Polar Paleo-Futures

Septentrionalium Terraum descripto, a map of the North Pole (or rather, North Archipelago) by Gerardus Mercator (I took a picture from the book New Worlds: Maps from the Age of Discovery I bought during recent X-mass sales). Mercator had to rely, almost entirely, on the maps and stories gathered by other travelers, so his maps is more a reflection of cultural zeitgeist of the times, and as such also a projections into the future. Few quotes from the book:

“Mercator produced the first separate printed map of the Arctic Circle, with the North Pole surrounded by four large islands. At the center of the pole is a giant whirlpool fed by four rivers, the whirlpool sucking the oceans of the earth to the pole and then in an abyss, from where the water would re-emerge as the many rivers of the world starting the circle again”.

Which means that it was not only a geographic map in our pure sense, but rather a statement about the world mechanics, the way how the earth, the skies and the water work together, and a very bold one. I wonder what can be a simplistic way of obtaining a different, less mystical and more accurate, closer to contemporary, a worldview. Some sort of film, like a bovine intestine, oiled, covered by mud, and then filled by hot air?

What are the simplistic tools/experiments to shake our overconfidence about the futures as we see them from now?