Speaker 1: Imagine, imagine you're working on this massive puzzle of the world, right,
like a puzzle you've been putting together for thousands of years.
Speaker 2: That is a very long time to.
Speaker 1: Be doing a puzzle, right, But you know, humanity has
been slowly snapping these pieces together for centuries, and then
finally you snap this massive icy piece into the absolute
bottom corner. You finally finish the south.
Speaker 2: You're talking about Anarica obviously actually.
Speaker 1: But then right as you do that, you look up
and realize this completely massive section from the top of
the puzzle, a label that had been there for centuries
has just well, it's completely vanished.
Speaker 2: Just scrubbed, completely clean from the board.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's wild. Welcome to Thrilling Threads everyone. We're so
glad you're hanging out with us today because we are
going on an absolute mission to unravel this.
Speaker 2: It really is a fascinating convergence of timelines.
Speaker 1: It totally is. Today we're looking at what honestly feels
like a glitch in the matrix of you know, global geography,
the historical crossover event, yeah, right in the nineteenth century.
Because on one hand, you have this sudden, highly documented
appearance of the entire continent of Antarctica, and literally on
that exact same timeline, just as that massive southern land
mass is getting officially mapped, this other huge territory known
on centuries of maps as Tartaria is just quietly erased.
Speaker 2: Which really makes this a conversation about the mechanics of memory,
you know, and just how incredibly fragile recorded history actually is.
Absolutely because our mission today is to look at the
official naval records, the exploration logs, and ancient cartography to
really isolate a specific mechanism. We want to figure out
how much of our history is actually discovered, how much
is just inherited from older civilizations, and maybe most importantly,
how much is intentionally overwritten by the very people drawing
the maps.
Speaker 1: Right, the people with the pens have the power. So
let's actually start with the physical discovery part, well, the
official discovery.
Speaker 2: Of antarcticley to set the stage for eighteen twenty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because to understand the weird timing of Antarctica showing
up on the map, you have to look at what
was happening in the atmosphere right before that. I was
reading the meteorological data we pulled for this, and right
before the Southern continent is officially found, the whole planet
goes through this terrifying, violent climate shock.
Speaker 2: You're referring to eighteen sixteen, which is famously recorded as
the Year without a Summer.
Speaker 1: Yes, which sounds like a sci fi movie, honestly.
Speaker 2: It really does. And the catalyst for that was actually
an event from the year prior, in April of eighteen fifteen.
It was the eruption of Mount Tambora in present day Indonesia.
And I mean this wasn't just your standard volcanic events.
Speaker 1: Hey, it was massive.
Speaker 2: It was a VEI seven on the volcanic explosivity Index
to give you an idea the scale. It ejected something
like one hundred cubic kilometers of rock and ash directly
into the.
Speaker 1: Atmosphere, which is kind of an abstract number until you
look at what that actually does to the chemistry of
the sky. Because I was looking at the paleo clipsmatology reports,
and the real killer wasn't the ash hitting the ground,
I mean, not globally anyway, It was the sulfur dioxide gas.
Speaker 2: That is the primary mechanism for a volcanic winter.
Speaker 1: Yes, Timbora just pumped tens of millions of tons of
sulfur dioxide straight up into the stratosphere, and once it's
up there, it reacts with water vapor and turns into
these sulfate aerosols, and.
Speaker 2: Those aerosols catch the atmosphereic currents and just spread across
the entire globe. They basically act like this massive planetary sunshade.
Speaker 1: A sunshade that you cannot take down right.
Speaker 2: They reflect the incoming solar radiation back out into space,
drastically increasing the Earth's albedo. The heat from the sun
literally just cannot penetrate the lower atmosphere to warm the surface.
Speaker 1: So the entire northern hemisphere essentially gets this giant emergency
thermal blanket thrown over it, but one that like traps
the cold in instead of keeping you warm.
Speaker 2: The ground level reality was pretty apocalyptic.
Speaker 1: It really was. I mean, I was looking at these
agricultural diaries from New England farmers. They were documenting severe
frost in every single month of the year.
Speaker 2: In June of eighteen sixteen, there were massive snowstorms hitting
New York and Maine.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine you're living in this agrarian society that
relies entirely on a predictable growing season, and suddenly just
the physics of the atmosphere decide that your corn is
going to freeze solid in July.
Speaker 2: And without the kind of globalized supply chains we have today,
local crap failure just meant immediate famine period.
Speaker 1: You just didn't eat.
Speaker 2: Europe was already economically devastated from the Napoleonic Wars, so
this lack of food led to widespread riots arson mass
migrations in North America. It actually triggered this desperate westward
migration into the Midwest because New England's agriculture just collapsed.
Speaker 1: It was literally a global system reboot. Humanity is just
trying to survive, staring at this dark sky and frozen ground.
But then as those aerosols finally start to settle out
over the next few years and the climate stabilizes, boom,
the map of the world suddenly gets this massive expansion,
which brings us.
Speaker 2: To eighteen the watershed moment for southern.
Speaker 1: Geography, exactly after thousands of years of human history. Eighteen
twenty is the year we officially confirm Antarctica is reel.
Speaker 2: But looking at the sources, there's this wild logistical anomaly.
Speaker 1: Here the Triple Discovery.
Speaker 2: Yes, it wasn't just one ship getting blown off course.
In the exact same year eighteen twenty, you have three
completely separate expeditions from three different countries spotting the continent
almost simultaneously.
Speaker 1: It's a fascinating study in maritime logistics. Really. You have
the Russian expedition led by Fabian von Bellingshausen, right, you
have a British expedition under Edward Brandsfield, and then you
have an American sealer named Nathaniel Palmer.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this a bit because I have to
push back on the sheer improbability. Here. Bellings Housen he
was Russian Imperial Navy, right.
Speaker 1: Yes, operating under direct orders from Zar Alexander the first
he had two heavily reinforced ships, and on January twenty seventh,
eighteen twenty, his logs say he spotted an unbroken ice
shelf we now know as the Fimble ice Shelf.
Speaker 2: Okay, So the Russians get there late January. Then literally
three days later, on January thirtieth.
Speaker 1: Edward Brandsfield spot's the Trinity Peninsula. A British guy on
a merchant ship charting the South Shetland Islands three days apart.
And then my favorite part of this whole thing, later
that year, you have Nathaniel.
Speaker 2: Palmer, the commercial sealer.
Speaker 1: He wasn't some decorated naval captain. He was a twenty
one year old kid from Connecticut sailing a tiny forty
seven foot wooden sloop called the Hero. He wasn't even
looking for a continent.
Speaker 2: No, he was looking for fresh seal rookeries to harvest
for pelts, the economic driver of exploration right there.
Speaker 1: Seal oil and pelts were huge money. But think about
this timeline. We are talking about advanced maritime civilizations. Humans
had already crossed the Atlantic. We mapped the super complex
coastlines of the Americas. We had global spice routes.
Speaker 2: We had chronometers for longitude and sextants for latitude exactly.
Speaker 1: We knew how to sale. So how does this entire
global maritime network completely miss a continent that is larger
than Europe for millennia? And then a Russian captain, a
British surveyor, and a twenty one year old kid all
bump into it in a ten month window right after
a global climate crisis.
Speaker 2: Well, the sheer scale and violence of the Southern Ocean
does provide a lot of the answer.
Speaker 1: There.
Speaker 2: The currents, right, Yeah, the antarctics circumpolar current is the
strongest ocean current on the planet. It creates this massive,
violent barrier of water. They literally call those latitudes the
Roaring forties, the furious fifties, and the screaming sixties.
Speaker 1: That sounds terrifying, honestly.
Speaker 2: It was before the nineteenth century, wooden sailing vessels just
didn't have a whole strength to survive the pack ice. Plus,
they didn't really have the dietary understanding of scurvy to
survive a voyage that isolated, right, you.
Speaker 1: Just die of vitamin ced efficiency before you even saw
an iceberg exactly.
Speaker 2: So the mainstream argument is that eighteen twenty was just
the exact moment where human ship building, technology, navigation, and
sheer political will finally converged to pierce that icy barrier.
Speaker 1: Okay, and logically that makes perfect sense. It fits the
whole narrative of a newly discovered world. But and this
is a huge but this brings us to the cartographic ghosts,
the inherited maps. Yes, because if an article was this
totally pristine undiscovered blank space until eighteen twenty. Then we
really have to explain why there are highly detailed maps
drawn centuries earlier that seem to show it already sitting
right there.
Speaker 2: This is where we shift from the physical reality of
the ocean to the archival reality of the map makers.
And the absolute centerpiece of this debate is the perie Rees.
Speaker 1: Map from fifteen thirteen.
Speaker 2: Right correct, compiled by an admiral and cartographer in the
Ottoman Empire. And what makes the specific document so critical
isn't just what's drawn on it, but what the admiral
actually wrote in the margins.
Speaker 1: The marginalia is so cool, he basically leaves a note
for future historians.
Speaker 2: He explicitly states that he did not chart these coastlines
from his own voyages. He admits he synthesized this map
using about twenty older source.
Speaker 1: Tracks, and he specifically mentions using Arabic maps, Portuguese charts,
and even maps from the voyages of Columbus.
Speaker 2: Right. Yes, he was essentially a data compiler trying to
build a cohesive picture of the globe from fragmented intelligence.
Speaker 1: But when modern researchers look at the southern portion of
this fifteen thirteen map. It completely contradicts the eighteen twenty
discovery timeline because underneath all the sixteenth century drawings of
like mytical beasts, there is this continuous coastline drawn across
the bottom.
Speaker 2: And researchers point out that it remarkably resembles the specific
geography of Queen Maudland in Antarctica.
Speaker 1: Which is crazy enough, But the really inexplicable part is
that it seems to show the coastline as it exists
beneath the ice sheet, right.
Speaker 2: The subglacial topography, which is an extraordinary claim.
Speaker 1: Because you can't see that with your eyes.
Speaker 2: No ground penetrating radar and seismic surveys capable of mapping
bedrock under miles of ice weren't invented until the mid
twentieth century.
Speaker 1: So if that map is actually showing the bedrock, that
means whoever drew the original source charts navigated those waters
when the continent was ice free, which means we're talking
about what millions of years ago or some massive rewrite
of human prehistory.
Speaker 2: That is the extreme implication. Yes, However, we have to
acknowledge the academic pushback here, which is incredibly strong.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the cartography math argument exactly.
Speaker 2: Mainstream historians argue that this is just a massive case
of confirmation bias. They assert that the coastline at the
bottom of the Puririe Race map is not Antarctic at all.
Speaker 1: It's South America, right, yes.
Speaker 2: The eastern coastline of South America. And the mechanism of
their argument rests on the science of cartographic projection. When
you try to flatten the three D sphere onto a
two D piece of parchment, get inevitable mathematical distortions.
Speaker 1: You literally have to stretch it or tear it right.
Speaker 2: The Peri Race map uses a form of asimuthal equidistant
projection centered near Cairo, so as you move further from
the center point, the land masses distort radially.
Speaker 1: So the mainstream view is just that he ran out
of cowskin to draw on. He had the data for Argentina,
hit the edge of the parchment, and just kind of
bent the coastline to the right along the bottom of
the map.
Speaker 2: Basically, yes, an error of formatting driven by a concept
known as horror vacuie, the fear of empty spaces. Sixteenth
century map makers hated leaving blank.
Speaker 1: Spaces Okay, I hear that, But to play Devil's advocate,
the Puri Race map isn't the only one doing this.
The sources also highlight the Orange Fine map from fifteen
thirty one French mathematician.
Speaker 2: He used a quart of form or heart shaped projection.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and dominating the entire southern hemisphere of his map
is this massive land mass labeled terra ostrelis. And it's
not just a bent coastline. He drew specific mountain ranges,
river valleys, gulfs. It is highly detailed, Yes, but I mean,
couldn't this also just be early map makers trying to
balance the globe, like based on that old Aristotelian philosophy
that there was so much heavy land in the north
they needed to draw a massive continent in the south
so the Earth wouldn't literally flip over in space.
Speaker 2: That concept of geografical symmetry was absolutely the prevailing academic
paradigm of the Renaissance. They believe the land must be
there theoretically, so they drew it right. But the researchers
challenging the mainstream view point to those specific topographical details
you mentioned, Why would you draw specific river drainage systems
on a purely theoretical counterweight.
Speaker 1: That is a million dollar question.
Speaker 2: The alternative hypothesis is that map makers like Fine and
Periories were acting as endpoints in this massive generational game
of telephone.
Speaker 1: I love this concept. How does map data survive a
game of telephone across thousands of.
Speaker 2: Years through portaland charts? These are highly practical navigational charts
used by mariners comping in rum lines for compass bearings.
A captain gets a map, it gets damaged by saltwater,
or cartographer copies it translates some names, maybe of just
the scale.
Speaker 1: Right, so empires rise and fall. The library of Alexandria
burns down, But these scattered physical copies of coastal geometry
just keep getting handed down exactly by.
Speaker 2: The time they reach sixteenth century year. The original context
of who drew them is entirely lost, but the raw
data of the coastline remains.
Speaker 1: So it's this huge tension between theoretical guesswork and inherited data.
If they really were copying ancient lost charts, then eighteen
twenty wasn't a discovery at all. It was a rediscovery, and.
Speaker 2: That tension remains unresolved. But what is completely undeniable is
the world's reaction. Once Antarctica was physically confirmed at eighteen twenty,
you would think there would be this massive rush to
map the interior.
Speaker 1: But there wasn't. They basically ignored it for almost a century.
It's so wild to me humanity finally finds a new
continent and just goes, yeah, thanks, but it's way too
cold and goes back to building factories in Europe.
Speaker 2: From the mid nineteenth century into the early nineteen hundreds,
exploration was basically limited to these incredibly desperate, dangerous pushes
toward the South Pole by guys like Shackleton, Amanson and
Scott just.
Speaker 1: Men dragging sleds across the ice by sheer brute force.
Speaker 2: The interior of the continent remade a total topographic void
because the brutal physics of that environment simply couldn't be
conquered by wooden ships or men pulling studges.
Speaker 1: Right, They needed a technological leap, and that leap was airplanes.
Speaker 2: Aviation fundamentally transformed our relationship with the continent.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the late nineteen twenties and Admiral
Richard E. Bird of the US Navy. He leads this
expedition that totally redefines everything by bringing heavily modified forward
promoter aircraft to the ice and.
Speaker 2: Operating an aircraft an Antarctica in the nineteen twenties is
an astonishing feed of engineering. We are talking about ambient
temperatures dropping to minus fifty degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 1: It's unfathomable.
Speaker 2: At those temperatures, machinery fundamentally changes. Engine oil turns into
the consistency of tar metal becomes incredibly brittle.
Speaker 1: I was reading that the mechanics literally had to hold
lit low torches to the engine blocks just to thaw
them out enough to spin the propellers.
Speaker 2: Yes, but once they got those planes in the air,
the payoff was completely unprecedented because.
Speaker 1: For the first time humans are looking down the continent.
They used aerial photogrammetry right exactly.
Speaker 2: They mounted heavy cameras pointing straight down from the aircraft
and flew these highly specific overlapping grid patterns over the ice.
Speaker 1: Just systematically snapping photos of places no human had ever walked.
Speaker 2: And the mechanism of that photogrammetry is what allowed the
rapid mapping. Back in the labs, cartographers used stereo plotters
to view those overlapping images in three D. They could
calculate the exact elevations of huge mountain ranges and glacial valleys.
Bird was literally filling in the blank space on the
map from thousands of feet up.
Speaker 1: It's an incredible scientific achievement. But then the nineteen thirties
roll around and this noble pursuit of knowledge takes a
super dark geopolitical turn because other nations realize, hey, if
you can fly over the ice, you can claim the ice.
Speaker 2: And one of the most aggressive moves was made by
Germany in nineteen thirty eight.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty eight German Antarctic expeditions.
Speaker 2: Organized under the Third Reich, they dispatched a catapult ship
called the schwap Land, which was designed to launch these
heavily modified Dornier flying boats directly off the deck using
steam catapults, and.
Speaker 1: They sailed right to the same region that Purier I
is supposedly mapped on that fifteen thirteen parchment Queen Maudland.
Speaker 2: Yes, and their objective was not pure science. It was
highly strategic. As these German flying boats swept over the interior,
they were physically opening their bomb bay doors and dropping
thousands of custom made heavy aluminum darts embedded with the swastika.
Speaker 1: They were just carpet bombing the ice with territorial markers.
It's so ominous.
Speaker 2: They were literally piercing the ice to claim it. And
the motivation was tied directly to the looming Second World War.
Germany relied heavily on imported whale oil.
Speaker 1: Oh right, they use it for margarine to feed people,
and nitroglycerin too.
Speaker 2: Yes, for manufacturing munitions. They wanted to establish a sovereign,
secure whaling base in the southern Ocean that wasn't controlled
by the British or Norwegians. They named this territory Neuschwabenland.
Speaker 1: It just shows how fast this place went from a
frozen wasteland and to a crucial piece on the global chessboard.
But then WWII officially erupts and everybody abandons the ice
to fight the war naturally, But it's what happens immediately
after the war that absolutely baffles me. I mean, the
ink on the surrender treatise is barely dry. In nineteen
forty five, and by nineteen forty six, the US launches
Operation High.
Speaker 2: Jump, officially designated as Task Force sixty eight. It remains
the largest single Antarctic expedition ever mounted in human history.
Speaker 1: It's staggering.
Speaker 2: Thirteen ships, right, Thirteen ships including an aircraft carrier, submarines, destroyers.
They brought thirty three aircraft, most notably the massive Martin
PBM Mariner flying.
Speaker 1: Boats, and almost five thousand military personnel in nineteen forty six,
a staggering force. If I try to rationalize this timing,
it makes my head spin, like the global economy is shattered,
Europe is in ruins, and the US military decides this
is the exact perfect moment to send a heavily armed
armada full of combat hardened veterans to the South Pole.
What is the official explanation for that?
Speaker 2: The stated military objective was that they needed to train
personnel in extreme polar conditions to prepare for a potential
conflict with the Soviet Union in the Archet.
Speaker 1: Okay, sure, the Cold War is starting.
Speaker 2: And securing Arctic readiness was a paramount strategic concern. The
shortest flight path for Soviet bombers was directly over the
North Pole. High Jump gave them a massive, unpopulated test
ground to see how naval vessels and aircraft carriers would
actually operate in pack ice.
Speaker 1: I mean, I get that, but the sheer scale of
it has fueled so much historical speculation. It's like ignoring
your attic for fifty years and then suddenly sending a
swat team in five thousand contractors up there with flashlights.
Because they weren't just testing cold weather gear. They were
doing these massive aerial surveys using magnetometers.
Speaker 2: That introduction of the airborne magnetometer is a crucial scientific leap.
It was originally developed during the war to detect the
magnetic anomalies of submerged enemy submarines, but that the scientists
attached to High Jump repurposed it by flying magnetometers over
the Antarctic ice. They weren't looking for submarines anymore. They
were mapping the magnetic signatures of the bedrock buried miles
beneath the ice sheet.
Speaker 1: They're trying to see what was physically under the continent.
And I mean the operation wasn't a walk in the park.
The environment actively fought them, Like the story of the
George One, the Mariner flying boat that crashed in a
wide out on Thurston Island.
Speaker 2: Leaving the crew stranded in the ice for weeks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but the data they eventually brought back fundamentally changed everything,
because throughout the nineteen fifties, the floodgates just opened. The British,
the Soviets, the French, the Argentinians, Everybody's rushing down there
to build these permanent, heavily fortified research stations.
Speaker 2: Which created a highly volatile diplomatic situation. Various nations were
slicing the continent up like a pie, and their territorial
claims were directly overlapping.
Speaker 1: A recipe for disaster. During the Cold War.
Speaker 2: Exactly, the international community recognized that Antarctica could easily become
the next theater of war, so following the International Geophysics
Year of nineteen fifty seven, they achieved a very rare
moment of diplomatic consensus, which.
Speaker 1: Leads directly to the nineteen fifty nine Antarctic Treaty. It's
really an incredible document. Over fifty countries eventually sign it,
and it essentially freezes all territorial claims.
Speaker 2: It explicitly mandates that the continy shall be used for
peaceful purposes only, no military basis, no weapons testing, no
nuclear explosions, no radioactive waste disposal, just.
Speaker 1: Pure science and shared data.
Speaker 2: It represents a massive centralization of geographic authority. The fragmented
era of independent exploration was over. Antarctica was formalized. Its boundaries,
its rules of access, its nomenclature, it was all standardized
by the major global powers.
Speaker 1: And that transition, that mechanism of centralized authority, formally standardizing
the globe is the exact perfect bridge to the second
half of this deep dive, because.
Speaker 2: The same bureaucratic momentum was at work elsewhere.
Speaker 1: Yes, while they were permanently writing Antarctica onto the bottom
of the map, there was this massive quiet erasure happening
across the top of the map during that exact same
nineteenth century window.
Speaker 2: Right as global cartography was formalized, we see the systematic
disappearance of an enormous geographical entity.
Speaker 1: For researchers who study archival maps from the sixteenth, seventeenth,
and eighteenth centuries, there is this glaring anomaly. We're talking
about tartaria, a fascinating subject if you look at maps
by the absolute titans of early cartography like Abraham Ortelius
or gerardis Mercader. The guys who basically invented modern map making.
You see the word tartaria spanning an incomprehensible amount of land.
Speaker 2: It stretched from the Caspian Sea in the west, completely
across the frozen expanse of Siberia, all the way to
the Pacific Ocean in the.
Speaker 1: East, and dipping all the way down into Central Asia
and the borders of China. It wasn't some tiny little kingdom.
Speaker 2: And the nomenclature was highly structured too. Cartographers divided into
specific administrative blocks. You had tartaria, deserta or empty tartary.
He had great Tartary covering the.
Speaker 1: North, independent tartary in the central steps Chinese tartary. For
hundreds of years, it was just an accepted standard part
of the European geographical lexicon.
Speaker 2: But then during that exact same nineteenth century window where
naval captains are finalizing Antarctica.
Speaker 1: The word tartaria experiences a mass extinction event on paper.
You look at atlases printed after eighteen fifty and it
is just gone, completely replunged by the Russian Empire, the
king Dynasty Manchuria Siberia.
Speaker 2: So we have to examine the mechanism behind this erasure.
Speaker 1: Right because If I ask a mainstream historian, they'll tell
me Tartaria was never actually a unified sovereign empire with
a centralized government. Right.
Speaker 2: Yes, the mainstream academic consensus relies on the distinction between
descriptive geography and political geography.
Speaker 1: Okay, what does that mean in practice?
Speaker 2: Well, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European map makers
had virtually no empirical data about the interior of northern Asia,
so they relied on a descriptive catch all term. It
was derived from the nomadic tatark In federations that historically
dominated the Eurasian step.
Speaker 1: So Tartaria was essentially just a European shorthand for those
vast unknown lands controlled by nomadic horsemen.
Speaker 2: Precisely, it was the geographical equivalent of writing here be dragons,
but using an ethnic identifier instead.
Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2: And then the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries witnessed the aggressive
expansion of centralized empires. The Romanov dynasty in Russia systematically
conquered and annexed the Siberian land.
Speaker 1: Mass, pushing eastward exactly.
Speaker 2: And as they pushed east, they sent dedicated surveying teams.
The unknown void of Tartaria was mapped, mathematically, measured, and
culturally absorbed into the Russian state apparatus.
Speaker 1: So the argument is just that as map making evolved
from these vague guesses into precise borders based on taxation
and sovereignty, the useless catch all term was discarded. It's
just basic cartographic evolution.
Speaker 2: That is the standard historical mechanism. Yes, it wasn't a
malicious conspiracy. It was the bureaucratic formalization of conquered territory.
Speaker 1: But that simple bureaucratic explanation definitely doesn't satisfy everyone today
because over the last few years there has been this massive,
highly viral alternative history theory, the Tartaria hypothesis.
Speaker 2: And it has gained significant traction online.
Speaker 1: It really has, and the researchers driving this theory aren't
just looking at the old paper maps. They're looking at
the physical landscape of the nineteenth century. They argue that
Tartaria was an actual, highly advanced global civilization that was
violently overthrown and intentionally erased by like a coordinated cabal
of nineteenth century industrialists.
Speaker 2: It is a fascinating study in how modern audiences interpret
historical anomalies because the core of their argument actually moves
away from the steps of Asia and focuses heavily on
an architectural phenomena buildings. Yes, proponents point to the sudden
explosion of monumental, highly intricate stone architecture that appeared across
North America, Europe and Asia during the mid late eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: And I mean, I have to admit, when you look
at the specific photographs they reference, the visual dissonance is
absolutely staggering. You look at these archival photos of places
like Omaha, Nebraska, or Melbourne, Australia, or San Francisco in
the eighteen seventies, and.
Speaker 2: The streets are unpaved exactly.
Speaker 1: The streets are literally muddy quagmires. People are driving wooden
horse drawn wagons, and yet towering over these dirt roads
are these colossal monolithic structures built in Greco Roman or
box Art styles. Massive stone columns, intricate vaulted domes, hundreds
of thousands of tons of perfectly cut masonry.
Speaker 2: So the theory poses a provocative question. Did the people riding
in those horse drawn buggies, who lacked modern power tools
and diesel cranes truly possessed the industrial capacity to quarry, transport,
and erect those complex buildings in such short documented time frames.
Speaker 1: And the Tartaria theory people say absolutely not. They argue
these buildings weren't built by nineteenth century immigrants or local governments.
They say they were already.
Speaker 2: There, surviving remnants of a global Tartarian empire.
Speaker 1: Right, And the narrative we're taught that they were built
as state capitals or post offices or railway stations is
just a lie invented by the elite who supposedly found
these structures, dug them out of the mud, and repurpose them.
Speaker 2: It is a radical reimagining of the industrial era. But
to really address this, we have to look at the
documented mechanics of nineteenth century construction and logistics.
Speaker 1: Let's debunk it, or at least look at the mainstream
counter argument.
Speaker 2: Mainstream architectural historians completely reject the hypothesis by pointing to
the very real technological revolutions of that era. First, the
visual distance between a mud road and a stone palace
is easily explained by municipal funding structures.
Speaker 1: Oh like, who's paying for what?
Speaker 2: Exactly? The federal or state government had massive capital to
construct a monumental post office to project power and permanence,
but the local city council often lacked the tax revenue
to actually pave the surrounding streets.
Speaker 1: Ah okay, you can afford the palace, but you can't
afford the driveway that totally tracks. But what about the
physical logistics? How do you cut and move that much
stone without modern hydraulics. I actually dug into the engineering
patents of the time for this, and the answer is steam.
Speaker 2: Steam power completely revolutionized masonry.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the invention of the steam powered stone channeler by
George Wardwell, before that you had to extract limestone with
manual labor disguise, with wedges and sledgehammers.
Speaker 2: Which took forever. But the steam channeler was a track
mounted machine that drove massive steel chisels into the bedrock,
cutting vast blocks of stone with incredible speed and precision.
Speaker 1: And once you cut the stone, you have to move it,
which is where the nineteenth century railway explosion comes in.
By the late eighteen hundreds, you had this incredibly dense
rail network connecting huge limestone quarries in places like Indiana
right to the open centers. You didn't knee horses. You
loaded thousands of tons of pre cut limestone directly onto
reinforced flatbed railcars.
Speaker 2: The rapid construction times are also explained by a shift
in techniques. A lot of these massive buildings weren't structural
stone all the way through. They utilized early forms of
structural iron and steel framing.
Speaker 1: Oh right.
Speaker 2: The Grand Greco Roman columns and intricate facades were often
just exterior cladding, a heavy stone skin hung on an
industrial metal skeleton. Plus, the massive labor force was provided
by millions of highly skilled European immigrants, including master masons,
who brought generational knowledge to the Americas.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, that makes perfect sense. But we also have
to talk about the world's fairs because these are heavily
featured in the Tartaria theory. Events like the eighteen ninety
three World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago or the nineteen oh
four Saint Louis World's Fair.
Speaker 2: The temporary cities.
Speaker 1: Right, they built entire, sprawling cities of breathtaking classical architecture,
only to tear them down or let them burn a
year later. The Tartaria proponents argue this is proof of
the erasure that they were intentionally destroying the old World
structures after showing them off.
Speaker 2: But again, the architectural science provides the real mechanism. The
vast majority of the buildings that those fares were never
meant to be permanent. They were built using a temporary
material called staff staff What is that. It's a mixture
of plaster of Paris hemp fiber and Portland cement molded
over cheap wooden frames. It was basically theatrical set design
on a colossal scale.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, so it just looked like solid marble from
a distance exactly that.
Speaker 2: They were hollow, highly flammable, and structurally designed to last
maybe a few months. The rapid demolition wasn't a cover up.
It was simply cleaning up a temporary plaster city before
it collapsed on people.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, So when we objectively balance the fringe theory
against the actual documented mechanics that steam channelers, the trains,
the structural steel, the narrative of a lost advanced civilization
kind of falls apart.
Speaker 2: It does.
Speaker 1: But and this is a big butt, that doesn't mean
the erasure of the word Tartaria from the maps isn't
a profound historical event. In its no, not at all.
Speaker 2: We don't need a lost civilization of advanced Masons to
recognize the immense cultural tragedy of the nineteenth century. Right.
The erasure of Tartaria from the maps represents the very real,
very violent homogenization of the globe. Vast networks of diverse
nomadic cultures, complex trade routes, and regional identities were systematically absorbed, standardized,
and bureaucratically overwritten by expanding empires.
Speaker 1: The map basically became less descriptive of the people who
actually lived there and more descriptive of the governments that
tax them exactly, which brings our two incredible threads perfectly
together today. The nineteenth century was the era of standardization.
As the centralized scientific institutions were gaining the logistical power
to finally reach the bottom of the world and permanently
ink Antarctica onto the map.
Speaker 2: The exact same centralized political forces were scrubbing the ambiguity
from the top of the map, erasing vast regional ideas
like Tartaria in favor of rigid imperial borders.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate synthesis. The story of Antarctica and the
story of Tartaria are really just two sides of the
exact same coin. They reveal the massive gaps in our
collective knowledge, and they show us how knowledge is actively managed.
Speaker 2: Antarctica is a physical gap in our geography, an environment
so hostile it kept its secrets hidden beneath miles of ice,
defying our physical ability to reach it.
Speaker 1: And Tartaria represents a conceptual gap in our historical memory,
a casualty of political cartography, and the forward march of empire.
Speaker 2: Both of these threads force us to confront how curated
our reality actually is.
Speaker 1: They really do, and they force you, listening right now,
to realize that history is not a clean, complete book
that we just read from front to back. It's incredibly messy.
When a new continent is confirmed, or when an empire
redraws a border, the past doesn't just vanish cleanly.
Speaker 2: At least traces.
Speaker 1: It leaves ghostly impossible coastlines on maps drawn in fifteen thirteen,
leaves towering monolithic stone buildings and cities that seem way
too young to hold them. It forces us to act
not just as passive students, but as active investigators. We
have to constantly question the documents, the logs, and the
motives of the people who drew the lines.
Speaker 2: I have a very humbling perspective. It reminds us that
our current map of the world and our understanding of
the timeline is merely the most recent draft.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the current version of the software.
Speaker 2: We operate within the limitations of our current eras technological
and political paradigms, just like the map makers of the
sixteenth century and the explorers of the nineteenth century operated
within theirs. We have to continuously apply critical thinking to
enrich our understanding of the human story.
Speaker 1: Which leads me to one final incredibly provocative thought for today,
a concept that builds on the physical mechanisms we've been discussing.
We know, as a matter of verified modern geological science
that the miles of pack ice covering Antarctica are currently
hiding an ancient, complex physical landscape.
Speaker 2: Thanks to ground penetrating radar, we know there are massive
subglacial mountain ranges like the Gambertseevs.
Speaker 1: And vast liquid water systems like Lake Vostok, just sealed
beneath the ice for millions of years.
Speaker 2: A hidden topography we are only just beginning to model mathematically.
Speaker 1: Right, So my question is, what else is the ice preserving.
I mean, if ancient cartographers like Peri Ras or Orange
Fine truly did inherit their coastal geometries from older fragmented charts,
could the ice of Antarctica hold the exact physical records
of the cultures that originally mapped it.
Speaker 2: That is a staggering possibility.
Speaker 1: If the Earth's climate has shifted drastically in the deep past,
could the answers to our missing history, the literal missing
pieces of the puzzle we talked about at the start,
be frozen solid in the bedrock at the absolute bottom
of the world, just waiting for our technology to finally
catch up.
Speaker 2: It's a possibility rooted in the ongoing revelations of glaciology
and archaeology. It guarantees that Antarctica will remain the ultimate frontier,
not just for climate study, but potentially for the deepest
layers of human antiquity.
Speaker 1: And that is exactly where we want to turn this
conversation over to you. What do you think after exploring
the atmospheric chemistry of volcanic winters, the logistical improbabilities of
the eighteen twenty discoveries, the mathematical projections of ancient maps,
and the industrial mechanics behind the architectural booms of the
nineteenth century. Where do you.
Speaker 2: Stand, we really want to hear your perspective.
Speaker 1: Are the sudden discovery of Antarctica and the bureaucratic erasure
of Parteria just the natural, messy, growing pains of modern
history formalizing the globe? Or do you believe these anomalies
point to an older, forgotten, inherited chapter of human knowledge
that we are only just beginning to piece back together.
Please leave a comment and let us know your thoughts,
your theories, and what specific part of this deep dive
I mean. This investigation challenged your assumptions the most.
Speaker 2: Your critical analysis and diverse viewpoints are what make these
explorations so valuable. We deeply appreciate you joining us for
this extensive examination of the history.
Speaker 1: We absolutely do. Thank you so much for joining us
on this edition of Thrilling Threads. We have plenty more
mind bending investigations into histories hidden mechanisms coming your way.
Until next time, keep questioning the map, keep examining the evidence,
and keep looking for the missing pieces of the puzzle.