Philippe Buache, the eighteenth-century French geographer, was | GALLIA DAILY | Voice of France
Philippe Buache, the eighteenth-century French geographer, was also able to publish a map of Antarctica long before the southern continent was officially ‘discovered’.
And the extraordinary feature of Buache’s map is that it seems to have been based on source maps made earlier, perhaps thousands of years earlier, than those used by Oronteus Finaeus and Mercator.
What Buache gives us is an eerily precise representation of Antarctica as it must have looked when there was no ice on it at all.
His map reveals the subglacial topography of the entire continent, which even we did not have full knowledge of until 1958, International Geophysical Year, when a comprehensive seismic survey was carried out. That survey only confirmed what Buache had already proclaimed when he published his map of Antarctica in 1737.
Basing his cartography on ancient sources now lost, the French academician depicted a clear waterway across the southern continent dividing it into two principal landmasses lying east and west of the line now marked by the Trans-Antarctic Mountains.
Such a waterway, connecting the Ross, Weddell and Bellinghausen Seas, would indeed exist if Antarctica were free of ice.
Fingerprint of the Gods: the evidence of earth's lost civilization — Graham Hancock (1993)
