Hapgood's shifting crust and Einstein's foreword
In 1958 the American college teacher Charles Hapgood published 'Earth's Shifting Crust', with a foreword by Albert Einstein, arguing that the whole crust slides suddenly over the interior and that Antarctica was ice-free in the recent past.
1958 CE · -71.00, 20.00 · status: claim
The account
In 'Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings' (1966) he took up Arlington Mallery's reading of the Piri Reis map as showing Queen Maud Land without ice, and added the Finé map. Hapgood later revised the theory after Einstein raised an objection, and in his final books relied on trance messages from a medium. His ideas feed Rand and Rose Flem-Ath's 'Atlantis is Antarctica' and Graham Hancock's books.
The sceptical view
Plate tectonics replaced the theory, and ice cores show Antarctica has been under ice for millions of years, not since about 9600 BCE.
Connections in the atlas
- 'When the Sky Fell': Atlantis under the Antarctic ice
- The oldest ice: a million years under Little Dome C
- Oronce Finé's world map and the 'ice-free Antarctica' claim
- The Piri Reis map 'shows Antarctica'