In this last blog examining the science behind Earth Changes, I focus on a recent study (Before Atlantis) by Mark Carlotto, PhD, which seems to support the pole shift hypothesis of Charles Hapgood. and the core-mantle decoupling hypothesis of The Ethical Skeptic.
4. An Earth change may involve a shift in the geographic location of the Earth’s poles, leading to dramatic climatic changes across the planet.
Several years, I attended an online talk by Mark Carlotto, an aerospace engineer, who had developed a novel method of testing the Charles Hapgood pole shift hypothesis that the Earth’s geographic North pole had shifted numerous times over the last 100,000 years. His talk was straightforward, but I had never heard of “crustal displacement”, so I was not sure what to make of the pole shifts.
Background: Mainstream geology supports continental drift and plate tectonics but not pole shift theory. According to the theory of continental drift, espoused by Alfred Wegener in 1912, the Earth’s continents move or drift relative to each other over long periods of geologic time – this has been confirmed with modern GPS measurements. Over the years, scientists have noted similar organisms on multiple continents which could be explained by the existence of a supercontinent, called Gondwana, that split and moved apart via continental drift. An offshoot of continental drift is plate tectonics which studies the movement of the continents as they ride on plates of the Earth’s lithosphere. These plates include continental crust and oceanic crust, both floating above a semi-liquid mantle. The discovery of rifts in the mid-ocean floors, producing new crust, and the subjugation of plates under one another, pushing crust into the mantle, has given us the understanding of an ongoing cycle of crustal development and destruction along the planet’s surface.
During the 1950s, Charles Hapgood proposed a theory that the ice ages were the result of climate change caused by rapid displacement of the earth’s crust over the mantle, which shifted the geographic poles and continents, moving some areas closer to the poles so that ice would develop in those areas. This theory is called the crustal displacement theory or the catastrophic pole shift hypothesis. The difference between the theory of continental drift and the crustal displacement theory is one of speed – slow movement of the crust (continental drift) versus relatively rapid movement (crustal displacement). Hapgood was trying to understand the rapid climate changes and species extinctions that occurred periodically. Here is what a pole shift would look like:
Coincidentally, geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milankovic (discoverer of the Milankovitch cycles) proposed that movement of the geographic poles is due to a similar mechanism to that of continental plate movement. He stated, “the displacement of the pole takes place in such a way that…Earth’s axis maintains its orientation in space, but the earth’s crust is displaced on its substratum”. Displacement of the geographic poles is also called ‘true polar wander’ and is considered a rare geological event.
Like many of us, Charles Hapgood wondered what earth changes could cause the continent of Atlantis to suddenly disappear. As Plato says in the Timaeus, “there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night…the island of Atlantis…disappeared in the depths of the sea”. In Atlantis Beneath the Ice, Rand and Rose Flem-Ath expand upon Charles Hapgood’s theory of earth crust displacement, proposing that Antarctica was once Atlantis, and a great cataclysm shifted the geographic poles, moving Atlantis from a temperate region to its current polar location (i.e., Antarctica).
In Earth’s Shifting Crust, Hapgood presents evidence that during the last ice age (15,000 years ago) the geographic North Pole was located near Hudson Bay in Canada, 2500 miles south from its current location. Consequently, North America was located much further north (close to the North Pole), with glaciers covering the northern half of North America and extending as far south as Illinois and Missouri. Hapgood hypothesized two other prior locations of the North Pole: one in Greenland 50,000 years ago and the other in Alaska around 80,000 years ago.
In his book Before Atlantis, aerospace engineer Mark Carlotto notes that ancient sites (e.g., buildings, cities) in Mexico, Egypt, Greece, Peru and other areas around the world seem to line up with past positions of the North Pole. He found that ancient temples and buildings are often oriented along the North-South axis, but with a deviation from the current North Pole. He extrapolated the N-S axis for thousands of ancient sites, using Google Earth, so that he could find the position of the geographic North Pole at the time that the structure was built. He discovered four different geographic North Poles, based on the archaeological sites and their N-S orientation. Three of his sites were similar locations to the sites proposed by Hapgood. From his book, here are the locations of the previous geographic North Poles:
The order of the poles, from oldest to current, is Bering Sea (BS), Greenland (Gr), Norwegian Sea (NS), Hudson Bay (HB) and the Arctic (Ar).
Ben Davison of the SuspiciousObserver YouTube channel has made several videos examining the pole shift hypothesis, including “The Earth Will Flip”. Davison states that there are currently two possible mechanisms for this to occur: 1) Global crustal slippage, as Hapgood predicts, and 2) Core-mantle decoupling rotation, as theorized by The Ethical Skeptic (TES).
The exothermic core-mantle decoupling – Dzhanibekov oscillation (ECDO) hypothesis of TES examines some of the underlying geophysics that may be involved in a pole shift. He proposes a role for the gyroscopic angular momentum of the Earth, like a spinning top, which takes into account that the Earth is not homogeneous in its core, but has two large “blobs”, large low-velocity provinces (LLVPs) that can trigger instability in core-mantle dynamics. Here is his diagram, which includes the current decrease in the geomagnetic field and the global warming trend:
There is much more to the ECDO hypothesis than I can fit into a short blog, but after reading his work, I am left with the impression that the Earth is a semi-stable planet with periodic pole shifts. Schoch and others have noted the “broad cyclicity of [human] civilizations on Earth…along with interspersed dark ages”, suggesting that the planetary ‘engine’ limits the time for each civilization, followed by planetary catastrophe and rebirth of the planet. The pole shift hypothesis is scary, but hopefully, others will examine the evidence and refine possible mechanisms by which it could occur.