Latest / Midnight Signals: History, Folklore and Unexplained Mysteries
Piri Reis and the Forbidden Maps of Antarctica
In 1513, the Ottoman admiral Piri Reis drew a world map from older source charts, some of which, he said, dated to the time of Alexander the Great. Some researchers argue its southern coastline shows Antarctica free of ice, three centuries before the continent was officially discovered in 1820. Later maps by Oronteus Finaeus in 1531 and Urbano Monte in 1587 have drawn the same kind of claims.
The episode follows those maps alongside the theories that grew up around the ice: Admiral Richard Byrd’s Operation Highjump and its early end, the German New Swabia expedition of 1938, and the 1959…
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