Pole Shifts
The cataclysmic pole shift hypothesis is the conjecture that the axis of rotation of a planet has undergone relatively rapid shifts in location, creating calamities such as massive floods and large scale tectonic events. This type of event would occur if the physical poles had been or would be suddenly shifted with respect to the underlying surface over a geologically short time frame.
Among the scientific community, the evidence shows that no rapid shifts in the pole have occurred during the last 200 million years. True polar wander is known to occur, but only at rates of 1° per million years or less. The last rapid shift in the poles may have occurred 800 million years ago, when the supercontinent Rodinia still existed. This hypothesis is almost always discussed in the context of Earth, but other bodies in the Solar System may have experienced axial reorientation during their existences.
The geographic poles of the Earth refer to the points on the surface of the planet that are intersected by the axis of rotation. The pole shift hypothesis refers to a change in location of these poles with respect to the underlying surface. Note that this is a different phenomenon than the changes in axial orientation with respect to the plane of the ecliptic that are caused by precession and nutation.
Pole shift hypotheses are not to be confused with plate tectonics, the well-accepted geological theory that the Earth's surface consists of solid plates which shift over a fluid asthenosphere; nor with continental drift, the corollary to plate tectonics which maintains that locations of the continents have moved slowly over the face of the Earth, resulting in the gradual emerging and breakup of continents and oceans over hundreds of millions of years.
Pole shift hypotheses are also not to be confused with geomagnetic reversal, the periodic reversal of the Earth's magnetic field (effectively switching the north and south magnetic poles). Geomagnetic reversal has more acceptance in the scientific community than pole shift hypothesis.
In popular literature, many conjectures have been suggested involving very rapid polar shift. A slow pole shift in the poles would display the most minor alterations and no destruction. A more dramatic view assumes more rapid changes, with dramatic alterations of geography and localized areas of destruction due to earthquakes and tsunamis. Several recent books propose changes that take place in weeks, days, or even hours, resulting in a variety of doomsday scenarios.
An early mention of a shifting of the Earth's axis can be found in an 1872 article entitled "Chronologie historique des Mexicains" by Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, an eccentric expert on Mesoamerican codices who interpreted ancient Mexican myths as evidence for four periods of global cataclysms that had begun around 10,500 B.C.
In 1948, Hugh Auchincloss Brown, an electrical engineer, advanced a hypothesis of catastrophic pole shift. Brown also argued that accumulation of ice at the poles caused recurring tipping of the axis, identifying cycles of approximately seven millennia.
In his controversial 1950 work Worlds in Collision, Immanuel Velikovsky postulated that the planet Venus emerged from Jupiter as a comet. During two proposed near approaches in about 1,450 B.C., he suggested that the direction of the Earth's rotation was changed radically, then reverted to its original direction on the next pass. This disruption supposedly caused earthquakes, tidal waves, and the parting of the Red Sea. Further, he said near misses by Mars between 776 and 687 B. C. also caused the Earth's axis to change back and forth by ten degrees. Velikovsky supported his work with historical records, although his studies were mainly ridiculed by the scientific community.
Charles Hapgood is now perhaps the best remembered early proponent. In his books The Earth's Shifting Crust (1958) (which includes a foreword by Albert Einstein who was writing before the theory of plate tectonics was developed) and Path of the Pole (1970). Hapgood, building on Adhemar's much earlier model, speculated that the ice mass at one or both poles over-accumulates and destabilizes the Earth's rotational balance, causing slippage of all or much of Earth's outer crust around the Earth's core, which retains its axial orientation.
Based on his own research, Hapgood argued that each shift took approximately 5,000 years, followed by 20,000- to 30,000-year periods with no polar movements. Also, in his calculations, the area of movement never covered more than 40 degrees. Hapgood's examples of recent locations for the North Pole include Hudson Bay (60šN, 73šW) , the Atlantic Ocean between Iceland and Norway (72šN, 10šE) and Yukon (63šN, 135šW).
However, in his subsequent work The Path of the Pole, Hapgood conceded Einstein's point that the weight of the polar ice would be insufficient to bring about a polar shift. Instead, Hapgood argued that the forces that caused the shifts in the crust must be located below the surface. He had no satisfactory explanation for how this could occur.
Hapgood wrote to the Canadian librarian, Rand Flem-Ath, encouraging him in his pursuit of scientific evidence to back Hapgood's claims and in his expansion of the hypothesis. Flem-Ath published the results of this work in 1995 in When the Sky Fell co-written with his wife, Rose.
The field has attracted pseudoscientific authors offering a variety of evidence, including psychic readings, possibly linked to other beliefs such as Tollmann's hypothetical bolide, Black Sea deluge theory or the Deluge myth.
In the 1970s and 1980s a series of non-fiction books authored by former Washington Newspaper reporter Ruth Shick Montgomery elaborates on Edgar Cayce readings.
In 1997, Richard W. Noone published the novel 5/5/2000, ICE: The Ultimate Disaster which depicts a cataclysmic shift of the Earth's ice cap covering Antarctica caused by a planetary alignment and solar storms, leading to crustal displacement. This book falls under pseudoscience rather than pop culture because Noone used scientific reasoning and backing to support his claim that the Earth's crust would "turn on its side" on May 5, 2000. This did not happen.
In 1998, retired civil engineer James G. Bowles proposed in a non-peer reviewed journal a mechanism by which a polar shift could occur. He named this Rotational-Bending, or the RB-effect. He hypothesized that combined gravitational effects of the Sun and the Moon pulled at the Earth's crust at an oblique angle. This force steadily wore away at the underpinnings that linked the crust to the inner mantle. This generates a plastic zone that allows the crust to rotate with respect to the lower layers. Centrifugal forces acting on the mass of ice at the poles, causing them to move to the equator.
Books on this subject have been published by William Hutton including the 1996 book Coming Earth Changes: Causes and Consequences of the Approaching Pole Shift (ISBN 0876043619), which compared geologic records with the psychic readings of Edgar Cayce and predicted catastrophic climate changes before the end of 2001 which did not happen.
In 2004 Hutton and co-author Jonathan Eagle published Earth's Catastrophic Past and Future: A Scientific Analysis of Information Channeled by Edgar Cayce (ISBN 1-58112-517-8), which summarizes possible mechanisms and the timing of a future pole shift.
The potential forces that could cause a reorientation of the Earth's axis of rotation include:
A high-velocity asteroid or comet which hits Earth at such an angle that the lithosphere moves independent of the mantle.
A high-velocity asteroid or comet which hits Earth at such an angle that the entire planet shifts axis.
An unusually magnetic celestial object which passes close enough to Earth to temporarily reorient the magnetic field, which then "drags" the lithosphere about a new axis of rotation. Eventually, the sun's magnetic field again determines the Earth's, after the intruding celestial object "returns" to a location from which it cannot influence Earth.
Perturbations of the topography of the core-mantle boundary, perhaps induced by differential core rotation and shift of its axial rotation vector, leading to CMB mass redistributions. See, e.g., Bowin.
Mass redistributions in the mantle from mantle avalanches or other deformations. See, e.g., Ladbury, and Steinberger and O'Connell.
Cataclysmic pole shift hypothesis Wikipedia
North Magnetic Pole Moving East Due to Core Flux National Geographic - December 24, 2009
Earth's north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia at almost 40 miles (64 kilometers) a year due to magnetic changes in the planet's core, new research says.
It's all about magnetic, an electromagnetic experiment in linear to experience and learn, one day reversing and returning the energy to light. Earth's magnetic poles are shifting. This is a metaphor for a shift in the polarity of human consciousness, and perhaps what the Mayans were referring to on December 21, 2012 the end of cycle in their Long Calendar. As science and pseudoscience merge in the twenty first century, understanding of the nature of reality as a consciousness hologram, will define poles shifts on all levels.
THEORY OF CRUSTAL DISPLACEMENT
