Oronce Finé's world map and the 'ice-free Antarctica' claim
In 1531 the French mathematician Oronce Finé published a heart-shaped world map with a huge southern continent; in the 1960s Charles Hapgood argued it showed Antarctica's real coastline and rivers before the ice.
1531 CE · -80.00, 60.00 · status: explained
The account
Finé's map labels the southern land as recently found but not fully explored, a reference to Magellan's sighting of Tierra del Fuego. Hapgood, in 'Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings' (1966), read its outline as Antarctica mapped by a lost civilisation and later writers such as Graham Hancock repeated the idea. Historians of cartography, from Franz von Wieser to Gregory McIntosh, trace the map's southern continent to Johannes Schöner's globes of the 1510s and 1520s.
The sceptical view
The southern land is copied from Schöner's speculative globes; its outline does not match the real coast, and Antarctica's interior has been under ice for millions of years.
Connections in the atlas
- Hapgood's shifting crust and Einstein's foreword
- Philippe Buache's frozen southern sea
- The Piri Reis map 'shows Antarctica'
- Terra Australis, the southern continent drawn before it was seen