The Piri Reis map demonstrates the Antarctic coast was ice-free when mapped

Piri Reis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piri_Reis

Piri Reis (Turkish: Pîrî Reis; born Muhiddin Piri c. 1465–1470; died 1553) was an Ottoman Turkish cartographer, admiral, and corsair. He is best known for his 1513 world map and his nautical atlas, the Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of the Sea). His cartography engaged more directly with the Age of Discovery than other Ottoman works from the period. His maps provide a glimpse into the world during a time o Piri… Piri Reis's 1513 world map has inspired pseudoscientific claims and appeared in popular culture as an unsolved mystery. For example, civil engineer Arlington Mallery, history professor Charles Hapgood, and Hapgood's students developed the hypothesis that the 1513 world map exceeded 16th-century map-making abilities and contained a cartographic depiction of an ice-free Antarctic coast. In Hapgood's 1966 book Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, he claims that islands along the map's southern Atlantic shore depict what are now ice-covered mountains in Antarctica's Queen Maud Land region. Hapgood's book received skepticism for its lack of evidence and its reliance on cataclysmic pole shift, the disproven geological hypothesis that Earth's entire crust could slip around the planet. According to geologist Paul Heinrich, the book did not account for post-glacial rebound, the process by which land rises after glacial ice melts away. Heinrich further noted that the 1949 survey initially cited by Mallery could not measure even one percent of the area drawn in the Piri Reis map. Subsequent studies have shown no significant similarities between the map's southern coastline and Antarctica's subglacial coast. A 2024 study indicates that the Antarctic ice sheet began forming about 34 million years ago and covered the continent millions of years before the emergence of modern humans. Although the 1513 world map has been described by some authors as anomalous in its accuracy, it is no more precise than other 16th-century manuscript maps. Hapgood's claims have nevertheless been uncritically repeated by Erich von Däniken in support of ancient astronauts and by Graham Hancock in support of an advanced lost civilization. The map and the pole shift hypothesis were key plot elements in Allan W. Eckert's science fiction novel The HAB Theory. Video game writer Corey May cites pseudohistory as an influence on his work for Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed series. He said that Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision appealed to him for its "idea of unraveling historical mysteries" regardless of whether he believed it. Assassin's Creed: Project Legacy introduces the 1513 Piri Reis map as an…