Lester Austin, Jr. and Harrison Finch took off from Honolulu, Hawaii, circumnavigated the Earth through both the poles, and returned to Honolulu. In 1977, PanAm Flight 50 circumnavigated the Earth through the North and South Pole in order to celebrate PanAm’s 50th anniversary. In 1979, Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Charles R. Burton set out from Greenwich, England to the South Pole, and then headed north to the North Pole and back to Greenwich. The Guinness Book of World Records lists this as the first surface polar circumnavigation. In 1988-1989, Dick Smith circumnavigated the globe passing over both poles using a Twin Otter plane. In 1992, Michael Palin made a documentary for the BBC featuring his travel from the Arctic to the South Pole [this was not strictly a circumnavigation, but Palin started from one pole and ended up at the other]. In 2009, the TAG Transpolar08 flight circumnavigated the Earth through the North and South Pole, at the same time breaking the speed record, with an average speed of 822.8 km/h. On July 9-11 2019, commemorating the Apollo Moon landing, the One More Orbit team broke the polar circumnavigation record using the Gulfstream G650ER aircraft.”
Flat Earthers assert that no one has ever crossed Antarctica since there is no such continent. However, several expeditions have accomplished this feat. These are shown in Fig. II.6 below. Furthermore, many scientific experiments and teams are currently installed in Antarctica.
Of course, Flat Earthers assert that these people were only fooling themselves, and were in fact traveling in circles. We understand there will be a Flat-Earth cruise in 2020 to see “the ice wall.” We don’t know quite what they have in mind. Certainly, at many points Antarctica appears as a large wall of ice, so sailing up near an ice cliff is hardly “proof” of an ice wall surrounding a flat Earth. By the way, the ship the Flat-Earthers will sail on uses GPS for guidance. GPS is governed by a set of satellites distributed around the (spherical) globe; and GPS assumes the Earth is a globe.
Another thing the Flat-Earthers could test on their Antarctic cruise would be the Midnight Sun. Any location north of the Arctic Circle will experience the Midnight Sun at some point during the winter season, and any point south of the Antarctic Circle will also experience the Midnight Sun during the Antarctic winter. A tell-tale sign is that in the Arctic, the Midnight Sun moves from left to right in the sky, while in the Antarctic the Midnight Sun moves from right to left. The Debunking Flat Earth Misconceptions site has a video showing this behavior. Many Flat-Earthers claim there are no videos of the Midnight Sun in the Antarctic – they are wrong.
II.3: The Stars
Flat-Earthers believe that the stars are located in a half-dome that rotates around the Earth’s disc once per day. The belief in a “celestial sphere” containing the stars pre-dated Copernicus. The attachment of Flat-Earthers to this picture of the stars reminds one of the woodcut published in Camille Flammarion’s 1888 book L’atmosphere Meteorologie Populaire. This shows a man in medieval times who manages to find the point where the celestial sphere intersects the Earth. Poking his head through the celestial sphere, he sees many features on the other side of that sphere, including the gears and machinery that make the Heavens move about Earth. As a side note, it is widely believed that this is a medieval woodcut, although it first appeared in Flammarion’s book in the late 19th century. Fig. II.7 was colored by Susanna Magruder.
The axis of the celestial sphere supposedly extends upwards from the North Pole of the Earth. Over approximately a 24-hour period, the celestial sphere will make one complete rotation about Earth. Some Flat-Earthers claim that Polaris, the North Star, is located at the axis of rotation. They assert “The North Star, it never moves.” In his 1885 book One Hundred Proofs That the Earth is not a Globe, William Carpenter stated that “Since we can (in middle north latitudes) see the North Star … all the year round, it is