Anomalous Antarctica Maps

The Piri Reis map was discovered in 1929 while Topkapi Palace, Istanbul, Turkey was being converted into a museum. It consists of a map drawn on gazelle skin, primarily detailing the western coast of Africa and the eastern coast of South America. The map is considered to have been drawn by Piri Reis, a famous admiral of the Turkish fleet.

The most noteworthy and mysterious thing about this ancient map is that it features the coast of Antarctica without glaciers.

Our modern knowledge of the coastline under the ice was obtained using seismic sounding data from Antarctic expeditions in the 1940s and 50s. Sonar is one way to map the coast under the Antarctic glaciers.

The other way would be to have surveyed them when they were ice-free.

According to Charles H. Hapgood - a geologist at the University of Hampshire - who based the claim on 1949 core samples from the Ross Sea, the last time the particular area shown in the Piri Re'is map was free of ice was more than 6000 years ago.

More recent studies show that this may be off by a couple of orders of magnitude. In any case, this geography should have been unknown to the ancients. If this is correct, there are some big mysteries to explain.

Some people, in a rush to explain the map's existence, have claimed that Antarctica could be the site of the ancient civilization of Atlantis which now lies beneath miles of ice thanks to a global axis shift that turned the tropical continent into a frozen wasteland.

Before you dismiss that possibility, consider this: Albert Einstein endorsed the theory that a axial shift is possible.

If one map is enough to make you think, what if I told you there was another map, drawn by a different explorer at a different time which showed the exact same thing... only this time with rivers in Antartica?

This map, known as the Finaeus Map - was found in the Library of Congress, Washington DC in 1960 by Charles Hapgood. It was drawn by Oronteus Finaeus in 1531. As with the Piri Reis map, Antarctica is shown to be ice free with flowing rivers, drainage patterns and clean coastline. Some of the mountain ranges shown were only discovered recently. The deep interior didn't show any rivers or mountains which some believe means it was already covered in ice at the time.

Another tidbit of proof is the Ross sea. Today huge glaciers feed into it, making it a floating ice shelf hundreds of feet thick. Yet this map and the Reis map show estuaries and rivers at the site. In 1949 coring was done to take samples of the ice and sediment at the bottom of the Ross Sea. They clearly showed several layers of stratification, meaning the area went through several environmental changes. Some of the sediments were of the type usually brought down to the sea by rivers. Tests done at the Carnegie Institute in Washington DC, which date radioactive elements found in sea water, dated the sediments at about 4000 BC, which would mean the area was ice free with flowing rivers up until that time - exactly what is recorded on the Reis and Finaeus maps.

Did ancient explorers sail the coast of an ice-free Antarctica?  Did they possess mapping tools that we don't know about?  The human race is a species with amnesia and this appears to be another chapter in our history lost to the ages and ignored for convenience.