Charles Hapgood

Charles Hapgood taught history at Keene Teachers College in New Hampshire, now Keene State College. In 1958 he published Earth's Shifting Crust, which proposed that the whole outer shell of the planet can slide over the interior, carrying continents into and out of the polar regions. Albert Einstein wrote its foreword, which is about the crust and says nothing about maps.

In 1966 he published Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, a study of old charts carried out with his students. He read the southern coasts on the Piri Reis map of 1513 and Oronce Fine's world map of 1531 as Antarctica drawn without its ice, copied from older charts made by a seafaring people who mapped the far south before the ice closed over it. An Air Force reconnaissance squadron at Westover Air Force Base, which he asked to look at the Piri Reis map, wrote back in 1960 that his identification was reasonable.

Map historians read the same coasts as the southern land of their period's geography, and Hapgood's matches rest on corrections to the maps' grids that his critics regard as the problem. Antarctica's ice is also far older than his reading allows: it began to form about 34 million years ago, and his coast needed to be open around 9600 BC.