"In a polar region there is a continual deposition of ice, which is not symmetrically distributed about the pole. The earth's rotation acts on these asymmetrically deposited masses [of ice], and produces centrifugal momentum that is transmitted to the rigid crust of the earth. The constantly increasing centrifugal momentum produced in this way will, when it has reached a certain point, produce a movement of the earth's crust over the rest of the earth's body, and this will displace the polar regions toward the equator."
~Albert Einstein From The Path of the Pole by Charles Hapgood
13 And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.
14 And there was no day like that before it or after it, [...]
~Bible (KJV), Joshua 10:13-14
9 And Isaiah said, This sign shalt thou have of the LORD, that the LORD will do the thing that he hath spoken: shall the shadow go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees?
10 And Hezekiah answered, It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees: nay, but let the shadow return backward ten degrees.
~Bible (KJV), 2 Kings 20: 9-10
The earth is home to two North Poles located in the Arctic region - a geographic North Pole and a magnetic North Pole.
Geographic North Pole
The northernmost point on the earth's surface is the geographic North Pole, also known as true north. It's located at 90° North latitude and all lines of longitude converge at the pole. The earth's axis connects the north and south poles, as its the line around which the earth rotates.
The North Pole is about 450 miles (725 km) north of Greenland in the middle of the Arctic Ocean - the sea there has a depth of 13,410 feet (4087 meters). Most of the time, sea ice covers the North Pole but recently, water has been sighted at the exact location of the pole.
If you're standing at the North Pole, all points are south of you (east and west have no bearing). Since the earth's rotation takes place once every 24 hours, if you're at the North Pole your speed of rotation is quite slow at almost no speed at all, compared to the speed at the equator at about 1,038 miles per hour.
The lines of longitude that establish our time zones are so close at the North Pole, the Arctic region uses UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) when local time is necessary at the North Pole. The North Pole experiences six months of daylight and six months of darkness.
Magnetic North Pole
Located more than 1000 miles (1600 kilometers) south of the geographic North Pole lies the magnetic North Pole at 78°18' North and 104° West,southwest of Nunavut, Canada's Ellef Ringnes Island.
The earth's magnetic pole is the focus of the planet's magnetic field and is the point that traditional magnetic compasses point toward.
Compasses are also subject to magnetic declination which is a result of the earth's varied magnetic field. Each year, the magnetic North Pole and the magnetic field shift, requiring those using magnetic compasses for navigation to be keenly aware of the difference between magnetic north and true north. The magnetic pole was first determined in 1831, hundreds of miles from its present location.
The National Geomagnetic Program of Geological Survey of Canada monitors the movement of the north magnetic pole and most recently determined its precise location in 1994. They've determined that the pole is moving at approximately 9 miles (15 kilometers) each year.
The north magnetic pole moves on a daily basis, too. Every day, there's an elliptical movement of the magnetic pole about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from its average center point.
Earth Losing its Balance Half a Billion Years Ago
Scientists discover that "evolutionary big bang" may have been caused by Earth losing its balance half a billion years ago
PASADENA--
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology think they have solved part of the mystery of the "evolutionary big bang" that occurred half a billion years ago. At that time, life on Earth underwent a profound diversification that saw the first appearance in the fossil record of virtually all animal phyla living today. With relative evolutionary rates of more than 20 times normal, nothing like it has occurred since. In a paper published in the July 25th issue of Science, the Caltech group reports that this evolutionary burst coincides with another apparently unique event in earth history--a 90-degree change in the direction of Earth's spin axis relative to the continents. Dr. Joseph Kirschvink, a geologist at Caltech and lead author of the study, speculates that a major reorganization of tectonic plates during latest Precambrian time changed the balance of mass within the Earth, triggering the reorientation. Thus, the regions that were previously at the north and south poles were relocated to the equator, and two antipodal points near the equator became the new poles.
"Life diversified like crazy about half a billion years ago," says Kirschvink, "and nobody really knows why. It began about 530 million years ago, and was over about 15 million years later. It is one of the outstanding mysteries of the biosphere. "The geophysical evidence that we've collected from rocks deposited before, during, and after this event demonstrate that all of the major continents experienced a burst of motion during the same interval of time."
David Evans, a co-author on the paper and graduate student at Caltech, notes that it is very difficult to make large continents travel at speeds exceeding several feet per year; typical rates today are only a few inches per year.
"Earth has followed a 'plate-tectonic speed limit' for the past 200 million years or so, with nothing approaching the rates needed for this early Cambrian reorganization." Evans said. "Some other tectonic process must have been operating that would not require the continents to slide so rapidly over the upper part of Earth's mantle."
In fact, geophysicists have known for over half a century that the solid, elastic part of a planet can move rapidly with respect to its spin axis through a process known as "true polar wander." True polar wander, Kirschvink explains, is not the same as the more familiar plate motion that is responsible for earthquakes and volcanism. While the latter is driven by heat convection in Earth's mantle, true polar wander is caused by an imbalance in the mass distribution of the planet itself, which the laws of physics force to equalize in comparatively rapid time scales.
During this redistribution, the entire solid part of the planet moves together, avoiding the internal shearing effects which impose the speed limit on conventional plate motions. (While his happens, of course, the entire Earth maintains the original spin axis in relation to plane of the solar system.) Thus, true polar wander can result in land masses moving at rates hundreds of times faster than tectonic motion caused by convection.
An analogy of the effect can be seen by cementing lead weights at the antipodal (or opposite) ends of a basketball. If the ball is then set on a slick floor and spun with the weights along the equator, the ball will spin in a manner as one would normally expect, with the weights remaining on the equator. If the ball is spun on one of the lead weights, however, the axis of rotation will tend to migrate until the weights are again on the ball's equator. In this configuration, the spinning ball has aligned its maximum moment of inertia with the spin axis, as required by the laws of physics.
As for astronomical evidence that such a phenomenon can occur, the authors point to Mars. Along the equator of the Red Planet is a gigantic volcano known as Tharsis, which is known to be the largest gravity anomaly in the solar system. Tharsis could have formed on the equator, but more likely formed elsewhere on the planet and then migrated to the equator via true polar wander because of rotational torques on its excess mass.
Something similar must have happened to Earth, says Kirschvink. At about 550 million years ago, 20 million years before the evolutionary burst, one or more major subduction zones in the ancient oceans closed down during the final stages of assembly of the supercontinent of Gondwanaland, leading to a major reorganization of plate tectonic boundaries.
Geophysicists have known for many years that this type of reorganization could, in theory, yield a sharp burst of true polar wander. In particular, if Earth were slightly "football shaped," with a major and stable mass anomaly on the equator and a more equal distribution of mass elsewhere, only slight changes of the smaller masses would be needed to produce large motions. A burst of motion up to 90 degrees in magnitude could even be generated if the maximum moment of inertia (about which the planet spins) became less than the intermediate moment (which is always on the equator). The massive plate motions observed by the Kirschvink group fit the predictions of this "inertial interchange" event rather closely.
Over the 15 million year duration of this true polar wander event, the existing life forms would be forced to cope with rapidly changing climatic conditions as tropical lands slid up to the cold polar regions, and cold lands became warm. "Ocean circulation patterns are sensitive to even slight changes in the location of the continents," says co-author Robert Ripperdan, a geochemist at the University of Puerto Rico and a Caltech alumnus. "A progressive shift of this magnitude could cause oceanic circulation patterns to become rather unpredictable, jumping from one semi-stable configuration to another on a million-year time scale. "Imagine the havoc which would result in Europe if the Gulf Stream were to disappear suddenly.
These jumps offer an explanation for yet another unique mystery of the Cambrian explosion, which is a series of nearly a dozen large swings in the marine record of carbon isotopes. "Repeated changes in global oceanic circulation patterns should ventilate organic carbon buried in the deep oceans, producing these carbon wiggles," Ripperdan says. "We used to think that they were somehow due to repeated expansion and contraction of the entire biosphere, but no one could think of a mechanism to do that. All of the evidence suddenly makes sense with this true polar wander model."
But what caused the evolutionary burst? Kirschvink notes that these global shifts in oceanic circulation will also act to disrupt regional ecosystems, breaking them down into smaller, more isolated communities.
"Evolutionary innovations are much more likely to survive in a small, inbreeding population, rather than in large, freely interbreeding groups," he notes. "And the carbon cycles are telling us that major changes in ocean circulation happened about every million years or so. That is certainly enough time for natural selection to weed through the fragments left by the last disruption, and to form new, regional-scale ecosystems.
"Then, Wham! They're hit again and the process repeats itself. That is a great script for increasing diversity, particularly as it seems to have happened shortly after the evolution of major gene systems which regulate animal development."
The end result was that evolution proceeded nearly 20 times faster than its normal rate, and the life of the planet diversified into many groups still living today.
Kirschvink and his collaborators base their conclusions on data collected from 20 years of work on numerous well-exposed sections of the Precambrian-Cambrian and Cambrian-Ordovician eras. By studying the weak fossil magnetism (paleomagnetism) left in many rocks as they form using ultrasensitive superconducting magnetometers, they can recover the direction of the ancient geomagnetic field. This provides information concerning the direction of ancient north, for the same reason that a small hand-held magnetic compass can be used to find the approximate north direction today.
This remanent magnetism can also provide an estimate of the ancient latitude in which the sediments were deposited, as the inclination or dip of the magnetic field changes smoothly with latitude--it points vertically at the poles and is horizontal (tangent to the earth's surface) on the equator.
Therefore, the fact that magnetic materials are found pointing in other directions is evidence that the ground itself has moved in relation to Earth's magnetic North, which is locked over time to the spin axis.
Geological samples collected by the Caltech group in Australia (which has some of the best-preserved sediments of this age from all of Gondwanaland) demonstrate that this entire continent rotated counterclockwise by nearly 90 degrees, starting at about 534 million years ago (coincident with onset of the major radiation event in the Early Cambrian), and was finished sometime during Middle Cambrian time.
North America, on the other hand, moved rapidly from a latest Precambrian position deep in the southern hemisphere, and achieved a position straddling the equator before the beginning of the Middle Cambrian, about 518 million years ago. Even the type of marine rocks deposited on the various continents--carbonates in the tropics, and clays and clastics in high latitudes--agree with these paleomagnetically-determined motions. The paleomagnetic directions are accurate within about 5 degrees, the authors write. Latitudes are quite reliable, but because the poles moved so rapidly, even the relative longitude between blocks can be determined. This true polar wander analysis predicts a unique "absolute" map of the major continental masses during this event, an animation of which can be viewed at http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~devans/iitpw/science.html
"This hypothesis relating abrupt changes in polar wander to evolutionary innovations could be tested in many ways," notes Kirschvink, "as there are some interesting events in the paleontological record during the following 200 million years which might have been triggered by similar processes. "There's lots of work to do."
Earth Crust Displacement
"In 1958 Charles Hapgood suggested that the Earth's crust had undergone repeated displacements and that the geological concepts of continental drift and sea-floor spreading owed their secondary livelihoods to the primary nature of crustal shift. According to Hapgood, crustal shift was made possible by a layer of liquid rock situated about 100 miles beneath the surface of the planet. A pole shift would thus displace the Earth's crust in around the inner mantle, resulting in crustal rock's being exposed to magnetic fields of a different direction."
"An earth crust displacement, as the words suggest, is a movement of the ENTIRE outer shell of the earth over its inner layers. If you remove the peel from an orange and then reattach it to the fruit you can visualize the possibility of the peel moving over the inner layers. The earth's crust, according to Charles Hapgood, can similarly change its position over the inner layers. When it does the globe experiences climatic change. The climatic zones (polar, temperate and tropical) remain the same because the sun still shines on the earth from the same angle in the sky. From the perspective of people on the earth at the time, it appears as the sky is falling. In reality it is the earth's crust shifting to another location. Some land moves towards the tropics. Others shift, with the same movement, towards the poles. Yet others may escape such great changes in latitude.
The consequence of such a movement of the entire outer shell of the earth is catastrophic. Throughout the world massive earthquakes shake the land and enormous tidal waves crash into and over the continental shelf. As the old ice caps leave the polar zones they melt, raising the ocean level higher and higher. Everywhere, and by whatever means, people seek higher ground to avoid an ocean in upheaval."
Vavilov found a direct correlation between agricultural origins and lands more than 4,920 feet above sea level.
"Working on the assumption that the earth's magnetic poles are usually close to the poles of rotation, Hapgood collected geomagnetic rock samples, finding evidence that the most recent earth crust displacement must have occurred between 17,000 to 12,000 years ago. The North Pole would have moved from the Hudson Bay area of northern Canada to it's current place in the Arctic Ocean. More recently, Langway and Hansen (1973) gathered climactic data pointing to a dramatic change in climate at 12,000 years ago. At that time, the Pleistocene extinctions, rising ocean levels, the close of the ice age, and the origins of agriculture all seem to coincide."
Using geomagnetic and carbon dating evidence, Hapgood identified the locations of the pole and its paths as:
Position # 1 -- 63 degrees N, 135 degrees W (the Yukon area - 75,000 B.C.)
Position # 2 -- 72 degrees N, 10 degrees E (in the Greenland Sea - 50,000 B.C.)
Position # 3 -- 60 degrees N, 73 degrees W (the Hudson Bar area - 12,000 B.C.)
Position # 4 -- the current position
Position # 2 -- 72 degrees N, 10 degrees E (in the Greenland Sea - 50,000 B.C.)
Position # 3 -- 60 degrees N, 73 degrees W (the Hudson Bar area - 12,000 B.C.)
Position # 4 -- the current position
Earth Crust Displacement: Effects and Evidence
In his best-selling book Earth in Upheaval, historian Immanuel Velikovsky gave an account of what might be expected when the Earth tilts on it's axis:
'Let us assume, as a working hypothesis, that under the impact of a force or the influence of an agent - and the Earth does not travel in an empty universe - the axis of the earth shifted or tilted. At that moment an earthquake would make the globe shudder. Air and water would continue to move through inertia; hurricanes would sweep the Earth, and the seas would rush over continents, carrying gravel and sand and marine animals, and casting them onto land. Heat would be developed, rocks would melt, volcanoes would erupt, lava would flow from fissures in the ruptured ground and cover vast areas
PASADENA--
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology think they have solved part of the mystery of the "evolutionary big bang" that occurred half a billion years ago.
At that time, life on Earth underwent a profound diversification that saw the first appearance in the fossil record of virtually all animal phyla living today. With relative evolutionary rates of more than 20 times normal, nothing like it has occurred since. In a paper published in the July 25th issue of Science, the Caltech group reports that this evolutionary burst coincides with another apparently unique event in earth history--a 90-degree change in the direction of Earth's spin axis relative to the continents. Dr. Joseph Kirschvink, a geologist at Caltech and lead author of the study, speculates that a major reorganization of tectonic plates during latest Precambrian time changed the balance of mass within the Earth, triggering the reorientation. Thus, the regions that were previously at the north and south poles were relocated to the equator, and two antipodal points near the equator became the new poles.
"Life diversified like crazy about half a billion years ago," says Kirschvink, "and nobody really knows why. It began about 530 million years ago, and was over about 15 million years later. It is one of the outstanding mysteries of the biosphere. "The geophysical evidence that we've collected from rocks deposited before, during, and after this event demonstrate that all of the major continents experienced a burst of motion during the same interval of time."
David Evans, a co-author on the paper and graduate student at Caltech, notes that it is very difficult to make large continents travel at speeds exceeding several feet per year; typical rates today are only a few inches per year.
"Earth has followed a 'plate-tectonic speed limit' for the past 200 million years or so, with nothing approaching the rates needed for this early Cambrian reorganization." Evans said. "Some other tectonic process must have been operating that would not require the continents to slide so rapidly over the upper part of Earth's mantle."
In fact, geophysicists have known for over half a century that the solid, elastic part of a planet can move rapidly with respect to its spin axis through a process known as "true polar wander." True polar wander, Kirschvink explains, is not the same as the more familiar plate motion that is responsible for earthquakes and volcanism. While the latter is driven by heat convection in Earth's mantle, true polar wander is caused by an imbalance in the mass distribution of the planet itself, which the laws of physics force to equalize in comparatively rapid time scales.
During this redistribution, the entire solid part of the planet moves together, avoiding the internal shearing effects which impose the speed limit on conventional plate motions. (While his happens, of course, the entire Earth maintains the original spin axis in relation to plane of the solar system.) Thus, true polar wander can result in land masses moving at rates hundreds of times faster than tectonic motion caused by convection.
An analogy of the effect can be seen by cementing lead weights at the antipodal (or opposite) ends of a basketball. If the ball is then set on a slick floor and spun with the weights along the equator, the ball will spin in a manner as one would normally expect, with the weights remaining on the equator. If the ball is spun on one of the lead weights, however, the axis of rotation will tend to migrate until the weights are again on the ball's equator. In this configuration, the spinning ball has aligned its maximum moment of inertia with the spin axis, as required by the laws of physics.
As for astronomical evidence that such a phenomenon can occur, the authors point to Mars. Along the equator of the Red Planet is a gigantic volcano known as Tharsis, which is known to be the largest gravity anomaly in the solar system. Tharsis could have formed on the equator, but more likely formed elsewhere on the planet and then migrated to the equator via true polar wander because of rotational torques on its excess mass.
Something similar must have happened to Earth, says Kirschvink. At about 550 million years ago, 20 million years before the evolutionary burst, one or more major subduction zones in the ancient oceans closed down during the final stages of assembly of the supercontinent of Gondwanaland, leading to a major reorganization of plate tectonic boundaries.
Geophysicists have known for many years that this type of reorganization could, in theory, yield a sharp burst of true polar wander. In particular, if Earth were slightly "football shaped," with a major and stable mass anomaly on the equator and a more equal distribution of mass elsewhere, only slight changes of the smaller masses would be needed to produce large motions. A burst of motion up to 90 degrees in magnitude could even be generated if the maximum moment of inertia (about which the planet spins) became less than the intermediate moment (which is always on the equator). The massive plate motions observed by the Kirschvink group fit the predictions of this "inertial interchange" event rather closely. Over the 15 million year duration of this true polar wander event, the existing life forms would be forced to cope with rapidly changing climatic conditions as tropical lands slid up to the cold polar regions, and cold lands became warm. "Ocean circulation patterns are sensitive to even slight changes in the location of the continents," says co-author Robert Ripperdan, a geochemist at the University of Puerto Rico and a Caltech alumnus. "A progressive shift of this magnitude could cause oceanic circulation patterns to become rather unpredictable, jumping from one semi-stable configuration to another on a million-year time scale. "Imagine the havoc which would result in Europe if the Gulf Stream were to disappear suddenly.
These jumps offer an explanation for yet another unique mystery of the Cambrian explosion, which is a series of nearly a dozen large swings in the marine record of carbon isotopes. "Repeated changes in global oceanic circulation patterns should ventilate organic carbon buried in the deep oceans, producing these carbon wiggles," Ripperdan says. "We used to think that they were somehow due to repeated expansion and contraction of the entire biosphere, but no one could think of a mechanism to do that. All of the evidence suddenly makes sense with this true polar wander model."
But what caused the evolutionary burst? Kirschvink notes that these global shifts in oceanic circulation will also act to disrupt regional ecosystems, breaking them down into smaller, more isolated communities.
"Evolutionary innovations are much more likely to survive in a small, inbreeding population, rather than in large, freely interbreeding groups," he notes. "And the carbon cycles are telling us that major changes in ocean circulation happened about every million years or so. That is certainly enough time for natural selection to weed through the fragments left by the last disruption, and to form new, regional-scale ecosystems.
"Then, Wham! They're hit again and the process repeats itself. That is a great script for increasing diversity, particularly as it seems to have happened shortly after the evolution of major gene systems which regulate animal development."
The end result was that evolution proceeded nearly 20 times faster than its normal rate, and the life of the planet diversified into many groups still living today.
Kirschvink and his collaborators base their conclusions on data collected from 20 years of work on numerous well-exposed sections of the Precambrian-Cambrian and Cambrian-Ordovician eras. By studying the weak fossil magnetism (paleomagnetism) left in many rocks as they form using ultrasensitive superconducting magnetometers, they can recover the direction of the ancient geomagnetic field. This provides information concerning the direction of ancient north, for the same reason that a small hand-held magnetic compass can be used to find the approximate north direction today.
This remanent magnetism can also provide an estimate of the ancient latitude in which the sediments were deposited, as the inclination or dip of the magnetic field changes smoothly with latitude--it points vertically at the poles and is horizontal (tangent to the earth's surface) on the equator.
Therefore, the fact that magnetic materials are found pointing in other directions is evidence that the ground itself has moved in relation to Earth's magnetic North, which is locked over time to the spin axis.
Geological samples collected by the Caltech group in Australia (which has some of the best-preserved sediments of this age from all of Gondwanaland) demonstrate that this entire continent rotated counterclockwise by nearly 90 degrees, starting at about 534 million years ago (coincident with onset of the major radiation event in the Early Cambrian), and was finished sometime during Middle Cambrian time.
North America, on the other hand, moved rapidly from a latest Precambrian position deep in the southern hemisphere, and achieved a position straddling the equator before the beginning of the Middle Cambrian, about 518 million years ago.
Even the type of marine rocks deposited on the various continents--carbonates in the tropics, and clays and clastics in high latitudes--agree with these paleomagnetically-determined motions. The paleomagnetic directions are accurate within about 5 degrees, the authors write. Latitudes are quite reliable, but because the poles moved so rapidly, even the relative longitude between blocks can be determined. This true polar wander analysis predicts a unique "absolute" map of the major continental masses during this event, an animation of which can be viewed at
"This hypothesis relating abrupt changes in polar wander to evolutionary innovations could be tested in many ways," notes Kirschvink, "as there are some interesting events in the paleontological record during the following 200 million years which might have been triggered by similar processes. "There's lots of work to do."
Earth Crust Displacement
"In 1958 Charles Hapgood suggested that the Earth's crust had undergone repeated displacements and that the geological concepts of continental drift and sea-floor spreading owed their secondary livelihoods to the primary nature of crustal shift. According to Hapgood, crustal shift was made possible by a layer of liquid rock situated about 100 miles beneath the surface of the planet. A pole shift would thus displace the Earth's crust in around the inner mantle, resulting in crustal rock's being exposed to magnetic fields of a different direction."
"An earth crust displacement, as the words suggest, is a movement of the ENTIRE outer shell of the earth over its inner layers. If you remove the peel from an orange and then reattach it to the fruit you can visualize the possibility of the peel moving over the inner layers.
The earth's crust, according to Charles Hapgood, can similarly change its position over the inner layers. When it does the globe experiences climatic change. The climatic zones (polar, temperate and tropical) remain the same because the sun still shines on the earth from the same angle in the sky. From the perspective of people on the earth at the time, it appears as the sky is falling. In reality it is the earth's crust shifting to another location. Some land moves towards the tropics. Others shift, with the same movement, towards the poles. Yet others may escape such great changes in latitude.
The consequence of such a movement of the entire outer shell of the earth is catastrophic. Throughout the world massive earthquakes shake the land and enormous tidal waves crash into and over the continental shelf. As the old ice caps leave the polar zones they melt, raising the ocean level higher and higher. Everywhere, and by whatever means, people seek higher ground to avoid an ocean in upheaval."
Vavilov found a direct correlation between agricultural origins and lands more than 4,920 feet above sea level.
"Working on the assumption that the earth's magnetic poles are usually close to the poles of rotation, Hapgood collected geomagnetic rock samples, finding evidence that the most recent earth crust displacement must have occurred between 17,000 to 12,000 years ago. The North Pole would have moved from the Hudson Bay area of northern Canada to it's current place in the Arctic Ocean. More recently, Langway and Hansen (1973) gathered climactic data pointing to a dramatic change in climate at 12,000 years ago. At that time, the Pleistocene extinctions, rising ocean levels, the close of the ice age, and the origins of agriculture all seem to coincide."
Using geomagnetic and carbon dating evidence, Hapgood identified the locations of the pole and its paths as:
Position # 1 -- 63 degrees N, 135 degrees W (the Yukon area - 75,000 B.C.)
Position # 2 -- 72 degrees N, 10 degrees E (in the Greenland Sea - 50,000 B.C.)
Position # 3 -- 60 degrees N, 73 degrees W (the Hudson Bar area - 12,000 B.C.)
Position # 4 -- the current position
Position # 2 -- 72 degrees N, 10 degrees E (in the Greenland Sea - 50,000 B.C.)
Position # 3 -- 60 degrees N, 73 degrees W (the Hudson Bar area - 12,000 B.C.)
Position # 4 -- the current position
Earth Crust Displacement: Effects and Evidence
In his best-selling book Earth in Upheaval, historian Immanuel Velikovsky gave an account of what might be expected when the Earth tilts on it's axis:
'Let us assume, as a working hypothesis, that under the impact of a force or the influence of an agent - and the Earth does not travel in an empty universe - the axis of the earth shifted or tilted. At that moment an earthquake would make the globe shudder. Air and water would continue to move through inertia; hurricanes would sweep the Earth, and the seas would rush over continents, carrying gravel and sand and marine animals, and casting them onto land. Heat would be developed, rocks would melt, volcanoes would erupt, lava would flow from fissures in the ruptured ground and cover vast areas. Mountains would spring up from the plains and would climb and travel upon the shoulders of other mountains, causing faults and rifts. Lakes would be tilted and emptied, rivers would change their beds; large land areas and all their inhabitants would slip under the sea. Forests would burn, and the hurricanes and wild seas would wrest them from the ground on which they grew and pile them, branch and root, in heaps. Seas would turn into deserts, their waters rolling away.
'And if the change in the velocity of the diurnal rotation [slowing the planet down] should accompany the shifting of the axis, the water confined to the equatorial oceans by centrifugal force would retreat to the poles, and high tides and hurricanes would rush from pole to pole, carrying reindeers and seals to the tropics and desert lions to the Arctic, moving from the equator up to the mountain ridges of the Himalayas and down the African jungles; and crumbled rocks torn from splintering mountains would be scattered over large distances; and herds of animals would be washed from the plains of Siberia. The shifting of the axis would change the climate in every place, leaving corals in Newfoundland and elephants in Alaska, fig trees in northern Greenland and luxuriant forests in Antarctica. In the event of a rapid shift of the axis, many species and genera of animals on land and in the sea would be destroyed, and civilizations, if any, would be reduced to ruins.'[4]
Neither Hapgood nor Velikovsky were pulling theories out of the air. The theory that the terrestrial crust is swimming on magma was first offered in the 1850's. The record of bones and trees, and shells and layers of sediment that had been found throughout the world pointed to one or more cataclysms in the Earth's past, some of them as recently as 1,500 B.C.E. and amazingly, 800 B.C.E.
Velikovsky sums up the scientific establishment's past record on answering the questions:
What caused tropical forests to grow in polar regions? What caused volcanic activity on a great scale in the past and lava flows on land and in the ocean beds? What caused earthquakes to be so numerous and violent in the past? Puzzlement, despair, and frustration are the only answers to each and every one of these phenomena.
The theories of uniformity (or gradualism) and evolution maintain that the geological record bears witness that from time immemorial, even from the time this planet began it's existence only minute changes - caused by the wind blowing on rocks, the sand grains swimming to the sea - accumulated into vast changes. These causes however, are inadequate to explain the great revolutions in nature, and they evoke the expressions of futility on the part of the specialists, each in his field.
Velikovsky continues with his account:
... The evidence is overwhelming that the great global catastrophes were either accompanied or caused by shifting of the terrestrial axis or by a disturbance in the diurnal and annual motions of the Earth ... The state of lavas with reversed magnetization, hundreds of times more intensive than the inverted terrestrial magnetic field could impart, reveals the nature of the forces that were in action ... Many world-wide phenomena, for each of which the cause is vainly sought, are explained by a single cause: the sudden changes in climate, transgression of the sea, vast volcanic and seismic activities, formation of ice cover, pluvial crises, emergence of mountains and their dislocation, rising and subsidence of coasts, tilting of lakes, sedimentation, fossilization, the provenance of tropical animals and plants in polar regions, conglomerates of fossil animals of various latitudes and habitats, the extinction of species and genera, the appearance of new species, the reversal of the Earth's magnetic field, and a score of other world-wide phenomena.[4]
Look into any one of the above fields and you will begin to see the same pattern Velikovsky, Hapgood, Einstein and hundreds of other independent geologists, paleontologists and archeologists have recognized in the Earth's past. A pattern of repeated, catastrophic change thought to be brought about by crustal displacements activated by one or more outside agents - such as passing comets or fluctuations in the sun's own magnetic field - appears to have been with humanity and its civilizations from the very dawn of mankind.
Rand and Rose Flem-Ath discussed earth-crust displacement' in their book, When the Sky Fell. Seeing evidence of it in almost all parts of the world they described it's effects and the consequences for mankind today.
The displacement that happened, according to them at about 11,000 BC, had:
'... also left other evidence of its deadly visit in a ring of death around the globe. All the continents that experience rapid and massive extinctions of animal species (notably the Americas and Siberia) underwent massive changes in their latitudes ...
And coral has been found in Newfoundland, ferns, fossils, coal and fossilized tree-stumps have been found in Antarctica, water lilies and fossilized palm leaves ten and twelve feet long have been found in Spitzbergen, there is evidence that the swamp cypress flourished within 500 miles of the North Pole in the Miocene epoch, and more. The evidence is overwhelming that the Poles have not covered the same parts of the planet for the entire extent of our geological history.
'The consequences of the displacement are monumental. The earth's crust ripples over its interior and the world is shaken by incredible quakes and floods. They sky appears to fall as continents groan and shift position. Deep in the ocean, earthquakes generate massive tidal waves which crash against the coastlines, flooding them. Some lands shift to warmer climes, while others, propelled into polar zones, suffer the direst of winters. Melting ice caps raise the ocean's level higher and higher. All living things must adapt, migrate or die ...
"If the horror of an earth-crust displacement were to be visited upon today's interdependent world the progress of thousands of years of civilization would be torn away from our planet like a fine cobweb. Those who live near high mountains might escape the global tidal waves, but they would be forced to leave behind, in the lowlands, the slowly constructed fruits of civilization. Only amongst the merchant marine and navies of the world might some evidence of civilization remain. The rusting hulls of ships and submarines would eventually perish but the valuable maps that are housed in them would be saved by survivors, perhaps for hundreds, even thousands of years. Until once again mankind could use them to sail the World Ocean in search of lost lands ..."
That something such as this could have happened to the earth seems, in our forward-looking culture of progress, somehow unbelievable. We are not taught such concepts at school nor are we brought up to think in this way. Suggesting that it could happen in the future can earn everything from the epithet of 'prophet of doom' to outright academic scorn. Nevertheless, look into the holy works and records of the ancient civilizations and you will find corroboration from what remains of the 'media' of their time, their mythology, legends and folklore. Cataclysmic events on a global scale did strike the civilizations of the ancients, and many recorded it in the clearest and most intelligible ways they were capable of at the time. The accounts survive to this day as myths of catastrophes.
The Path of the Pole by Charles H. Hapgood is now available in paperback, as is
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles H. Hapgood was a history professor who began, at the prompting of some students, to look into the search for the lost continent of Atlantis. That lead him to the ideas of Hugh Achincloss Brown: that the entire earth could be made to be repositioned at a radically new angle on its axis of rotation.
Hapgood realized that the entire planet did not have to be repositioned around its axis. Only the outer crust need move, just as the loosely peeled skin of an orange could be slid around the unmoved inner slices. This line of thinking was published in Earth's Shifting Crust (1958), in collaboration with James H. Campbell, a mathematician-engineer.
Hapgood ultimately revised key parts of his thinking because his calculations convinced him that the mass of the ice cap on Antartica could not destabilize the earth's rotation.
Hapgood's thinking is expressed most clearly by Hapgood himself.
That book was later revised and in 1970 republished as The Path of the Pole by Chilton. In an introductory note, Hapgood said:
"Polar wandering is based on the idea that the outer shell of the earth shifts about from time to time, moving some continents toward and other continents away from the poles. Continental drift is based on the idea that the continents move individually...A few writers have suggested that perhaps continental drift causes polar wandering. This book advances the notion that polar wandering is primary and causes the displacement of continents....This book will present evidence that the last shift of the earth's crust (the lithosphere) took place in recent time, at the close of the last ice age, and that it was the cause of the improvement in climate."
Hapgood then goes on to mention to two areas where he finds much of his evidence, in data derived from studies of geomagnetism and from carbon 14 dating.
Although he argued that such global disruptions happened repeatedly, Hapgood by then was rejecting the idea that such disruptions could happen quickly.
Based primarily on that technical data, he argued that each shift took approximately five thousand years, followed by 20 to 30 thousand year periods with no polar movements. Also, in his calculations, the area of movement never covered more than 40 degrees.
The presence of a truly liquid layer between the core and the outer crust would allow such slippage, moderated by inertial forces.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles H. Hapgood was a history professor who began, at the prompting of some students, to look into the search for the lost continent of Atlantis. That lead him to the ideas of Hugh Achincloss Brown: that the entire earth could be made to be repositioned at a radically new angle on its axis of rotation.
Hapgood realized that the entire planet did not have to be repositioned around its axis. Only the outer crust need move, just as the loosely peeled skin of an orange could be slid around the unmoved inner slices. This line of thinking was published in Earth's Shifting Crust (1958), in collaboration with James H. Campbell, a mathematician-engineer.
Hapgood ultimately revised key parts of his thinking because his calculations convinced him that the mass of the ice cap on Antartica could not destabilize the earth's rotation.
Hapgood's thinking is expressed most clearly by Hapgood himself.
That book was later revised and in 1970 republished as The Path of the Pole by Chilton. In an introductory note, Hapgood said:
"Polar wandering is based on the idea that the outer shell of the earth shifts about from time to time, moving some continents toward and other continents away from the poles. Continental drift is based on the idea that the continents move individually...A few writers have suggested that perhaps continental drift causes polar wandering. This book advances the notion that polar wandering is primary and causes the displacement of continents....This book will present evidence that the last shift of the earth's crust (the lithosphere) took place in recent time, at the close of the last ice age, and that it was the cause of the improvement in climate."
Hapgood then goes on to mention to two areas where he finds much of his evidence, in data derived from studies of geomagnetism and from carbon 14 dating.
Although he argued that such global disruptions happened repeatedly, Hapgood by then was rejecting the idea that such disruptions could happen quickly.
Based primarily on that technical data, he argued that each shift took approximately five thousand years, followed by 20 to 30 thousand year periods with no polar movements. Also, in his calculations, the area of movement never covered more than 40 degrees.
The presence of a truly liquid layer between the core and the outer crust would allow such slippage, moderated by inertial forces.
Mountains would spring up from the plains and would climb and travel upon the shoulders of other mountains, causing faults and rifts. Lakes would be tilted and emptied, rivers would change their beds; large land areas and all their inhabitants would slip under the sea. Forests would burn, and the hurricanes and wild seas would wrest them from the ground on which they grew and pile them, branch and root, in heaps. Seas would turn into deserts, their waters rolling away.
'And if the change in the velocity of the diurnal rotation [slowing the planet down] should accompany the shifting of the axis, the water confined to the equatorial oceans by centrifugal force would retreat to the poles, and high tides and hurricanes would rush from pole to pole, carrying reindeers and seals to the tropics and desert lions to the Arctic, moving from the equator up to the mountain ridges of the Himalayas and down the African jungles; and crumbled rocks torn from splintering mountains would be scattered over large distances; and herds of animals would be washed from the plains of Siberia. The shifting of the axis would change the climate in every place, leaving corals in Newfoundland and elephants in Alaska, fig trees in northern Greenland and luxuriant forests in Antarctica. In the event of a rapid shift of the axis, many species and genera of animals on land and in the sea would be destroyed, and civilizations, if any, would be reduced to ruins.'[4]
Neither Hapgood nor Velikovsky were pulling theories out of the air. The theory that the terrestrial crust is swimming on magma was first offered in the 1850's. The record of bones and trees, and shells and layers of sediment that had been found throughout the world pointed to one or more cataclysms in the Earth's past, some of them as recently as 1,500 B.C.E. and amazingly, 800 B.C.E. Velikovsky sums up the scientific establishment's past record on answering the questions:
What caused tropical forests to grow in polar regions? What caused volcanic activity on a great scale in the past and lava flows on land and in the ocean beds? What caused earthquakes to be so numerous and violent in the past? Puzzlement, despair, and frustration are the only answers to each and every one of these phenomena.
The theories of uniformity (or gradualism) and evolution maintain that the geological record bears witness that from time immemorial, even from the time this planet began it's existence only minute changes - caused by the wind blowing on rocks, the sand grains swimming to the sea - accumulated into vast changes. These causes however, are inadequate to explain the great revolutions in nature, and they evoke the expressions of futility on the part of the specialists, each in his field.
Velikovsky continues with his account:
... The evidence is overwhelming that the great global catastrophes were either accompanied or caused by shifting of the terrestrial axis or by a disturbance in the diurnal and annual motions of the Earth ... The state of lavas with reversed magnetization, hundreds of times more intensive than the inverted terrestrial magnetic field could impart, reveals the nature of the forces that were in action ... Many world-wide phenomena, for each of which the cause is vainly sought, are explained by a single cause: the sudden changes in climate, transgression of the sea, vast volcanic and seismic activities, formation of ice cover, pluvial crises, emergence of mountains and their dislocation, rising and subsidence of coasts, tilting of lakes, sedimentation, fossilization, the provenance of tropical animals and plants in polar regions, conglomerates of fossil animals of various latitudes and habitats, the extinction of species and genera, the appearance of new species, the reversal of the Earth's magnetic field, and a score of other world-wide phenomena.[4]
Look into any one of the above fields and you will begin to see the same pattern Velikovsky, Hapgood, Einstein and hundreds of other independent geologists, paleontologists and archeologists have recognized in the Earth's past. A pattern of repeated, catastrophic change thought to be brought about by crustal displacements activated by one or more outside agents - such as passing comets or fluctuations in the sun's own magnetic field - appears to have been with humanity and its civilizations from the very dawn of mankind.
Rand and Rose Flem-Ath discussed earth-crust displacement' in their book, When the Sky Fell. Seeing evidence of it in almost all parts of the world they described it's effects and the consequences for mankind today. The displacement that happened, according to them at about 11,000 BC, had:
'... also left other evidence of its deadly visit in a ring of death around the globe. All the continents that experience rapid and massive extinctions of animal species (notably the Americas and Siberia) underwent massive changes in their latitudes ...
And coral has been found in Newfoundland, ferns, fossils, coal and fossilized tree-stumps have been found in Antarctica, water lilies and fossilized palm leaves ten and twelve feet long have been found in Spitzbergen, there is evidence that the swamp cypress flourished within 500 miles of the North Pole in the Miocene epoch, and more. The evidence is overwhelming that the Poles have not covered the same parts of the planet for the entire extent of our geological history.
'The consequences of the displacement are monumental. The earth's crust ripples over its interior and the world is shaken by incredible quakes and floods. They sky appears to fall as continents groan and shift position. Deep in the ocean, earthquakes generate massive tidal waves which crash against the coastlines, flooding them. Some lands shift to warmer climes, while others, propelled into polar zones, suffer the direst of winters. Melting ice caps raise the ocean's level higher and higher. All living things must adapt, migrate or die ...
"If the horror of an earth-crust displacement were to be visited upon today's interdependent world the progress of thousands of years of civilization would be torn away from our planet like a fine cobweb. Those who live near high mountains might escape the global tidal waves, but they would be forced to leave behind, in the lowlands, the slowly constructed fruits of civilization. Only amongst the merchant marine and navies of the world might some evidence of civilization remain. The rusting hulls of ships and submarines would eventually perish but the valuable maps that are housed in them would be saved by survivors, perhaps for hundreds, even thousands of years. Until once again mankind could use them to sail the World Ocean in search of lost lands ..."
That something such as this could have happened to the earth seems, in our forward-looking culture of progress, somehow unbelievable. We are not taught such concepts at school nor are we brought up to think in this way.
Suggesting that it could happen in the future can earn everything from the epithet of 'prophet of doom' to outright academic scorn. Nevertheless, look into the holy works and records of the ancient civilizations and you will find corroboration from what remains of the 'media' of their time, their mythology, legends and folklore. Cataclysmic events on a global scale did strike the civilizations of the ancients, and many recorded it in the clearest and most intelligible ways they were capable of at the time. The accounts survive to this day as myths of catastrophes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles H. Hapgood was a history professor who began, at the prompting of some students, to look into the search for the lost continent of Atlantis. That lead him to the ideas of Hugh Achincloss Brown: that the entire earth could be made to be repositioned at a radically new angle on its axis of rotation.
Hapgood realized that the entire planet did not have to be repositioned around its axis. Only the outer crust need move, just as the loosely peeled skin of an orange could be slid around the unmoved inner slices. This line of thinking was published in Earth's Shifting Crust (1958), in collaboration with James H. Campbell, a mathematician-engineer.
Hapgood ultimately revised key parts of his thinking because his calculations convinced him that the mass of the ice cap on Antartica could not destabilize the earth's rotation.
Charles H. Hapgood was a history professor who began, at the prompting of some students, to look into the search for the lost continent of Atlantis. That lead him to the ideas of Hugh Achincloss Brown: that the entire earth could be made to be repositioned at a radically new angle on its axis of rotation.
Hapgood realized that the entire planet did not have to be repositioned around its axis. Only the outer crust need move, just as the loosely peeled skin of an orange could be slid around the unmoved inner slices. This line of thinking was published in Earth's Shifting Crust (1958), in collaboration with James H. Campbell, a mathematician-engineer.
Hapgood ultimately revised key parts of his thinking because his calculations convinced him that the mass of the ice cap on Antartica could not destabilize the earth's rotation.
That book was later revised and in 1970 republished as The Path of the Pole by Chilton. In an introductory note, Hapgood said:
"Polar wandering is based on the idea that the outer shell of the earth shifts about from time to time, moving some continents toward and other continents away from the poles. Continental drift is based on the idea that the continents move individually...A few writers have suggested that perhaps continental drift causes polar wandering. This book advances the notion that polar wandering is primary and causes the displacement of continents....This book will present evidence that the last shift of the earth's crust (the lithosphere) took place in recent time, at the close of the last ice age, and that it was the cause of the improvement in climate."
Hapgood then goes on to mention to two areas where he finds much of his evidence, in data derived from studies of geomagnetism and from carbon 14 dating.
Although he argued that such global disruptions happened repeatedly, Hapgood by then was rejecting the idea that such disruptions could happen quickly.
Based primarily on that technical data, he argued that each shift took approximately five thousand years, followed by 20 to 30 thousand year periods with no polar movements. Also, in his calculations, the area of movement never covered more than 40 degrees.
The presence of a truly liquid layer between the core and the outer crust would allow such slippage, moderated by inertial forces.
Contributing sources:
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Solar Storms can disable or destroy computer circuits, any and all electric and electronic equipment. They release particles which travel to the earth's magnetosphere, causing many geomagnetic anomalies.
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The Path of the Pole by Charles H. Hapgood is now available in paperback, as is Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings.
The Path of the Pole: Cataclysmic Poleshift Geology
The Path of the Pole: Cataclysmic Poleshift Geology
Ping your blogAnd Chomp it www.Hypersmash.com
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http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/2012-earths-poles-shifting.htm
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