While at Springfield College, a student's question about the
Lost Continent of Mu prompted a class project to investigate the lost continent of
Atlantis, leading Hapgood to investigate possible ways that massive Earth changes could occur and exposing him to the literature of
Hugh Auchincloss Brown. In 1958, Hapgood published ''The Earth's Shifting Crust
. It denied the existence of continental drift, an idea that became supported by mainstream science a few years later. The book included a foreword by Albert Einstein. In Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
(1966) and The Path of the Pole'' (1970), Hapgood proposed the hypothesis that the Earth's axis has shifted numerous times during geological history.
The Path of the Pole was meant as a replacement for ''The Earth's Shifting Crust
after corrections were suggested to him. Hapgood writes in Voices of Spirit'' (1975): "In later discussions we discussed the theories of my book 'Earth's Shifting Crust', and he [Einstein] suggested that one of them was wrong; as a result of this I revised my book, which subsequently was republished as 'The Path of the Pole'. My own further research confirmed the truth of his observation, which involved technicalities of geophysics." In
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings he supported the suggestion made by Arlington Mallery that a part of the
Piri Reis map was a depiction of the area of
Antarctica known as
Queen Maud Land. He used that to propose that a 15° pole shift occurred around 9,600 BC (approx. 11,600 years ago) and that a part of the Antarctic was ice-free at that time and that an
ice-age civilization could have mapped the coast. He concludes that "Antarctica was mapped when these parts were free of ice" and took the view that an Antarctic warm period coincided with the last ice age in the Northern hemisphere and that the Piri Reis and other maps were based on "ancient" maps derived from ice-age originals. Hapgood also examined a 1531 map by French mathematician and cartographer
Oronce Finé (aka
Oronteus Finaeus). In
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, he reproduces letters that he states he received from the chief of a U.S. Air Force cartography section stationed at
Westover AFB in 1961. These letters say that at Hapgood's request, they had studied both Piri Reis and Oronce Finé maps during their off-duty hours, concluding that both were compiled from original source maps of Antarctica at a time when it was relatively free of ice, supporting Hapgood's findings. Hapgood concluded that advanced cartographic knowledge appears on the Piri Reis map and the Oronteus Finaeus map, and must be the result of some unknown ancient civilization that developed advanced scientific knowledge before other civilizations such as Greece. In the book
The Piri Reis Map of 1513 Gregory C. McIntosh examines Hapgood's claims for both maps and states that "they fall short of proving or even strongly suggesting that the Piri Reis map and the Fine map depict the actual outline of Antarctica." Hapgood's ideas on catastrophe have been presented in other works by librarians Rose and
Rand Flem-Ath and author and former journalist
Graham Hancock, each basing portions of their works on Hapgood's evidence for catastrophe at the end of the
Last Glacial Maximum. Hapgood's ideas also figure prominently in the 2009 sci-fi/disaster movie
2012. ==Acámbaro figures==