Sliding Crust

On the Possibility of Very Rapid Shift of the Poles
Excerpts from article by Flavio Barbiero

In his book The Path of the Pole (Chilton Book, Philadelphia, 1970) Charles Hapgood expresses the hypothesis that the poles have changed their position three times during the recent past. From the Greenland Sea, where it shifted about seventy thousand years ago, the north pole moved to Hudson Bay fifty thousand years ago, and finally to its presents position 11.600 years ago, at the end of Pleistocene.

To support his hypothesis, Hapgood presents an impressive quantity of evidence which can be summarised as follows:

1. the presence of ice caps in North America and Northern Europe, highly eccentrical compared to the present north pole.
2. The contemporaneous absence of ice caps from Siberia which was actually populated to its northernmost regions by an impressive zoological community.
3. The arctic Sea was warmer than it is today, and there were human beings living in the New Siberia Islands.
4. Antarctica was partially free of ice.
5. The general climatic situation of the Earth was coherent with a different position of the poles.

The hypothesis that the inclination of the terrestrial axis in relation to the ecliptic and that the position of the poles might change has been taken into consideration since last century. Some of the greatest geologists of the time, including J.C.Maxwell and Sir George Darwin (son of the famous Charles Darwin), considered this problem and decided that the stabilising effect of the equatorial bulge was so great that no conceivable force originating within the Earth could make it shifting on its axis, except for the collision with another planet. They therefore dismissed the idea of any shift of the poles as impossible and, in fact, not worth discussing. Their influence has been so highly felt that to this day no one has seriously considered such an hypothesis.

Hapgood too accepts un-critically the assumption that only a “planetary collision” is capable of displacing the axis of rotation. Therefore he proposes a theory that explains the shift of the poles as the result of the shift of the whole Earth’s crust. Based on the research of the Russian scientist V.V. Beloussov, he assumes that at a depth of approximately hundred miles in the upper mantle there is a layer of liquid rock which behaves as a bearing allowing the whole crust to “shift” when subjected to a displacing force. In Hapgood’s opinion this force is provided by the centrifugal momentum of ice caps eccentrical to the poles. In this way the Earth would keep its axis of rotation unchanged, but the poles and the whole Earth’s surface would shift and change latitude.

The evidence proving that the poles where in different positions during the Pleistocene era is quite impressive, and this explains why Hapgood’s theory was approved by scientists such as Einstein and K.F. Mather. But it meets with so many difficulties that it appears highly controversial. Above all, it is not compatible with other geological theories which are widely accepted today, such as the drift of the continents and related theories.

Furthermore the theory does not explain some of the most significant peculiarities of Pleistocene’s climate changes, first of all the speed with which these changes appear to have taken place. According to Hapgood it took the north pole at least two thousand years to move from its previous position to the present. The evidence we have, however, are in favour of a definitely much faster climatic change. It was Hapgood himself who underlined the enormous amount of evidence proving the high speed at which the shift of the poles appears to have happened; speed which the mechanism he proposes is unable to explain.

The only way to completely and coherently explain what took place at the end of Pleistocene appears to be that of admitting the possibility of a shift of the poles of the same magnitude Hapgood hypothesizes, but in a much shorter time: not more than a few days. This possibility is openly refused, only because no convincing explanation has been forwarded so far.