A map that shows Antarctica nearly 300 years before it was discovered ?
In 1531, French mathematician and
cartographer Orontius Finaeus published a world map that included a
detailed southern continent resembling Antarctica.
What makes the map so unusual is that Antarctica would not be officially discovered until more than 300 years later.
Even more striking, the landmass is shown with rivers, coastlines, and internal features beneath what is now miles of ice.Some
researchers have suggested the map may have been copied from far older
source material, possibly preserved through lost charts or ancient
geographic knowledge passed down through time.
Others argue the
continent was drawn theoretically, based on the long-held belief that a
southern landmass must exist to balance the world.Whether advanced guesswork or inherited knowledge, the map raises an uncomfortable question.
How was a continent drawn in such detail long before anyone was supposed to have seen it?
FOR years a few imaginative authors have argued, based on 16th century maps, that the ice-covered continent of Antarctica was discovered and mapped by an ancient civilization, perhaps one from another planet.
The latter proposition was dismissed by most geographers and historians as preposterous.
Nevertheless, a careful comparison of information appearing on the maps with what is now known of the continent has led a leading geologist and polar specialist to propose that the outlines of Antarctica may, in fact, have been known long before Columbus reached America.
The generally accepted view is that Antarctica was first sighted in 1820 by American seal-hunters as well as by British and Russian explorers.
The suggestion that it may have been discovered many centuries earlier has been made by Dr. John W. Weihaupt, vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Colorado at Denver.
His analysis appears as the lead article in the Aug. 28 issue of Eos, the Proceedings of the American Geophysical Union.
Dr. Weihaupt, a specialist in seismic and gravity studies and planetary geology, conducted research at a number of Antarctic stations beginning with the International Geophysical Year of 1957- 58.
Interviewed by telephone recently, Dr. Weihaupt was reluctant to speculate on how the rough outline of Antarctica might have become known to early mapmakers, saying he was not a maritime historian.
He suggested, however, that Bronze Age seafarers from the Mediterranean, trading along the east and west coasts of Africa, might have ventured farther south than previously believed.
A Peaking Period of WarmingFrom 2,600 to 9,000 years ago, he said, the world was warmer than at any time in the last million years, except for the period between the last two ice ages.
Polar ice was presumably reduced, making high latitudes more tempting to explore.
Dr. Weihaupt says that, assuming the outline of Antarctica was known to early cartographers, the source of their information ''remains unanswered.''
Even crude mapping of a large continent would require a knowledge of navigation and geometry presumably beyond the ken of primitive navigators.
Speculation on prehistoric discovery of Antarctica began in 1956, when a map of the Atlantic Ocean purportedly drawn in 1513 by a Turkish admiral named Piri Re'is was shown by a Navy cartographer to Arlington H. Mallery, an engineer.
Mr. Mallery was known for his thesis that Vikings reached American shores five centuries before Columbus.
The map supposedly contained information from voyages made by Columbus.
It showed the western bulge of Africa with considerable accuracy and what seemed a crude outline of the opposite coasts of the Americas.
Those coasts continued unbroken around the southern extremity of the Atlantic, where Antarctica's Queen Maud Land is now known to lie.
This was taken by Mr. Mallery as evidence that the continent at the bottom of the world was already known.
American cartographers had seen the map as early as 1932, but little attention had been paid to its possible implications regarding Antarctica.
Mr. Mallery's argument was picked up by Prof. Charles H. Hapgood, a historian at Keene Teachers College in New Hampshire.
Professor Hapgood had published a controversial book arguing that off-center accumulations of polar ice sometimes caused gradual, but radical changes in the axis of the earth.
His analysis of the Piri Re'is map was published in 1966 under the title ''Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings - Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age.''
He also cited several other early maps upon which Dr. Weihaupt now bases his argument.
They are the Orontius Finaeus world map of 1531, the Gerhardus Mercator world map of 1538 and a map of the Americas produced by Ptolomaeus Basilae in 1540.
Professor Hapgood proposed that the Orontius Finaeus map showed the coast of Antarctica as it would appear if the continent were not covered with ice, as may have been the case between the last two ice ages.
The suggestion that Antarctica had been mapped by some civilization that thenvanished won few adherents among historians and geographers.
Two years after the book appeared, however, Erich von D"aniken, a Swiss hotel-keeper turned writer, carried the argument one large step further. In his book ''Chariots of the Gods?'' he proposed that the maps were derived from aerial views obtained by visitors from beyond the earth.
Dr. Weihaupt said he ignored the Piri Re'is map as of questionable authenticity.
He concluded, however, that the Orontius Finaeus and Mercator maps, through their resemblance to the actual outline of Antarctica, ''suggest that man's knowledge of that continent may date from a time somewhat earlier than that century,'' or at least three centuries before the continent's modern discovery.
A Modern and Complete Map of the World by the Royal Mathematician Oronce Fine of the Dauphiné.
Virtually Complete Outline
Both maps show virtually the complete outline and details of a continent that, like Antarctica, is centered on the South Pole.
Generations of scholars have debated over who discovered Antarctica.
The American candidate has been Nathaniel Palmer, captain of a sealing sloop from Stonington, Conn. American and British sealers had begun hunting south of Drake Passage below Cape Horn and on Nov. 17, 1820, Palmer sailed farther south and may have sighted the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.
The British candidate is Edward Bransfield of the Royal Navy, ordered to explore the area for an outpost to control the south side of that critical waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific.Britain gives Jan. 30, 1820, as the date of Bransfield's discovery.
Two weeks earlier two Russian ships under Adm. Thaddeus von Bellingshausen may have sighted the ice-covered Princess Martha Coast.
Multinational exploration of Antarctica and probing of its ice cover have now produced relatively complete maps of the continent as it would appear free of ice.
Deep fiords would exist where ice streams now reach the sea. An archipelago comparable to the Philippines would lie south of Drake Passage.
The Ross Ice Shelf, an apron of ice 1,000 feet thick and as large as France, would be an open gulf.
The Orontius Finaeus map shows such a gulf, suggesting the possibility it was free of ice at some prehistoric time.
Dr. Weihaupt cites polar specialists who suspect the Ross Ice Shelf may break up into icebergs and vanish if the climate warms and he proposes this may already have happened after the last ice age.
Some ancient Greek philosophers suggested that, to make the world symmetrical, there should be a large land mass at the South Pole to balance the northern continents.
Maps such as that of Orontius Finaeus were explained as flights of imagination based on such reasoning.
But Dr. Weihaupt finds the resemblance to what is now known of the continent, in terms of its size, outline and scattered mountain ranges to be striking.
''The geography of the southern continent,'' he concluded, ''may thus have been known in its broad configuration before the mid-16th century. While the evidence bodes thus, I have no hesitation in reminding the reader, as myself, of Sir Walter Raleigh's admonition that conjectures 'painted on Maps, doe serve only to mislead such discoverers as rashly believe them.' ''
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