Kingdom Come

The AuthaGraph map renders the continents in their true size and shape. Africa has regained its geographic primacy while North America and Europe are shrunk back to their true sizes. The oceans, too, are finally represented accurately…Narukawa has achieved a geographically accurate depiction of Earth.

 Except that it’s a rectangle with the landmasses pushed into corners. This configuration fails to spread the shared oceans around the land spaces in a circular area around the North Pole. An oceanographically accurate depiction of Earth would have to be circular with the North Pole at the center.

The politics of this rectangular map really comes into play in the map’s depiction of Antarctica.

While the AuthaGraph map layout was only drawn in 2016, it was, curiously, portrayed 70 years earlier as the “ Official Seal and Emblem of the United Nations, Report of the Secretary-General, 15 October 1946″.

South America’s elongated northeast projection is the giveaway. The United Nations version appropriately groups the continents around the central North Pole. Antarctica is not shown.

That is really odd, because Antarctica is the fifth-largest continent in terms of total land area at 5.5 million square miles. with 11,164 miles of coastline. Resting on top of that land is the world’s largest ice sheet. That ice holds more than 60 percent of Earth’s fresh water.

As early as 1929 Admiral Richard Byrd led exploration of Antarctica with a team of 40 men with three airplanes exploring Antarctica and photographing the terrain from the air.

At 3:29 p.m.Byrd, the pilot Bernt Balchen, and two others took off from Little America [base camp] in the Floyd Bennett, headed for the South Pole.

Magnetic compasses were useless so near the pole, so the explorers were forced to rely on sun compasses and Byrd’s skill as a navigator….the Floyd Bennett struggled to gain enough altitude to fly safely above the Polar Plateau. They cleared the 11,000-foot pass…by a few hundred yards and then flew on to the South Pole,..They flew a few miles beyond the pole and then to the right and the left to compensate for any navigational errors. Byrd dropped a small American flag on the pole, and the explorers headed for home, safely landing at Little America at 10:11 a.m.

There are so many questionable claims in this story. We’re just going to take the word of four men with a vested interest in becoming famous that they successfully made a 14 hour round trip in this aeroplane over the most hostile terrain in the world?

Most of Antarctica looks like this…no roads, very cold, very high, very windy. Only about one per cent of Antarctica is visible above the ice sheet covering it, which in some places is 12,000 feet thick.

Antarctica is difficult to get to, has virtually no infrastructure and is a very hard environment to live in...

Antarctica is very big and mostly totally empty like no-where else…

the coast [freezes] out to between hundreds and well over a thousand kilometers every winter. In the spring it breaks up and the ice threatens any boating or shipping activities. It is the coldest and the windiest continent, the ice caps make it the highest too.

The reported width of Antarctica varies from a maximum of 3,337 miles and minimum of 771 miles, making an average width of about 2,000 miles. This is the length of the Transantarctic Mountains,the fourth-longest mountain range in the world,which reportedly splits the entire continent into two unequal parts.

On both his flights to the North and South Pole Richard Byrd chose a Fokker Tri motor, an American-built version of the Dutch Fokker F.VIII-3M. Three engines at 200 horsepower each were capable of a maximum speed of 122 miles per hour. Four fuel tanks held 110 gallons each. At cruising speed, fuel consumption was about 28 gallons per hour.

Check my math. Constantly in the air from 3:30 pm until 10:30 am the following day adds up to 19 hours of flight time.

At 122 mph x 19 hours the plane could cover 2,300 miles. That works out to be the average width of the continent, i.e. half the trip to the center and back again, within reason.

But at 28 gallons per hour x 440 gallons the plane was only carrying enough fuel for a 14 hour flight – at cruising speed, without exertion for elevations or against headwinds either coming or going or both ways.

All our information comes from a government focused on military superiority and space exploration. It is hardly a stretch of the imagination or a paranoid conspiracy theory to consider that our government is keeping secrets. And in fact, Richard Byrd’s credibility was already suspect.

Richard Evelyn Byrd learned how to fly in the U.S. Navy and served as a pilot in World War I. An excellent navigator, he was deployed by the navy to Greenland in 1924 to help explore the Arctic region by air. On May 9, 1926, the Josephine Ford left Spitsbergen, Norway, with Byrd as navigator and Floyd Bennet as pilot. Fifteen hours and 30 minutes later, the pair returned and announced they had accomplished their mission. For the achievement, both men were awarded the Medal of Honor. However, some doubt lingered about whether they had actually flown over the North Pole, and in 1996 a diary Byrd had kept on the flight was found that seemed to suggest that the Josephine Ford had turned back 150 miles short of its goal because of an oil leak. In the late 1920s, however, few suspected Byrd had failed in his mission.

It is highly questionable how far into the interior the 1929 South Pole expedition could have penetrated. Nonetheless, a map of Antarctica is attributed to this expedition.

We can deduce that the extreme weather conditions at the South Pole did indeed hinder exploration because it wasn’t until December 1946 that Admiral Richard Byrd led another expedition.

Operation Highjump into Antarctica.

“High jump” into the bottom of the word?

It sounds more like it was a part of the frenzied Space Race occurring concurrently upon the acquisition of Nazi rocket science by both the U.S. and Russia at this same time. Everything is connected. The chiefs of staff of governments are weighing all their options, budgets, and priorities.

HIGHJUMP’s objectives, according to the U.S. Navy report of the operation, were:

1. Training personnel and testing equipment in frigid conditions; [as would occur in outer space]
2. Consolidating and extending the United States’ sovereignty over the largest practicable area of the Antarctic continent (publicly denied as a goal before the expedition ended);
3. Determining the feasibility of establishing, maintaining, and utilizing bases in the Antarctic and investigating possible base sites;
4. Developing techniques for establishing, maintaining, and utilizing air bases on ice, with particular attention to later applicability of such techniques to operations in interior Greenland, where conditions are comparable to those in the Antarctic;
5. Amplifying existing stores of knowledge of electromagnetic, geological, geographic, hydrographic, and meteorological propagation conditions in the area;
6. Supplementary objectives of the Nanook expedition  [by the North Pole which had been previously explored by Admiral Byrd.

Sure sounds like typical military reconnaissance. The Soviets thought so too, stating in one of their military journals that “U.S. measures in Antarctica testify that American military circles are seeking to subject the polar regions to their control and create military bases.”

Highjump was a significant illustration of the state of the world and the cold war thinking at the time. The nuclear age had just begun, and the real fears were that the Soviet Union would attack the United States over the North Pole. The Navy had done a training exercise there in the summer of 1946 and felt it needed to do more. The northern winter was coming, and Highjump was a quickly planned exercise to move the whole thing to the South Pole. Politically, the orders were that the Navy should do all it could to establish a basis for a [land] claim in Antarctica. That was classified at the time…

How did Highjump help lay the foundation for further U.S. exploration of the continent?

Belanger: It was the beginning of photo mapping there, and…guided the building of stations there.

That contrasts with the public service announcement of the purpose of Highjump.

During Highjump the six R4Ds completed 28 photographic flights and captured more than 21,000 images. The helicopters and PBMs also flew photo missions along the coasts.At the completion of the operation, more than 70,000 photos had been taken and over 1.5 million square miles of territory had been surveyed. “Our hope is that now we have the entire material to make a detailed map of all of Antarctica,” said Byrd.

The greatest achievement of Operation Highjump was its acquisition of approximately 70,000 aerial photographs of the coast of Antarctica and selected inland areas. Unfortunately, a large percentage of the photographs were rendered useless due to a lack of adequate ground control points. Fortunately, this deficiency was rectified the following year by a much smaller expedition, Operation Windmill composed of the icebreakers Edisto and Burton Island, which succeeded in obtaining most of the needed ground control points.

Fortunately. but realistically?

Operation High Jump’s ship- and land-based aircraft only mapped and photographed some 537,000 square miles (1,390,000 square km)of the Antarctic coastline and interior. That’s only 10% of Antartica’s reported total land mass of 5,500,000 square miles.

After just two month’s of work the expedition was precipitously withdrawn back to the United States in February 1947.

But amazingly!, in 2010 the contours and size of Antarctica as determined by Admiral Byrd were confirmed by satellite imaging.

Researchers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., led a team that used high-resolution satellite images, along with newly developed computer software, to trace the most accurate Antarctic grounding line ever compiled. The point where ice separates from land is called the “grounding line…” The red dots are the data points for the new map, overlaying the previous map compiled in 1946-47 using far inferior equipment.

So with all this new data, why does the new map based on the latest high tech radar data show the exact same outline of the landmass as the crude 1947 map drawn from surface visualization only? 

One has to assume, or at least wonder, if the Transarctic Mountain chain is what was used to measure Antarctica.

Radar imaging has revealed what Antarctica would really look like if it wasn’t covered in ice….

The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) used decades of research including state of the art techniques to show what the continent would look like ‘naked’.

The map by BAS shows just how mountainous it is in the greatest ever detail.

The red and black areas denote the tallest peaks, with dark blue marking the lower elevations.

BAS researcher Professor David Vaughn added: ‘Ten years ago I worked on the last version of this map, so when my colleagues brought the draft of this one to my office I was blown away.

‘It’s like we discovered a new continent hidden under the ice. This is the product of putting the accumulated measurements from hundreds of scientists together.

Just eyeballing the new geological discoveries gives us some sense that almost the entire landmass of 5.5 million square miles is mountainous, and even the lower elevations are significant. There are actually 9,000 ft-high mountains lurking beneath the 12,000 feet of ice.

Ahh, but there’s more.

There are several ways to judge the size of Antarctica. The present land mass of ice and rock extends over about 14 million square kilometres (5.5 million square miles), but every winter the solid surface area of Antarctica roughly doubles to 28 million squarekilometers (11 million square miles).  If this sea ice is regarded as part of the land mass, Antarctica would be third in size after Asia and Africa.

I would posit that all water – solid or liquid – surrounding Antarctica’s land mass is as much a part of Antarctica as the ocean surrounding the state of Hawaii and other island chains. The mountain/island Mauna Kea is the tallest known mountain because it is measured from its base on the ocean floor rather than from sea level. 

The Earth is, after all, considered one solid mass of which only some is covered by water. All that underlying solid mass has to be accounted for when parceling out the pieces of the Earth. This matters because maps can easily shift the location of water around – as is done in the AuthoGraph map, but not landmass size and location, covered or not by water.

A group of scientists has unveiled the most precise map yet of the floor of Antarctica’s Southern Ocean.

The map covers 48 million square kilometers (~24 million square miles) of the floor of the ocean. Submerged mountains encircle all of Antarctic land mass. Adding the roughly 5 million square miles of continental land to the 24 million square miles undersea surroung the land results in a total of about 30 million square miles of mountainous area.

This is approximately 1/7 of earth’s ground area of 200 million square miles, above and below water.

The Antarctic mountains are the key to discovering the true size and shape of the Antarctic.

Earth has at least two veeeery looooong mountain ranges; one is the Alpide mountain belt (including the Himalayas) extending west to east from the Atlantic to the Pacific across Eurasia, and the other is the American Cordillera (including the Andes) extending north to south across the Americas from the Artic to the Antarctic.

I was unable to find estimates of the square mileage of these two systems but they can be visualized on a topographical map for comparison purposes.

Each of those belts extends over just a little less than half the circumference of the Earth, i.e. ~125,000 miles, 1/2 of the total of ~250,000 linear miles at the equator of a globe, or around the poles for a globe earth. And this is the maximum length of a line of mountains on a globe due to the geological processes that form them. 

Underground forces from volcanic activity split apart the original single land mass called Pangea. The following map clearly shows the line of volcanoes dividing the Americas and Europe and Africa,

as well as the “ring of fire” in the Pacific. 

The Pacific Ocean’s Ring of Fire actually extends farther than this map. Volcanoes in Antarctica, including Mount Erebus, the southernmost volcano on Earth, complete the Ring of Fire.

So why don’t either of the maps show the Antarctic?

The mountains on the continents are formed from a different process than volcanic mountains. After Pangea’s solid crust broke up, the resulting pieces have been squeezed together by ongoing volcanic undersea volcanic forces.

When plates collide, there’s no place for the mass between them to go except up. Think of a finger and thumb pressing together on a tube of toothpaste.

Since it takes two sides smashing into each other to form a mountain range, the maximum possible length of a mountain range is one half of a globular crust. Looking at the map of the fault line we can trace the lines responsible for the north-south Cordillera and east-west Alpide ranges. Each is formed from approximately half of the earth’s crust, in multiple plates.

Those plates lie near or across the widest part of a globe earth, which provides the distance needed to form large mountain ranges.

A rectangular map gives a false impression of the extent of Antarctica allowed for mountain formation. On a globe earth, Antarctica is crowded into a circular, bowl-shaped section. Take a ball and section off a circular area representing the Antarctic on a globe. There isn’t enough room to account for 30 million square miles of mountains.

I understand that I don’t have the resources to prove anything about Antarctica. That’s not my job. It’s the job of National Geographic and the United Nations etc. to prove what they claim is true. What I’ve done is raised doubts based on inconsistent and incompatible data provided by these sources.

A thinking person should question the veracity of these sources, especially when special interests are at stake.