'Horrible' Sea Level Rise Of More Than 3 Feet Plausible By 2100, Experts Say - NBC

[muriel_volestrangler]

103. Wait - are you being serious?

We say somewhere is discovered when people get to it (not penguins). So the Americas were indeed discovered when the first people got there 12,000 (or whatever the latest estimate) years ago. But, and I really hope you knew this already, Antarctica doesn't have any indigenous people. No-one lived on it, or visited it. It is well beyond the horizon from Tierra Del Fuego, across an extremely rough ocean that people did not have good enough ships to navigate east-to-west until the 16th century. Going further south was even harder. The ice gets in the way.

Read the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Antarctica

The Antarctic mainland was not seen until 1820.

The 'map' you saw from the 1500s was a complete guess. It was not accurate. And you have no reason to think it dates from 600AD, or any other time. Perhaps it was the Oronce Fine one, which makes an Antarctic continent far too large, perhaps including a bit of coast of Australia, and reaching up to as far north as Madagascar:



http://xoomer.virgilio.it/dicuoghi/Piri_Reis/Finaeus_eng.htm