This map, as discussed in Chapter 3 ‘Weird History’ has strong credentials, however, there are clearly serious flaws in it suggesting that it should be treated with caution when cited as evidence of the existence of an early and lost civilisation.

One such flaw is that of the island shown at 0° latitude and just east of longitude 47° W on the parchment. Hapgood refers to this island as "one of the major mysteries of the Piri Reis map" (18). He continues, "the details of the island are convincing. Some reproductions of the coloured facsimile (but unfortunately not all of them) suggest by a deeper shade around the coasts that there were coastal highlands or mountains surrounding a great central plain. The harbours and islands off the coast are inviting. They are carefully drawn. There seems to have been an effort to achieve accuracy (19)." Hapgood notes that the island has now disappeared into the ocean, "submerged to a depth of a mile and a half." (20)

Hapgood was convinced that if he could only prove that this island had existed, then this would silence any doubters once and for all; for it was the degree of detail in the Piri Reis map that so convinced him of its accuracy (once realigned to modern scales). He therefore decided to approach the US Government for help and permission to search for underwater cities in the region of the St Peter and St Paul Rocks.

By October 1963 Hapgood had presented a convincing enough argument to secure an interview with President Kennedy to discuss the matter further. However, as history records, fate intervened.

In actual fact, even if the interview had gone ahead, it would not have changed the fact that the island shown on the map is not presently submerged beneath the Atlantic nor did it ever exist.

We know this now because the US Navy has recently released satellite data gathered by the US Navy’s Geostat spacecraft between the 31^st March and 30^th October 1986 that was used to prepare the first detailed topographic map of the entire ocean floor (21).

The Piri Reis ‘missing’ island should therefore have appeared on this map of the seabed, however the Geostat map shows no evidence of any such island nor any submerged mountains. Indeed the only topographic forms that can be seen in the area where the island ‘should be’ are numerous transform faults, ridges and trough topography that characterises normal oceanic crust.

If Piri Reis could ‘invent’ an entire island of considerable dimensions, then surely he could also make-up the supposed outline of Antarctica?

Obviously the answer is yes, however it should be remembered that Piri Reis readily admitted that he had merely complied his world map from twenty or more smaller maps, and these in turn were probably compiled from even smaller and older maps. Consequently, some areas of the overall map will be accurate whilst others inaccurate and without doubt the original source maps would have been the most accurate of all for these are the maps that would have actually been used by those who drew them. In essence, just because part of the map is erroneous, does not make it all so. Indeed, the map itself was a working tool used by mariners and others. It would hardly have enjoyed this status had it been so riddled with errors that it would have been safer to voyage blind.

Yet it is the outline of the Antarctic area we are interested, rather than that of South America, Africa or Spain. Clearly if there were other ancient maps of the area then this would lend credence to the idea that it really had been mapped before becoming entombed in ice. Hapgood himself realised this and searched for further supporting evidence. His search was to lead him to the Reference Room of the Library of Congress, Washington DC, America. Hapgood recalls;

"I found … many fascinating things I had not expected to find, and a number of charts showing the southern continent. Then one day, I turned a page and sat transfixed. As my eyes fell upon the Southern Hemisphere of a world map drawn by Oronteus Fineaus in 1531, I had the instant conviction that I had found here a truly authentic map of the real Antarctica.

"The general shape of the continent was startlingly like the outline of the continent on our modern maps. The position of the South Pole, nearly in the center of the continent, seemed about right. The mountain ranges that skirted the coasts suggested the numerous ranges that have been discovered in Antarctica in recent years. It was obvious, too, that this was no slapdash creation of somebody’s imagination. The mountain ranges were individualized, some definitely coastal and some not. From most of them rivers were shown flowing into the sea, following in every case what looked like very natural and very convincing drainage patterns.

This suggested, of course, that the coasts might have been ice-free when the original map was drawn. The deep interior, however, was free entirely of rivers and mountains, suggesting that the ice may have been present there." (22)

The fact that this map shows the complete continent of Antarctica seems remarkable in itself, suggesting that far from mankind having made superficial contact with part of the continent, s/he was familiar with the entire area at least three hundred years before Antarctica was supposedly discovered.

Hapgood asked the Cartographic Section of the 8th Reconnaissance Technical Squadron, Massachusetts. to evaluate both the Piri Reis and Oronteus Fineaus maps. In reply, he received the following letter from Captain Lorenzo W Burroughs, the chief of the section, who gave a summary of their findings;

"A) The solution of the portolano projection used by Admiral Piri Reis, developed by your class in Anthropology, must be very nearly accurate; for when known geographical locations are checked in relationship to the grid computed by Mr Richard W Strachan (MIT) there is remarkably close agreement. Piri Reis’ use of the portolano projection (centred on Seyene, Egypt) was an excellent choice, for it is a developable surface that would permit the relative size and shape of the earth at that latitude) to be retained. It is our opinion that those who compiled the original map had an excellent knowledge of the continents covered by this map.

As stated by Colonel Harold Z Ohlmeyer in his letter (July 6, 1960) to you, the Princess Martha Coast of Queen Maud land, Antarctica appears to be truly represented on the southern sector of the Piri Reis Map. The agreement of the Piri Reis map with the seismic profile of this area made by the Norwegian-British-Swedish Expedition of 1949, supported by your solution of the grid, places beyond a reasonable doubt the conclusion that the original source maps must have been made before the present Antarctic ice cap covered the Queen Maud Land coasts.

It is our opinion that the accuracy of the cartographic features shown in the Oronteus Fineaus (sic) Map (1531) suggests, beyond reasonable doubt, that it was also compiled from accurate source maps of Antarctica, but in this case the entire continent. Close examination has proved the original source maps must have been compiled at a time when the landmass and inland waterways of the continent were relatively free of ice. The Cordiform Projection used by Oronteus Fineaus (sic) suggests the use of advanced mathematics. Further, the shape given to the Antarctic continent suggests the probability, that the original source maps were compiled on a stereographic or gnomonic type of projection (involving the use of Spherical trigonometry.)

We are convinced that the findings made by you and your associates are valid, and that they raise extremely important questions affecting geology and ancient history, questions which certainly require further investigation." (23)

In order to explain these ice-free coastlines, Hapgood concluded that Antarctica must have been located a few thousand miles further north than its present location, and slipped to its current position in an ‘Earth Crust Displacement’.

The idea behind Earth Crust Displacement is that ice builds up at the poles, and, on reaching a critical point, the outer crust of the planet slips under the weight of the ice, casting previously temperate areas into the polar positions. (This initially sounds impossible, however movement of the Earth’s plates is now accepted, for example India drifting and crashing into Asia causing the rise of the Himalayas.)

It was this conclusion that led writers such as Graham Hancock, Rand and Rose Flem-Ath (right) et al. to claim that Antarctica may, in fact, have been the location of the legendary Atlantis. Such a concept was certainly compatible with Plato’s story; and would account for the destruction of the civilisation as described by the author.

The continent was certainly big enough to be home for an entire civilization, and its location further north in the Atlantic would have made its position ideal as a central link between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ worlds, accounting for some of the connections discussed in this work.

However, the concept of Earth Crust Displacement is built upon a misunderstanding of plate tectonics. The crust of the Earth is not floating on a liquid nor even a semi-liquid mantle. In fact, the crust is securely adhered to the mantle and connected by the asthenosphere, a layer more viscous than lava and certainly not fluid enough to allow for rapid movement.

In fairness to Hapgood, many of the studies that reached these conclusions were made after his theory was proposed, however more recent authors have been careless in continuing to propose this theory even after it has been unequivocally disproved. As noted above Albert Einstein supported Hapgood’s theory, however the conclusions he reached, like Hapgood’s, were only as good as the data then available. Many years on, we now know the data to be obsolete.

The Earth Crust Displacement theory also ignores some inherent evidence. If Antarctica had originally been located thousands of miles further north, or at least not covered in ice – it would reveal itself in its true form; split into East and West Antarctica, with a sea in-between its constituent parts (right). For Antarctica is only one huge continent when covered in ice and it has not been that free of ice for at least four million years.

It is inconceivable that the continent could have been situated away from the pole, but still under solid ice at its centre as the Oronteus Fineaus map inevitably suggests.

The only other way Antarctica could have been the home for a civilisation is if it has been ice free in recent times – at least within the last twenty thousand years. Yet, the available evidence confirms that this is not the case.

Drilling was undertaken in 1967-8 at Byrd Station where a core drill went down 7,101 feet before it hit liquid water near the bedrock, then froze fast (24). In 1970 Soviet scientists began drilling at Vostock Station, high in the inland ice cap in east Antarctica. In 1981-2 French scientists reached more than 900m beneath a point called Dome C, near the centre of the huge ice cap. And since 1980 the Vostock (right) ice drillers have bored through more than 2080m of the 3700m (12,140ft) of the ice under the station (25). "The Vostock core is the first to cover, completely and unambiguously, the entire last 150,000 years of the earth’s ice-age cycle."

French Glaciologist, Claude Lorius, reported in 1985 after working with Soviet scientists on the ice-core (26). "It clearly goes back through earth’s previous interglacial warm period, called the Eem or Sangamon, and well into the ice-age before that." Lorius continues, "That previous interglacial was similar but markedly warmer than our present warm spell, the Holocene. The beginning of the previous warming was as sharp and extensive as was the opening of the Holocene, between about 10,000 and 8000 years ago." (27)

A discovery made in 1996 also confirms that a least part of Antarctica has been under ice for millions of years. Space and ground based instruments identified a huge lake more than two miles below the continent, insulated by millions of years of ice that may still be a home to creatures that inhabited the planet more than 30 million years ago. Researchers know that there should be life in this underworld lake for Russian and American microbiologists have already examined microbes in samples of ice laid down a mere 400,000 years ago.

"We’ve found some really bizarre things – things that we have never seen before," noted Richard Hoover of NASA.

He and his Russian colleague (left) have given the microscopic creatures temporary nicknames such as Klingon, Mickey Mouse, Porpoise and Sphere (28).

The discovery at such depths raises the hope that other stranger life forms will be found in the lake, particularly as volcanic heat deep in the rock may provide energy to sustain such forms of life. Antarctica is 58 times as big as Britain and there could be hundreds of lakes below the ice-sheet. "Every single one of them could be potentially of significance," said Dr Ellis-Evans of the British Antarctic Survey. "This is a whole new world opening up for us." (29)

It would appear that the maps are neither going to confirm Antarctica as the home of the missing civilisation, nor as evidence of such a civilisation. Indeed a closer scrutiny of the Oronteus Fineaus map in particular, reveals that it may be little more than a romantic pictorial of a southern continent. This map certainly does not resemble the subglacial bedrock topography of Antarctica, for example, Wilkes Land, which the Oronteus Fineaus map shows as solid land is occupied almost entirely by two large subsea basins and an archipelago of bedrock islands. (30) In a partially glaciated Antarctica this solid land shown on the map would also be under water.

The map also fails to show the Amery basin, which in either a partially or completely deglaciated Antarctica would be occupied by a 430 to 500 mile long bay lying perpendicular to the coast of Antarctica between Princess Elizabeth land and Mac Robertson land. (31)

The map has other faults. Because the bedrock surface underlying West Antarctica lies hundreds of meters below sea level, except for some bedrock islands, the coastline shown on the Oronteus Fineaus map, would have had to have been to the edge of an ice sheet. Yet as noted above, Hapgood, claims the map shows rivers mouths, fjords and other non-glaciated features on this glacial coastline. In essence, the map does not show an Antarctica free of ice, nor does it depict an accurate ice-bound Antartica. Despite this, the map does exist and sufficiently resembles the continent to confirm that its makers had some knowledge of, or belief in, a southern continent.

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