The Glass Ceiling
Chapter 13: The Map

What on Earth

My globe shows only ice around the axle where the North Pole should be. Yet in older maps from Zeno, Mercator, Cabot and others, an assemblage of islands cradles an inland sea.

Map making was a venerated and honorable profession. Elaborate marquees were hand drawn with calligrapher's tools. Raw data was collected by mariner explorers. Rough sailors though they may have been, their mapping skills were a source of deep generational pride.

Recognizable land masses shared by unconnected mapping sources are unlikely to have been a fantasy. For further provenance, these Northern islands are described in excruciating detail in correspondence between Mercator and Sir John Dee. The North Atlantic was especially well explored by sailors from Britain and Scandinavia.

The mapmakers art is seen in progress in the image at top left. This map greatly predates aircraft images and the accuracy of the mapping of South America is impressive. In the unexplored North, we see land masses that correspond to the islands. There is an interesting looking island West of South America.

Pre-Copernican maps show a flat projection but Mercator's projection is accurate for the day and implies that the Arctic circle shown in modern maps is pinched and the Northern extents of Canada, Europe and Russia have been distorted to compensate.

The Missing Land

The four islands in Mercator's map represent a land mass larger than the continental United States.

Modern maps omit these islands, and by projection, the space in which they exist.

As the Earth is flat, we know that there is no such thing as a South Pole. If we walk a straight line from the North Pole we will encounter the equator after 4,000 miles (by definition). If we walk 4,000 miles farther we encounter a large circle, 8,000 miles in radius and 50,000 miles in circumference. The Antarctic Circle is much bigger than the Arctic Circle. This is in keeping with voyage logs of Cook, Ross and Magellan, each of whom clocked nearly fifty thousand miles in the attempt to circumnavigate Antarctica.

Let's draw a big purple circle, 50,000 miles around and 16,000 miles across. Let's put a top down of the accepted globe in the middle and add back Mercator's islands.

Now using the rest of the land masses from our spherical map, with continent shapes almost natural, we fill in the Southern Hemisphere.

Do you see what I see?

Yes, it's a very crude diagram. But do you see there's not nearly enough map to cover it? In the Azimuthal Equidistant Projection, continents are widened at their bottoms, and stretched out to fill the circle. But if you don't do that, instead placing the rest of the landmasses at their approximate correct size and shape, there's way more land than there is map.

And that is exactly what was done to our map. More than half of it is missing.

It could be all water. If there are land masses we can never know because our map has no way to represent that place. It has been removed from our reality by a trick of projection. Enough ancient sources remain for us to see what has been done in the North. A little bit of math or origami shows that three quarters of the "Southern Hemisphere" is missing outright.

All we know about the map of the world is what has been given to us. We can prove the map is incomplete, but there's no place on Google to look up what isn't there.

As our civilization is largely clustered North of the equator, the North was fairly well explored in ancient times and a reasonable guess may give us a workable projection inside the equatorial circle.

The South was mapped far less well, and Antarctica was not characterized until fairly modern times. Ancient explorers referred to vast southern land masses severally as Terre Australis. Its profile and extent were unknown.

On the evidence in front of us it is hard to believe there is nothing in the North but ice and starving polar bears who can be saved by a single bottle of Coca Cola. (It's the real thing you know, unlike moon pictures, space pictures and maps).

USGS is the premier source of global mapping data, which they get from NASA. Conspiracy wags say that stands for Never A Straight Answer. NASA presents the globe/space meme nonstop through all the media. They give us starmaps and oh-so-pretty telescope pictures. And they give us our earth maps.

Most people at NASA believe in space, having gone through the same schools we did. But a few people at the top know the truth. Shadow governments run deep, and the President does not necessarily have a "need to know".

But we know. And we can see that our maps are both untrue and incomplete.

In Canada, the Northern limit of where you can go with your kayak is a military blockade called the DEW line. Commercial flights are not allowed to go near the pole although that would normally be the most efficient route from Europe to America. The official story is patronizing nonsense about great circle paths.

The story so far... The North is frozen wasteland and no you can't go there, you have to take our word for it. Ancient mapmakers? That's silly. We didn't even have maps before satellites, and they were probably all drunk. If there ever was land up there, it sank eleven billion years ago when the asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.

The accustomed white void in the center is replaced here with the mountainous islands and inland sea of the ancient maps.

The yellow circle around the outside of the map is the ice wall we call Antarctica. Its extent is unknown.

What remains purple is unknown. If you go there you will be lost because it is not on the map. For those of us who grew up with the globe model, this part of the map is fully unexplored.

Are they hiding land? In the North, we know they are. In the great purple void? We can only speculate. But you can see that the map as given does not add up.


Here is a more professional map with a more-or-less natural projection. Just like my crude paste-up diagram, this map tells the story of missing land. There just aren't enough continents to cover the great circle.

And here is an unusual variation on the famed AE map. This one wraps back and tries to show Antarctica as a continent, but there's a lot of empty space.

Of course we could settle all this once and for all if we climb in our motor launch and steam South to Antarctica. We can sail around it and find out if it's 12,000 miles around like NASA says or if it's 50,000 miles like it says in the voyage logs of Magellan and Cook.

Oh but we can't go there. An international treaty is enforced by a military blockade so we have to take NASA's word for it after all.
Back to The Glass Ceiling Contents Next: Academic Arguments
Home Forum About Contact Us