Pole shift and crustal displacement

Theory that Earth's crust slides over the mantle, moving the poles and producing sudden flood, ice and climate change

Pole shift and crustal displacement is the theory that the Earth's rigid outer shell periodically slides over the planet's interior, carrying the geographic poles to new positions and whole continents into new climate zones. Charles Hapgood set it out in 1958 and dated the last such shift to the close of the last ice age; Albert Einstein described the mechanism in his foreword, in which asymmetrically deposited polar ice drives the crust across the globe. It is offered to explain the sudden end of the ice age, the worldwide flood traditions, and the ice-free Antarctica said to be drawn on the Oronteus Finaeus map. The theory sits under Cataclysmic destruction of a prior advanced civilization as one of its proposed mechanisms (parent, umbrella), contrasts with the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, the planetary near-encounter and the galactic superwave as rival accounts of the same catastrophe (siblings), and is distinct from Magnetic pole reversal and from true polar wander.

The theory has been carried by three lineages that rarely cite one another: the engineers and Atlantis researchers who developed the ice-load mechanism (Hugh Auchincloss Brown, Chan Thomas, Rand and Rose Flem-Ath); the exopolitical writers who read it as the event that froze a buried Antarctic civilization (Michael Salla, Corey Goode's sources, Jason Reza Jorjani); and the prophetic tradition that expects it as a coming purification. Graham Hancock, who reported Hapgood's theory in 1995 as "an excellent theory", says he would not now defend it strongly; a geologist who debated him in 2017 called the 1995 picture of a continent carried south "nonsense"; and the paleomagnetist John Tarduno's group holds that the rotation axis has been stable relative to the surface since the mid-Cretaceous, which leaves no room for a shift within the human past. The best-known corroboration of the idea, Chan Thomas's The Adam and Eve Story, has been told as a CIA-suppressed manuscript, a story the investigator AJ Gentile answers with the agency's own file on its author.

The ice-load mechanism

The mechanism behind the theory predates its catastrophist uses. Joseph Adhémar tied polar ice accumulation to periodic deluges in the nineteenth century,[citation needed] and the electrical engineer Hugh Auchincloss Brown argued in Cataclysms of the Earth (1967) that ice accumulating unevenly at the poles shifts the planet's centre of mass and eventually tips the crust, on a recurring cycle of 4,000 to 7,500 years; he went on to propose that nuclear explosions at the poles could redistribute the load and forestall the next tip.

Einstein's foreword to Hapgood stated the same physics in his own words: "In a polar region there is continual deposition of ice, which is not symmetrically distributed about the pole. The earth's rotation acts on these unsymmetrically deposited masses, and produces centrifugal momentum that is transmitted to the rigid crust of the earth." In Salla's quotation of it the foreword says that Hapgood's first communication "electrified" him and that the idea is "original, of great simplicity, and – if it continues to prove itself – of great importance to everything that is related to the history of the earth's surface." Salla reads the foreword as an endorsement of the rigor of Hapgood's research.

Hapgood and the Antarctic maps

Charles Hapgood's Earth's Shifting Crust (1958) developed the displacement of the lithosphere over the mantle into a full thesis. Hapgood paired it with a reading of the Renaissance portolan charts, among them the Piri Reis map and the Oronteus Finaeus map, whose outlines of an ice-free Antarctica he took to derive from much older surveys made before the shift; Salla extends the inference, holding that the maps record a continent inhabited before a devastating pole shift. Cartographic historians read the same outlines differently.[citation needed]

Randall Carlson, discussing how the crust responds to the redistribution of ice loads, says that Hapgood "in a sense kind of anticipated continental drift, although in his scenarios it was much much faster" than the few centimetres a year of the current plate-tectonic models. The paleomagnetist John Tarduno's group argues that the rate of any polar motion is limited by the viscosity of the mantle, and that the paleomagnetic record shows long-term rotational stability since at least the mid-Cretaceous.

The Flem-Aths and the Atlantis connection

Hapgood corresponded with Rand and Rose Flem-Ath from 1977 to 1982. Their When the Sky Fell (1995) argued that a crustal shift roughly 11,500 years ago carried the North Pole from the Hudson Bay region to its present position and placed the South Pole over Antarctica, and connected the shift to the mythological destruction of Atlantis. Salla, drawing on the Flem-Aths' maps of western Antarctica and the Palmer Peninsula as ice-free until about 9700 BCE, holds that Hapgood's theory is correct and that Atlantis lies beneath the Antarctic ice.

Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) took up Hapgood's theory among the candidate mechanisms for a catastrophe about 12,500 years ago, which he reported "as an excellent theory which explains the information." By 2017 he had distanced himself from it: "I would not want to defend that theory strongly today." The geologist who confronted him in the studio called the picture of a continent carried south "nonsense", and Hancock answered that crust displacement was Hapgood's work and not his, that a researcher is entitled to change his view, and that the comet-impact evidence now fell in the window his book had proposed.

Chan Thomas and The Adam and Eve Story

The engineer Chan Thomas proposed in The Adam and Eve Story regular crustal slippage at intervals of about 6,500 years, the most recent about 11,500 years ago. Gentile describes Thomas's pole shift as a 90-degree displacement in which Antarctica moves to the equator. The story that the Central Intelligence Agency classified the manuscript and removed about 200 of its 278 pages has circulated as evidence that a dangerous truth was withheld. Gentile, who consulted the agency's file on Thomas, concluded that the book was never classified: the file held the manuscript among unrelated papers on an author who worked as an engineer at McDonnell Douglas and was known to his colleagues as very intelligent and eccentric, and Thomas later revised the book to add angels, UFOs and extrasensory perception. A podcast guest speaking to Jesse Michels lists the book among the works the intelligence community might have allowed out as a limited hangout, while leaning toward the view that the agencies hold no special data on cyclical cataclysm.

Dates proposed

The proposed dates do not converge on one episode or one interval.

The exopolitical reading

Michael Salla gives the theory its largest role in the exopolitical literature. His informant Corey Goode was told by a senior officer, called "Sigmund", that "an extremely ancient series of cities had been discovered flash frozen deep under the ice-shelf" in Antarctica, together with animals and "Pre-Adamites" preserved in the ice. Salla reads this as confirmation of Hapgood, and holds that Hapgood's pole shift explains the Great Flood better than the asteroid impacts Hancock proposes in Magicians of the Gods, and also explains the transition in the Sumerian King List from the gods' direct rule to demigods and humans. He suggests that the shift which froze Antarctica was geo-engineered by the "Nordics" or by higher-dimensional beings seeking to end the Pre-Adamites' domination of humanity, and warns that melting of the west Antarctic ice sheets could change the weight distribution about the South Pole and trigger a new shift.

Jason Reza Jorjani accepts a cycle of 12,000 to 13,000 years driven by the distribution of ice at the poles, with the crust slipping a few thousand kilometres over the mantle, and holds that if the cycle is real the next shift cannot be stopped, only prepared for by moving people inland. He reads the Iranian tradition of a homeland overcome by ice as a memory of the Antarctic freezing, and identifies Atlantis with Antarctica, which lay at the latitude of Argentina before the slippage if Hapgood was correct. In his account the melting of Antarctica, with a sea-level rise of about 300 feet, will "get Atlantis back."

The prophetic lineage runs separately. The psychic Edgar Cayce predicted a polar reversal in 1998, and the polar shift became a general feature of American New Age religions; the Korean new religion JeungSanDo makes a polar shift one of the triggers of its cosmic change.

Magnetic reversal and true polar wander

Magnetic pole reversal, the flipping of the planet's magnetic field, is a separate claim from a shift of the geographic poles.[citation needed] True polar wander, the rotation of the planet's whole solid body relative to its spin axis, is the process Tarduno's group tests against the paleomagnetic record; it argues that even a claimed Late Cretaceous episode of about 12 degrees is an artifact of a hematite overprint, and that the rate of such motion is capped by mantle viscosity. Carlson's answer to a question about a neat twelve-thousand-year cycle runs through the isostatic adjustment of the crust under glacial loads rather than a slide of the whole shell.

Open questions

References

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