2009-03-18T11:29:00.000-07:00

Norene Z. Byrnes (1944-1986) was an American researcher and amateur scientist and one of the best known advocates of the theory that human life once thrived on the Antarctic continent. Byrnes earned a master's degree in history from Springfield College in Massachusetts where she met and worked with Charles Hapgood in the 1960's.

After working with Hapgood on his book Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966) Byrnes began her own investigation into the possibility that people inhabited an ice-free Antarctic continent in ancient times. Her investigation led her to the work of Giuseppe Cognomi, a little known 17th century scientist who was thought dead and mysteriously reappeared claiming to have had contact with a civilization inhabiting an ice-free interior sea in Antarctica. For the next 2 decades, Byrnes attempted to reconcile Cognomi's accounts with modern day science.

Byrnes died in 1986 just as she was compiling her work for publication. Considered a suicide, the circumstances of her death were extremely uncertain. Much of her work was destroyed or missing. That which survived is now held by the Society for Linian Studies, a small group dedicated to continuing Byrnes' work.