Antarctica, as you know, was discovered by Russian sailing ships under the command of Thaddeus Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev. This happened 195 years ago, on January 28, 1820. For two centuries, people have traveled the harsh continent far and wide, making a lot of amazing discoveries.
The most important of these, by the way, breaks the long-standing perception of Antarctica as a single piece of land. Nevertheless, the remaining mysteries are enough, perhaps, for many generations of polar explorers and scientists.
They tried to challenge the superiority of our seafarers more than once. The Americans insist that the continent was discovered by the sealer Nathaniel Palmer. Although a simple comparison of the logbooks breaks this version. The sloop "Hero" approached the coast of Antarctica only on November 17, 1820, that is, ten months after the Russian expedition.
What ice hides
Bellingshausen and Lazarev, most likely, were also not the first people to see Antarctica. The fact that our ancestors could have been here much earlier is evidenced by ancient maps on which the continent is depicted in convincing detail. Moreover, there is no ice on it yet!
In fact, Antarctica is a fairly compact archipelago. The largest piece can be conventionally called a continent. To the west, across the strait, there are islands - large, indented by fjords, plus small placers, like in the Aegean Sea.
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All this is clearly visible on the maps of under-ice relief constructed by specialists. However, at present, both the lands and the sea surfaces with straits are covered with a snow cap, in places reaching four kilometers in thickness. In what centuries was Antarctica so overwhelmed?
On portolan, which in 1513 was copied from some ancient sources by the Turkish admiral Haji Muhiddin Piri ibn Haji Mehmed (aka Piri Reis), Antarctica is completely free of ice. Rivers flow, forests grow … The legacy of the Ottoman sailor was discovered in 1929.
Piri Reis Map
Later, when, after recovering from the Second World War, the leading states began large-scale studies of the southern continent, seismologists began to clarify the coordinates of the lands lying under the ice crust.
Portolana was shown to military cartographers - their verdict was reported to historian Charles Hapgood by US Air Force Colonel Harold Z. Olmeyer: “At the bottom of the map, the geographic features show a very noticeable similarity with the seismic data of the 1959 Swedish-British Antarctic Expedition of the real geological relief under the glacier located there.
This indicates that the coast was mapped before it was covered with ice. The glacier in this region is now about a mile thick. We have no idea how the data on this map might correlate with the estimated level of geographic knowledge in 1513.”
Scientists rushed through the archives to look for other similar evidence. And they found that Antarctica is present on many maps, including the one that was created in 1532 by the Frenchman Orontius Phineus, and also on the famous "Planisphere" Cantino (1502) and many others. The degree of glaciation was different everywhere, from which the researchers made a sensational conclusion - people had previously seen Antarctica, both free from the "shell" and in the process of its occurrence.
Map of Oronteus Phinius, 1531
According to scientists, these Renaissance maps are copies of works of deep antiquity. Charles Hapgood writes that on the portolan of Piri Reis, the longitude and latitude of the coastlines are determined an order of magnitude more accurately than medieval European and Arab cartographers, as well as their colleagues who lived during the heyday of Greco-Roman civilization, were able to do.
In any case, by the time of the Russian expedition, the existence of Antarctica in Europe and the North American United States was guessed, its location was approximately known. The information background on the eve of Bellingshausen's and Lazarev's campaign was somewhat reminiscent of the eve of the discovery of America - then, too, many believed that if you sail for a long time after the setting sun, you will inevitably meet the earth. (True, for some reason, before Columbus, no one succeeded.)
So it was in the 18th century: among sailors and geographers, images of the ice-free southern part of the land were everywhere. Such maps, for example, were used by James Cook when, during his second trip around the world, he tried to reach Terra australis. But his wooden vessels were blocked by icebergs. The Russians were more fortunate - the sloops Vostok and Mirny were able to slip further south, discovered Antarctica and walked around it in a circle.
To be honest, there was nothing to be happy about: the kingdom of ice and cold, without signs of land and harbors convenient for colonization, told Russian sailors. Interest in the mainland faded for a long time. Only from the end of the 19th century, in anticipation of an unprecedented industrial revolution, pioneers were drawn there, equipped with imperialist offices and young raw monsters.
Finally, in the winter of 1911-1912. the troops of the Norwegian Roald Amundsen and the British Robert Scott, moving from different ends of the mainland, almost simultaneously reached the South Pole …
In Search of the Grail
An important role in the latest research in Antarctica belongs, oddly enough, to the Nazis. The Fuhrer, a demoniac mystic, spared no expense in exploring the mysterious continent. A number of expeditions were sent to distant southern latitudes as part of a project to search for lost ancient knowledge. Hitler was clearly looking for something specific. But what? Most likely, the leaders of the Ahnenerbe society ("Legacy of the Ancestors") had data on the catastrophe that caused the glaciation of the archipelago continent, hoping to find traces of highly developed civilizations here, to gain access to their military secrets.
“In the mythology of all the peoples of the world without exception, there is evidence of the Flood. Everyone remembers him, from the Eskimos to the inhabitants of the highlands of Tibet - more than 500 almost identical myths and legends have been recorded. As a result of the catastrophe, they say, new mountains rose, seas or plains appeared, "the stars moved from their place," and the sun began to rise on the other side of the horizon. Geophysicists explain this fact by such a phenomenon as the "slipping" of the earth's crust, which floats on the surface of liquid magma.
Under a certain influence, it can really shift, science allows this. Antarctica was once much closer to the equator. But as a result of the flood, the poles shifted, the climate changed, some peoples died, others were forced to migrate thousands of kilometers,”explains Andrei Zhukov, a historian and expert on pre-Columbian America.
New Swabia on the map of the German Antarctic Expedition 1938-1939. The dotted line indicates the explored area of the mainland.
In the late 30s, the Germans founded a scientific base and a colony called "New Swabia" on the territory of Queen Maud Land - that part of Antarctica, which, thanks to Amundsen's campaign, Norway claims. The further fate of the settlers is hidden in the darkness of the Third Reich, but the strange activity of the German fleet in the southern latitudes is not denied by any serious specialist. It is also rumored that in 1947 real military actions took place here.
One side is known - this is the squadron of American Rear Admiral Richard Byrd. “For some reason, the respected polar explorer set off on another“research”expedition, taking with him an aircraft carrier with a large“wing”of planes and helicopters, two destroyers, an amphibious transport, a submarine, an icebreaker and several other support vessels. In total - 13 ships. About 5,000 people took part in Operation High Jump. It doesn't look very much like science, it's a powerful strike force.
Not everyone returned home. The Americans, who landed just on Queen Maud Land, lost a destroyer, about half of the carrier-based aircraft and about 400 personnel, says Captain First Rank, Doctor of Historical Sciences Dmitry Filippov.
According to the military historian, the Yankees quickly retreated. And at the hearings in Congress, Richard Byrd announced a certain terrible threat hanging over humanity - almost about flying saucers that arise out of nothing and are practically invulnerable. The newspapers then wrote about the clashes, the members of the expedition gave interviews. It's just not clear how much the American censorship corrected them …
One of the versions is that the Americans fought with the Germans, more precisely, with the Hitlerite undead, evacuated to "New Swabia". “The Germans had a so-called Fuehrer's convoy, a number of submarines from its composition in May 1945 surrendered in South America. The prisoners confirmed that shortly before the surrender, documents and relics of the Third Reich were loaded on board some submarines. They also received passengers who hid their faces.
The final destination was Antarctica, and they followed a familiar route, which they had followed more than once. And Karl Doenitz, the head of the Kriegsmarine, back in 1943, claimed that his sailors had discovered some kind of “paradise” and that some kind of impregnable fortress had been created for the Fuhrer at the other end of the world,”says Dmitry Filippov.
Circumpolar paradise
Whatever mythology the recent past of Antarctica is covered with, its present and foreseeable future is much more important to us. Quite active volcanic activity is observed on the sixth continent. So, in the throat of the active volcano Erebus there is a lava lake - a unique phenomenon, because, despite the fierce cold, it never freezes. This suggests that there is a constant influx of enormous energy from the bowels of the Earth. This means that there may be thermal springs under the ice.
In early 2010, scientists from Russia, the United States and Norway discovered many hot geysers on the ocean floor a thousand miles off the coast of Antarctica. There were also found reservoirs hidden from human eyes.
On February 5, 2012, at a depth of 3769.3 meters, the Russians from the Vostok station with the help of an electric drill reached the surface of the largest subglacial lake. Its area is about 16,000 sq. km, the length of the coastline is more than a thousand. The lake was named so - Vostok, it is on all maps of the ice continent.
On January 26, the staff of the Russian Antarctic Expedition made a second penetration into the subglacial lake. This reservoir is "sterile", at a depth of pressure exceeds 300 atmospheres. But that doesn't mean anything yet. Outlets of warm water to other subglacial lakes can form huge cavities with a stable warm microclimate. Ancient life could have survived there. Hollywood is actively fantasizing in this direction - remember, for example, the blockbuster Alien vs. Predator?
“Before the catastrophe, Antarctica was a flourishing land. According to scientists, the continent was located 30-35 degrees "higher", that is, not in the polar latitudes. True, such calculations were made "on the tip of a pencil", they need to be rechecked, to clarify the dates of the catastrophe, which is still referred to the VI-XII millennia BC. And the causes of the disaster - the fall of a huge meteorite into the Pacific Ocean - have not yet been proven. However, the flood is a fact, and so is the pole shift. Theoretically, in Antarctica, for example, the same Atlanteans, representatives of a high-tech civilization, whose traces lie under the ice, could have lived. Otherwise, where did the maps come from, from which medieval craftsmen copied the stunningly accurate contours of the sixth continent, green and inhabited? " - summarizes the researcher Andrey Zhukov.