ruse by the Atlantic “civilization” (the megalith builders) to mislead others into venturing out into the Atlantic on a fools quest to protect their trade routes from Libya and up along the Atlantic coast from Mauritania to Britain
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