This is the first of a 4 part series on the belief of flat earthers that Antarctica is a conspiracy in a variety of ways. We cover each point separately since this topic is so extensive because they've built up so many layers of conspiracy around this continent. This article will be debunking the ice wall flat earthers claim exist, and the other articles will be as follows:
Part 2: Debunking the Flat Earth Antarctic Treaty Conspiracy
Part 3: Debunking the Admiral Byrd Conspiracy Theory
Part 4: Debunking the "No 24 Hour Sunlight in Antarctica" Myth
As we point out in our article, The Flat Earth Resurgence , there has been a huge rise in people who have actually rejected the sphere earth model completely and seem to truly believe the earth is flat! We point out that in order to be able to explain proven phenomenon we see every day in real life, flat earthers have to build more and more unproven and crazy theories on top of crazy theories until their idea looks more like a Rube Goldberg machine than a model of reality.
What Flat Earthers Believe About Antarctica
In my opinion, the most bizarre of their conspiracies is the one about Antarctica. They have built so many ideas on top of ideas that their beliefs about Antarctica have become so incredibly ludicrous, you couldn't make up the things they will tell you about this frozen continent.
First of all, they do not believe Antarctica is a continent, per se, but a frozen 'ice rim' the circumference of the entire planet planet. Secondly, they believe there is no 24 hour sun on Antarctica during their summer months, and they believe no one can go to Antarctica, because if it were allowed, someone might find the ice wall and prove to the world the earth is flat (really!)!
To keep the Rube Goldberg theme going, in order to prevent people from going and exploring for this ice rim, they believe the UN has a fleet of ships patrolling the entire circumference of the earth, preventing any ships from going there to find the ice wall. They also believe the Antarctic Treaty is proof of this, and there is a multinational agreement to keep anyone from going to Antarctica and finding the truth! Conveniently, this Treaty designed to hide a flat earth is published right on the internet for all to see and read.
Image credit: mine
They believe this is all a conspiracy by the leaders of dozens of nations, the UN, shipping companies, airlines, private companies who deal with the government, and even satellite cable companies, to hide the real truth from you. They will even bring Admiral Byrd and Wikileaks into the mess to 'prove' their conspiracy! All of which we will show is utter nonsense later in the series.
When asked the reason for the biggest conspiracy on the planet it usually illicits nonsensical answers such as "Well, they are hiding land from us!" or "There is nothing that would quench the exploratory spirit of the most curious creature on the planet by telling him the earth is a sphere!" or the religious reason of "They are hiding God from us", as if an omnipotent being would be able to accomplish anything and everything except making spheres, or somehow a flat plane with an impenetrable dome would naturally harbor more land or incite more of an exploratory spirit than the ability to go into the infinity of space would!
Seriously, I could not even make this stuff up if I were to try. These are actual beliefs of the vast majority of flat earthers, and why I chose to make this series to debunk this nonsense and provide some sanity to this Antarctica conspiracy theory.
The Ice Wall Debunked
The entire start of this conspiracy is their belief in an ice wall. This belief is mainly because, as we point out in our article The Flat Earth Map is Actually a Projection Map of a Globe, despite having every GPS coordinate on nearly every point on the earth, satellite images of the entire earth, and having nearly every distance accurately mapped between every point on earth, flat earthers have not been able to use crowdsourcing of their tens of thousands of members, blockchain, the internet, and supercomputers to create an accurate map with even correct distances between points. It should be amazingly easy to map a planar earth to a planar surface, but so far, this feat has eluded them.
So, instead of using modern technology to survey their fantasy world and create an accurate 'flat earth map' they have arbitrarily chosen to use a globe projection map with Antarctica depicted as an ice rim around the world, as shown in the image below. Somehow, inexplicably, flat earthers decided this depiction of Antarctica as an ice rim is reality.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
However, there is zero evidence of this ice wall, and plenty of evidence it is merely a continent present at the southern pole of the earth, including the fact that it has been circumnavigated multiple times, including This Successful Solo Navigation by Lisa Blair in 2017 and there is even an Annual Antarctic Cup Race complete with a 'racetrack' of electronic gates and lanes. Not to mention the fact it's been surveyed in many different ways.
All of the circumnavigations and surveys, that have led to the depictions of Antarctica on a globe, point to the continent having a circumference of less than 15,000 miles, both as shown on the sailors' GPS devices, the length of time it took the circumnavigations to occur, and results of surveys. However, on the globe projection map that flat earthers use, the circumference of Antarctica must be somewhere between 60,000- 78,000 miles.
Here's the math that you can do yourself to show this. I put in the coordinates for the very tip of Antarctica in South America to the topmost portion of land at the top of North America, to make as straight a line as possible on Google maps (Note that when you do this on Google maps, the line will be slightly curved. I wonder why) and got the coordinates of:
King George Island
Antarctica
-61.901698, -57.998392
to
Ellesmere Island
Baffin, Unorganized, NU, Canada
82.790687, -63.845865
for a total distance of just at 10,000 miles (10,000.23 mi to be exact). This is actually somewhat too short of a distance, since the center of the Arctic Circle would be higher than my coordinates, and the center of the Antarctic Circle would also be lower. But we'll give flat earthers this 'conservative' estimate to show the approximate circumference of the interior of the ice wall.
So, we put in the formula of: C=2πr
to get the total circumference of: 62831.85 miles.
Image Credit: mine
But we can add on even more distance using the distance between the actual coordinates. Google maps will not allow these coordinates to be put in to get directions, so I used TimeandDate.com which gives us the distance of 12,427 miles from North Pole to South Pole, which would give us the staggering number of 78083.81 miles of the earth's circumference. This would represent the exterior of the ice wall.
Image Credit: mine
I could do the calculations on Google maps to be more accurate, but you get the idea of the giant distances involved here, in determining the size of the ice rim. The distance is between 60,000 to 78,000 miles. This is a 4 -5 times larger than the 14,000-15,000 mile distance aerial surveys, satellite imagery, and circumnavigation have revealed. An error of 400-500%, or of approximately 45,000 miles!
The Science Sphere Earthers Have Done on Antarctica
While flat earthers are making memes and inventing conspiracies, sphere earthers are doing aerial and satellite surveys of Antarctica to create accurate maps for navigation and further exploration. Some surveys that have been done are:
- THE FALKLAND ISLANDS AND DEPENDENCIES AERIAL SURVEY EXPEDITION: carried out in 1956-1957. You can see many of the studies done from this expedition at the Cambridge University Website for the Scott Polar Research Institute
- The British Antarctic Survey: Where you can take your pick of one of the many types of maps they have created, such as topographic maps, geologic maps, digital maps for use in GPS devices and for pilots, and magnetic anomaly maps compiled from satellite and ground data by 22 different scientific organizations since 1957
- The Soviets have done at least 35 Antarctic expeditions. You can see the abstract of research on this study entitled Soviet geological maps of the Prince Charles Mountains, East Antarctic Shield
- Antarctica Gamburtsev Project: Surveyed and discovered entire mountain ranges underneath the ice.
- This is the 1970-1971 Typewritten Report from the Antarctic Research Division of the Australian Government
- The Australian Government has an entire Website discussing their activities in Antarctica, including the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition
- There was a Prince Charles Mountains Expedition of Germany and Australia where they did extensive geodetic surveying and ice radar surveying
- There's even a McMurdo-Antarctica Lidar Project attempting to map the continent with lidar.
You can even search the Australian Antarctic Data Center and the Cambridge Scott Polar Research Institute Database for specific information about the thousands of expeditions, surveys, and even get the satellite imagery that has been done on Antarctica. There is a mountain of information and evidence that flat earthers must completely ignore in order to maintain their ridiculous illusion
And the Evidence from the Flat Earthers?
No flat earther has done any aerial surveying or taken satellite imagery of this ice wall even though they believe their impenetrable dome is at least 200 miles in height and so could easily get a satellite or plane over it to get images, surveys, or lidar. None have Circumnavigated Antarctica Like Lisa Blair, attempted a Solo Crossing Like Henry Worsely tried to do, and it seems as though none have even bothered to 'survey' it in the comfort of an airliner by taking this Quantus Antarctic Tourist Flight to see for themselves that it is a continent and not an ice rim. It seems that none have figured out ANY way to get the slightest bit of evidence of this 'ice rim' or the edge of the world they claim is there.
In fact, this promotional video for the Quantus flight Yes, the one entitled Flat Earth Hoax below) explains that they have NINETEEN different flight paths over the continent, and that they have many repeat customers for this tourist flight that flies over Antarctica for 4 to 5 HOURS. There is a huge amount of footage of Antarctica in this video, and certainly there are thousands of tourists with hours of video from this flight.
At an average airspeed of 550 miles per hour, the flight would cover over 1000 miles in two hours of flying with over 100 miles of view in each direction. If you look at the flat earth map, at no point could that ice wall possibly be 1000 miles wide. If there were an ice rim around the earth, someone on that flight would have noticed. In fact, that flight would simply not be allowed if there were a massive worldwide cover up to hide a flat earth from us.
I suspect some flat earther might argue that they are flying over the North Pole. However, the flight leaves from Australia and takes 12 hours out and back. There is no possibility such a great distance could be covered in 12 hours, let alone have 4 hours of flight time over the ice in the North Pole.
A while back, there was a GoFundMe Campaign to get flat earthers to Antarctica to prove the flat earth, but It Was Canceled After a Negative Article About Flat Earth . Cancelled after a negative article? What? Sounds like true science believers who are dedicated to the truth, right?
Every once in a while, they may put up a picture of an iceberg or ice floe and claim it's THE ice rim, but these images of a small chunk of ice could be taken anywhere in the world and are certainly not evidence of a continuous wall of ice 60,000 miles in circumference. In other words, they have zero evidence of this ice wall. The only thing they have are wild, speculative claims with no evidence to back them up. Here's one of the images they use to prove the existence of a 60,000 mile ice wall being guarded by a fleet of what would need to be 10's of thousands of armed ships.
Image Credit: Our World Heritage- since that is the ORIGINAL source of the image
Interestingly enough, the actual image in the meme disproves their belief system! Too bad they did not bother to find the source of this image, and just liked the way it looked. It is an image from a blog called Our World Heritage.
The ship in the meme above is the FS Polarstern, a private ship and not an armed UN gunship, contracted on the author's trip to Antarctica to take supplies to people at the Neumayer Station, a permanent research outpost on the ice shelf. I soundly Debunk Ice Wall Memes and provide more details of this image and the story behind it on that page. This image is simply a dishonest way to get gullible people to believe in the flat earth cult.
Can they get any more ridiculous? Well, keep reading to Part 2: Debunking the Flat Earth Antarctic Treaty Conspiracy to find out how flat earthers have concocted an insane story about a fleet of armed UN ships preventing anyone from finding the ice wall!
