The existence of these unusual maps has been known for a long time. Since Antarctica was officially discovered by the British only in 1819, earlier maps with the outlines of its coastline simply could not exist. Maps depicting Antarctica without ice would have been an even greater challenge to the history of science. Their existence would prove that the very concept of prehistory of mankind, adopted in scientific circles, was erroneous.
The maps in question were first made public in the 1960s, thanks to the efforts of Professor Charles Hapgood, who taught science at Kinsky College, New Hampshire. Hapgood was a brilliant theorist and a renowned scientist enough to challenge academic dogma. He first encountered the problem of maps of Antarctica in his study of another, related, problem of the emergence of glacial eras. As early as 1848, Swiss naturalist Louis Agassie proved that there were several periods in the history of the Earth when glaciers covered huge areas of the globe, which are now in temperate zones. Since then, scientists have speculated differently about the cause of glacial eras. According to most theories, the general decline in temperature was caused by a gradual change in the Earth's orbit and direction of the Earth's axis. According to Hepgood, these theories could not explain the powerful cataclysms that accompanied the end of the last, most well studied glacial age.
Hepgud was interested in whether the weight of the polar caps themselves can periodically remove the Earth from equilibrium and lead to the onset of glacial eras. Together with his like-minded engineer James Campbell, he studied the idea that the Earth's crust lies on a very weak, practically liquid layer of matter. The main argument was that when the ice thickness on the polar caps reaches a critical mass, its weight makes the upper layer of the Earth's crust slip along the lower layer until the equilibrium is achieved. Therefore, although the Earth's axis remains in position and the North and South Poles remain the coldest places on the planet, the continental crust shifts by significant distances. If, for example, Europe were to move 2,000 miles northward into the polar region, it would be covered by glaciation.
This simple mechanism, according to Hepgood, explains the phenomenon known as the "glacial age". There were no global climatic changes; instead, ice was redistributed over different parts of the globe as they entered the Arctic or Antarctic Polar Circle. During the last ice age, the North Pole was located in the Hudson Bay area, with the result that the whole of North America was under the ice cover (see "First Americans" in Travel and Discovery). The end of the Ice Age, according to Hepgood, began after the Earth's crust began to change its position about 18,000 years ago. America gradually moved southwards, and the ice cap melted for 10,000 years. Floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions destroyed 9/10 of the flora and fauna in North America and Eurasia. Volcanoes erupted clouds of dust over Siberia, covering it from the sun, causing a sharp drop in temperature. These upheavals and climate changes caused the Siberian mammoths to die out, and Siberia itself entered the Arctic Circle and became an inhospitable land of cold, long nights and permafrost. In the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctica, which was basically free from the glacial cover during the ice age in America, suffered a similar fate. By the VI millennium it was completely within the Polar Circle and was covered with ice for two thousand years.
Hapgood has put forward courageous guess. Probably, there were earlier civilizations, whose sea-going feats were erased from human memory long ago. They investigated and mapped the outlines of the Antarctic coast - perhaps four thousand years before the last stage of glaciation (according to the model of the Ice Age proposed by Hepgood). He did not guess who the prehistoric sailors and cartographers were. The rest of his life, until his death in 1982, Hepgood devoted to the search for traces of "ancient sea kings".