Heinrich seems to be missing the point....one suspects deliberately.
Hapgood's theory is that these maps were made from older source maps which were themselves copies of copies of copies. Reis, as a Turk, would have had access to the wealth of knowledge which the Arabs kept alive while Europe was in the Dark Ages.
Actual maps of subglacial antarctica seem as rare as hen's teeth but I found this one from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. I wouldn't attempt to interpret it!
Heinrich says: (I have separated the paragraph for comment)
There are four major problems with the above questions and statements of FOG.
First, the Buache Map fails miserably to accurately depict the subglacial topography of Antarctica.
Hold this thought.
Second, although from 50 to over 700 meters of uplift as a result of isostatic rebound would have altered the subglacial topography of Antarctica when it had been ice-free, the Buache map still fails to remotely resemble a hypothetical ice-free topography of Antarctica.
Hold this thought, too, but recall the theory that these were drawn from copies of ancient maps.
Third, numerous paleoclimatic and sedimentologic studies shows Antarctica was ice-covered and glaciated when Hapgood (1979) and FOG claim that it was ice-free and temperate 40,000 to 6,000 B.P.
Finally, Antarctica was totally ice-free over 14 million years ago.
#3 and #4 I agree with...and more important, I haven't read where any geologist subscribes to Hapgood's earth-crust displacement theory.
As for points #1 and #2, Heinrich simply chooses to ignore the fact that at a time (1737) when Europeans did not even know that Antarctica existed, Bauche not only included it but broke from the earlier tradition of Mercator and Finaeus and showed it as separate islands.
As noted here:
Antarctica consists of two major regions: W Antarctica (c.2,500,000 sq mi/6,475,000 sq km), a mountainous archipelago that includes the Antarctic Peninsula, and E Antarctica (c.3,000,000 sq mi/7,770,000 sq km), geologically a continental shield. They are joined into a single continental mass by an ice sheet thousands of feet thick
http://www.answers.com/topic/antarctica
Bauche's vision is correct in general but Heinrich is trying to dismiss him because he did not get all the details correct. As has been noted before, many times on this board, scientists have a way of trying to ignore anomalies they find disconcerting.
Bauche did not have Heinrich's access to seismic surveys, etc. but he still managed a reasonable guesstimate of conditions which could not possibly have been observed by human beings in an unglaciated setting. That seems to be the major issue; not whether or not every island was the correct shape.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
-- George Carlin
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