The Hub
Maps are arguments about the world, and always have been. Flat earth cosmology, the Gleason projection sold as a photograph of a flat planet, and the treaty governing Antarctica have all been read as evidence of something concealed. Where those readings began, and what the documents themselves say.
This hub follows the record behind the shape of the world: where the claims began, how they changed, what evidence was offered, and what the surviving sources actually support.
Featured Investigation
A coastline runs along the bottom of a 1513 Ottoman chart, past where anything was supposed to be. In 1960 a US Air Force reconnaissance squadron was asked what it looked like, and answered in writing.
Read the investigationThe Record
A thin book printed in Venice in 1558 described two brothers who sailed into the Arctic a century before Columbus. Its map put an island south of Iceland that sailors searched for, sighted, and never found.
In 1531 a Paris mathematician printed a world map shaped like two hearts, with a southern continent along the bottom and a note calling it recently discovered. Antarctica would not be sighted for another 289 years. Where did the shape come from?
The standard flat earth map carries an 1892 US patent, and that number does real persuasive work. The patent is titled Time-Chart, and Gleason's own filing describes flattening a globe.