The Cataclysmic Pole Shift Hypothesis

The vacation had been going so well up until this point. You and your mate Barry Onions have got several exotic cocktails lined up on the bar as you look forward to another fun-packed day of relaxing in the baking heat and fighting over the recliners with a pack of angry Germans. But then everything goes a bit downhill.

Just as you’re about to take a first sip of your Double Truffle Martini, a sudden chill hits the air and your nose turns a troubling shade of blue. Dammit. You know what’s happening here.

There’s been another sudden rapid shift of the geographical poles, and you’re all now much closer to the North Pole than you had been just a few seconds ago. You turn around to vent your strong disapproval about this to Barry Onions, but he’s already frozen to death – his lips now locked forever around the straw he was using to take a final suck of his Slippery Nipple. Bloody typical.

This would never have happened if you’d stuck with your original idea of going to Bognor Regis.

It may sound a little far-fetched and over-dramatic, but the idea of the geographical North and South Poles just going for a random wander around the Earth has been debated and investigated by some of the world’s greatest minds for centuries. Even Albert Einstein was drawn towards the theory for decades, and I wouldn’t want to argue the toss with him unless it was a pop music quiz or something. It’s speculated that our problem planet has witnessed Cataclysmic Pole Shifts many times before in its ancient history, and we’re long overdue for the next big shift which will result in swift catastrophic consequences for all life on Earth.

So is now a good time to start collecting Fray Bentos pies in preparation for the imminent end of the world? And could Cataclysmic Pole Shifts be the simple answer to some of history’s most intriguing puzzles including the discovery of flash-frozen woolly mammoths, the recovery of old impossible maps, and the true fate of the lost city of Atlantis? I say simple. This is a lot more complicated than it may at first sound.

And considering that I already thought it sounded pretty bloody complicated to begin with, we could be in for a very bumpy ride.

The Paths to the Poles

Charles Hutchins Hapgood is one of the names most commonly associated with pushing forward the idea of rapid pole shifts. The American professor and author may not have been a geologist but he was still a pretty clever bloke. He received a master’s degree from Harvard in 1929, and by the 1940s he was lecturing world history, economics, and the history of science in various colleges across the United States. And it was apparently an innocent question from one of his students about the whereabouts of the lost continent or city of Atlantis which led him onto the rocky path of Cataclysmic Pole Shifts in search of the answers.

Years later, he detailed his subsequent hypothesis in the 1958 book The Earth’s Shifting Crust which was followed up by a revised version of his arguments in The Path of the Pole in 1970. But before we dive into what exactly Hapgood was banging on about, it’s important to briefly note the crucial differences between the geographical poles and the magnetic poles.

Without getting bogged down in too much detail before I’ve had my ninth coffee of the morning, the geographical poles are typically considered to be fixed positions where the planet’s axis of rotation intersects the surface. The North Pole sits in the middle of the Arctic Ocean whilst the South is located in Antarctica, and these are the points around which the planet turns, defining the rotational axis of Earth.

The magnetic North and South poles are a whole different kettle of whale meat, and are hundreds of miles away from their geographical counterparts which causes all kinds of comical mix-ups down at the mail sorting offices. The magnetic poles are the points on the surface on which Earth’s magnetic field lines converge, and these are what your compass uses to point to North and South when you’ve got lost in the woods and you’re being chased by an angry bear. Significantly, the magnetic poles are not quite so fixed and have even been known to swap positions in what is known as a ‘Geomagnetic Reversal’ or ‘Magnetic Flip’ in which North becomes South and hundreds of Scouts never return from their latest camping expeditions.

But let’s put the magnets down for the time being and concentrate on the fixed geographical poles. As fixed as some of us might believe them to be, there are others who believe that the geographical poles were in very different positions many years ago. And Charles Hapgood was one of the major proponents of the theory that the actual surface of the Earth can move pretty rapidly when it’s in the mood.

His original book The Earth’s Shifting Crust was largely met with derision by scientists when first published in 1958, although Albert Einstein reckoned that this college teacher might actually be onto something.

Hapgood’s Earth Crust Displacement Theory

Hapgood speculated that the Earth’s surface could move significantly on the back of some kind of major crust displacement bubbling away below. Not just certain patches here and there. He reckoned that the whole of the planet’s surface could move as a single piece over the layers of liquid rock of the Earth’s core layer, with some of it sliding in the direction of the North Pole, some of it sliding towards the South Pole, and some of it sliding towards the halfway point at the Equator.

One of the methods which Hapgood uses to help describe the event in simple terms is to imagine loose peel moving around an orange. The orange itself remains largely unchanged afterwards but the thin layer of peel is shifting about all over the place. In fact, oranges are quite useful when it comes to describing a polar shift. Before you start peeling it, get a marker pen and plant a small smiley face on the orange where you imagine the North Pole might currently sit.

Now spin the orange around a bit. Again, you’ve still got pretty much the same orange in your hand, but the North Pole is now in a completely different location. I think this would work with watermelons, too. Not so good with bananas.

But it illustrates the point that the result of such a geographical pole shift from a crust displacement could make things pretty bewildering on the surface.

At the very least, it could cause a bit of sudden confusion if you were popping to the shops for a packet of pork scratchings, only to find that your local shop has moved to the middle of Antarctica and you hadn’t even put your good coat on for the journey. You’ll probably have one or two other things to worry about in the long-term, though.

Hapgood reckoned that the Earth’s crust has shifted three times over the last 80,000 years, each shift no bigger than 40 degrees. The North Pole had been making itself comfortable in a nice spot in Yukon, Canada, before it moved to the Atlantic Ocean between Iceland and Norway about 80,000 years ago, then hopped over to visit Hudson Bay about 50,000 years ago, before packing up and heading for the middle of the Arctic Ocean about 12,000 years ago.

I should stress that we’re not talking about plate tectonics, here. Back when Charles Hapgood was writing his first book, the theory of plate tectonics was certainly knocking around but was largely treated with the same amount of ridicule as his Earth Crust Displacement theory. In fact, people were only just beginning to fully get on board with the hypothesis of Continental Drift, on which the subsequent hypothesis of Plate Tectonics was formed.

The theory of Continental Drift suggests that all of our planet’s continents used to be a single Google-style supercontinent but they have split up and drifted apart across the ocean bed over hundreds of millions of years. The coastlines of these separate continents now appear to fit together like an exploded jigsaw puzzle. Building on this theory, Plate Tectonics suggests that the Earth’s lithosphere – the crust and the upper mantle – is made of up of seven or eight solid plates which are in constant motion, pushing together and converging to create conveyor belts on which the embedded continents passively drift along with them for the ride.

But the conveyor belts aren’t in any immediate hurry. We often talk about how plate tectonics are responsible for gradually pushing Hawaii ever closer to Japan, but it’s not worth making the effort to learn a new language just yet. Assuming that the plates stick to the same rough trajectory – which often changes every few million years – then it would take another sixty million years before Hawaii finally gets there, during which time the island state may well have sunk anyway.

Many people would say that the later wide acceptance of Plate Tectonics stripped away all credibility from Hapgood’s hypothesis, although some would suggest that there’s not necessarily any contradiction in the two concepts. Whilst Plate Tectonics gently nudges chunks of the Earth over incredibly long periods, Hapgood is suggesting that some other force of nature is also responsible for the entirely separate event of the whole surface of the Earth moving as one loose orange peel skin over a far more rapid timeframe.

What Would Cause Such a Shift?

But what exactly would cause such a thing? Hapgood believed that it may have something to do with the build-up of ice mass at one or both of the poles. Bearing in mind that the rotation of the Earth is defined by the geographical poles, things could get problematic if one side of the axis got a bit too heavy. When too much ice begins to accumulate at one of the poles, the weight of this could destabilise the rotational balance, causing displacement of the earth’s crust which responds by shoving the polar regions towards the equator in a bid to regain a steady footing.

If Hapgood was right, the effects of such a comparatively rapid shift could obviously have dire consequences for the inhabitants of Earth. We’re talking about floods and earthquakes springing up all over the shop, but we’re also talking about whole regions of the Earth experiencing a remarkably sudden form of climate change as certain locations get shifted much closer to the Arctic without any warning.

And it could provide the answer for so many elusive historic riddles. For example, it could offer a clue to the very subject that got Hapgood thinking about this in the first place back in the college classroom – the advanced civilization of the ancient lost city of Atlantis may have fallen victim to a sudden polar shift which threw them into a brutal climate in which they couldn’t possibly survive.

It could also dish up the solution to another mammoth mystery. I don’t mean a particularly big mystery – just one involving woolly mammoths. We don’t know for certain what caused the mass extinction of these cuddly beasts who roamed in great herds across the Northern hemisphere for the best part of half a million years before the last of their kind died about 4,000 years ago. But a few startling discoveries were apparently being uncovered at the beginning of the 20th century which suggests that many of the mammoths didn’t exactly have much time to consider their impending doom before they took their last breath.

Across the plains of northeastern Siberia, explorers were finding the carcasses of what appeared to be flash-frozen woolly mammoths from tens of thousands of years ago. Some of these carcasses were reported to have undigested food in their stomachs, perhaps indicating that they had been happily snacking away on plants and shrubs when they were suddenly struck by an icy doom which didn’t even give their stomachs enough time to begin the digestion process.

One of the most famous flash-frozen woolly mammoths was discovered by German entomologist Alfred Otto Herz in 1902 by the Berezovka River in Siberia. It was reported at the time that along with the undigested food in its stomach, this one was also found to have unchewed grasses and beans still in its mouth – along with flash-frozen buttercups which proved to be still freshly in bloom after they’d thawed out a bit. Again, this would seem to indicate that the animal was rudely disturbed from its lunch by some kind of instant deepfreeze which perfectly preserved both the woolly mammoth and the food upon which it had been innocently munching.

In fact, Alfred was so intrigued by the discovery of this flavour-sealed beast that he was apparently even considering serving the perfectly-preserved flesh at a dinner party for his cronies. And who can blame him? It’s not every day you get to choose Woolly Mammoth Dippers from the menu.

So Charles Hapgood may have been on the right path with this Earth Crust Displacement Theory which caused such a sudden catastrophic climate change that Greta Thunberg wouldn’t even have had time to growl “How dare you!” before she was silenced forever by the ice.

Einstein’s Endorsement

Albert Einstein certainly thought that Hapgood was onto something. He even provided the foreword for that original 1958 book The Earth’s Shifting Crust. Einstein admitted that he was electrified by Hapgood’s idea and strongly urged dismissive scientists to take the matter more seriously. In his own words: “His 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. I think that this rather astonishing, even fascinating, idea deserves the serious attention of anyone who concerns himself with the theory of the earth’s development. One can hardly doubt that significant shifts of the crust of the earth have taken place repeatedly and within a short time.”

The problem with the hypothesis is that it was still largely a hypothesis with not much in the way of juicy evidence. One of Hapgood’s biggest revelations was that he’d been working with Chinese coral expert Ting Ying Ma who believed that warm coralline seas used to flow right across the now icy wilderness of Antarctica. Ting Ying Ma felt that the coral data he had collected could only be explained by a sudden sliding of the solid earth shell over the liquid core, leading to a sudden and dramatic change in latitudinal positions.

But it wasn’t until a few years later when Hapgood was putting together his later works that he came across something which he considered to be a game-changer. He managed to get his hands on some very old and deeply intriguing maps – and one in particular seemed to do more to advance the polar shift theory than anything his polar shift predecessors had managed to find.

Earlier Roots of the Theory

You see, Charles Hapgood wasn’t the first person in history to come up with the idea of a cataclysmic pole shift. And before we start inspecting his maps for more clues, we should rewind the clock to dig up the earliest roots of the theory that got us this far.

Way back in the late 18th century, French naturalist Georges Cuvier – often known as “The founding father of palaeontology” – was the first to put forward the argument that “Life has been often disturbed on this earth by terrible events – calamities which, at their commencement, have perhaps moved and overturned to a great depth the entire outer crust of the globe.” This was later expanded upon by Danish writer Frederik Klee in 1847 who proposed the theory of a displacement of the Earth’s spin axis as an explanation for how warm-weather animals may have lived in the Arctic back in the sun-drenched good old days when it wasn’t anywhere near The North Pole. And this idea was expanded upon again in 1866 by Sir John Evans – the President of Britain’s Geological Society – who published a paper with the super-snappy title “On a Possible Cause of Changes in the Position of the Axis of the Earth’s Crust.”

An interesting point here is that, as far as I can make out, Charles Hapgood doesn’t appear to have been aware of any of these earlier ponderments, as he makes no reference to them in his books – in fact, he proposes that the theory didn’t begin to emerge until the early 20th century. Perhaps Hapgood was less interested in the random ramblings of acclaimed naturalists and geologists, and far more interested in the incredible supernatural predictions of superstar celebrity psychic Edgar Cayce.

Edgar Cayce and the Sleeping Prophet

Born in Kentucky at the back end of the 19th century, Edgar Cayce was a quite peculiar fellow who maybe deserves a closer examination of his own. From a very young age, the academically-struggling schoolboy claimed to have seen the ghost of his dead grandfather, and later had an encounter with an angelic woman with wings who bestowed him with special powers that would enable him to help others, particularly sick children.

This came in quite handy for Edgar himself when he was struck by a ball during a game in the schoolyard which left him reeling in shock from a serious spinal injury. That same night, as his worried parents watched over him in bed, a seemingly asleep young Edgar suddenly began rattling through the ingredients for a remedy which would quickly cure him. After taking this remedy promptly prepared for him by his parents, Edgar was miraculously healed but had no memory of talking in his sleep. Or so the story goes.

In his adult life, Edgar Cayce would sit with patients suffering from mystery illnesses and enter a trance-like state during which he would diagnose their conditions and recommend the perfect cures. The New York Times reported on his story in 1910 under the captivating headline “Illiterate Man Becomes Doctor When Hypnotized.” He also put himself in a trance to deliver psychic readings to thousands of customers, reportedly including such high-profile names as Thomas Edison, Harry Houdini, and Marilyn Monroe.

And whilst he was in these trances, the man who became known as ‘The Sleeping Prophet’ was also known to deliver a whole bunch of quite fascinating predictions for the future. For example, he predicted that two US presidents would die in office in the near future. They turned out to be Franklin D. Roosevelt and JFK.

In early 1929, he spoke of an imminent “great disturbance in financial circles” which appears to be a prediction of the stock market crash that happened just a few months later. He talked of key details found in the Dead Sea Scrolls which wouldn’t be discovered for another couple of decades, and in 1935 he predicted an imminent alliance between Germany, Japan, and Austria which would set “the whole world on fire.”

But the reason that we’re talking about Edgar Cayce right now is because he also made a quite startling prediction about a “shifting of the poles” in the not-too-distant future which is really going to shake up the globe quite a bit. Edgar reckoned that “There will be upheavals in the Arctic and Antarctic that will cause the eruption of volcanoes in the torrid areas and pole shift. The Earth will be broken up in many places. The early portion will see a change in the physical aspect of the west coast of America.

The greater portion of Japan must go into the sea. The upper portion of Europe will be changed as in a twinkling of an eye. Land will appear off the east coast of America. There will be upheavals in the Antarctic that will make for the eruption of volcanoes in the torrid areas.”

Sounds a bit worrying. But when is all this scheduled to take place? Oh hang on a bit. According to Edgar, it was supposed to happen between 2000 and 2001. And it turns out that not all of his predictions were bang on the money. For every accurate prediction of World War 2 or the Wall Street Crash of 1929, there were slightly less accurate predictions regarding the total destruction of New York in the 20th century, the second coming of Christ in 1998, and the discovery of Atlantis in the 1960s.

Hugh Auchincloss Brown and Immanuel Velikovsky

In truth, Charles Hapgood appears to have been much more directly influenced by the hypothesis of cataclysmic pole shifts first put together in 1948 by American electrical engineer Hugh Auchincloss Brown. This was the first to suggest that a massive accumulation of ice at one of the poles could be enough to send the Earth into a bit of a dizzy wobble and create an axial polar shift. After studying the layers of rock formations, Brown believed that different layers had been formed in different latitudes – and that the rocks had been shifting in and out of polar zones over the course of relatively frequent polar shifts – an event which he believed happened every four to seven thousand years. Hugh suggested that the most effective way to avoid the fallout from any future cataclysms was to break up the polar ice caps by blasting at them with nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, the Russian-American writer and catastrophist Immanuel Velikovsky was coming at the matter from a very different angle in his controversial and some might say completely bonkers 1950 book Worlds in Collision. Collecting ancient manuscripts and artefacts as part of his not entirely persuasive evidence, Velikovsky proposed that the planet Venus emerged from Jupiter as a comet at some point in the 15th century BC before settling down into a stable orbit and becoming recognised as a planet. But during its early life as a comet, Venus passed incredibly close to the Earth, a near-miss which caused an immediate and dramatic pole shift – a pole shift which then reversed itself when the comet Venus made another close call around 50 years later before getting comfy in its new planetary orbit.

The Earth was destined to experience a couple of other near-misses with the planet Mars later on in 776 and 687 BC, which again caused a giant polar wobble and subsequent reversal. Velikovsky reckons that these sudden unexpected polar shifts were responsible for earthquakes and tsunamis and even the biblical parting of the Red Sea, although I’m not sure Moses would have agreed with this hypothesis.

Velikovsky’s book turned out to be a huge hit, topping The New York Times bestseller list for eleven consecutive weeks, despite the fact that most experts at the time dismissed him as a raving loony. But he did get some degree of support from one pretty respectable name. And would you believe it, it was only our old friend Albert Einstein again. A few years before Einstein became so fascinated by Charles Hapgood’s later hypothesis, he appeared to agree with the effect if not the cause of Velikovsky’s pole shift theories. In his appraisal of Velikovsky’s work, he cautiously ventured: “There is much of interest in the book which proves that in fact catastrophes have taken place which must be attributed to extraterrestrial causes. However, it is evident to every sensible physicist that these catastrophes can have nothing to do with the planet Venus. I can say in short: catastrophes yes, Venus no.”

Atlantis and the Ancient Maps

But so many other proponents of the theory are more attracted to the idea of linking cataclysmic polar shifts to the downfall of the lost continent of Atlantis rather than a parting of the Red Sea. It sometimes feels a bit like attempting to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that extraterrestrial visitors have been influencing the path of mankind for centuries by citing the mysterious extinction of dragons as evidence.

One of the earliest scholars to propose a connection between polar shifts and the fate of Atlantis was French writer, historian, and archaeologist Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg way back in 1872. Over the course of his lifetime, he was famous for uncovering a whole stack of ancient manuscripts and documents, largely relating to the Maya and Aztec civilizations. Although the text and meaning of many of these documents were difficult to grasp at the best of times, his interpretation is that many of them were detailing the story of an ancient and highly advanced civilisation which was lost without trace following four global cataclysms which began around 10,500 BC.

Whilst some may dismiss the texts as an mere amalgamation of malingering melodramatic and meaningless Mexican myths, Charles argued in his 1872 article ‘Chronologie historique des Mexicains’ that the documents were talking about the rise and fall of Atlantis – a lost continent which he believed was destroyed by four ancient shifts of the geographical poles.

Of course, much of this can be put down to personal interpretation, and not everyone was convinced that he was talking the right language. But nearly a century later, another Charles picked up the old threads of this theory and uncovered a few more pieces of evidence which might just point everyone in the right direction. We’re talking of course about Charles Hapgood and his treasured collection of incredibly old maps, which included a portion of a map of the world put together by Piri Reis in the year 1513.

The Piri Reis Map

Piri Reis was a Turkish navigator, geographer and cartographer who is most famous for compiling The Book of Navigation in 1521 – a book which would help guide voyages across the Mediterranean sea for hundreds of years. But a little earlier in 1513, Piri Reis had also drawn up a naval map which was widely regarded at the time as the most detailed map of the world ever made. According to the text on the map written by Piri Reis himself, it was created by piecing together references from twenty older maps and charts from all over the world, including eight maps from 2nd century Greece, and one fairly fresh map from Christopher Columbus who had only recently completed his voyages of discovery to The New World.

And Piri Reis certainly wasn’t modest about his own achievements. According to his own inscription on his work: “No one now living has seen a map like this.” It seems a bit of a shame then that this huge historical accomplishment was soon lost and forgotten about for hundreds of years. Well, two-thirds of the map have been lost forever.

But it turns out the other third had been gathering dust for years amongst a bundle of unremarkable material stashed away in the library of the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul – and it was only uncovered by chance in 1929.

Charles Hapgood later grabbed his own copy of this fragment of the map, and after several years of intense consideration, he reached the conclusion that this map from 1513 showed the exact location of a lost civilization in the Antarctic.

Hapgood felt that the map evidenced a deep understanding of spherical trigonometry which was not fully grasped in the West until the 18th century, and was most likely not even grasped by Piri Reis himself at the time. So it was perhaps originally at work in the older source maps that Piri Reis was using as reference – and perhaps some of these maps were put together by a highly advanced civilisation who really knew their stuff.

But the question remains over how such a civilization could have just been wiped off the map. Hapgood believed that the 1513 map displayed a big lump of southern landmass which was about the same shape and size as Antarctica – a continent which wasn’t officially discovered until the 19th century. It wasn’t exactly in the right place, and was much further away from the South Pole than you would usually expect – so there wasn’t quite so much of the mild nip in the air that you might experience during a holiday there today. In fact, it looked like quite a cosy place to live.

But Hapgood was of the opinion that this earlier sunnier model of Antarctica could originally have been home to the higher-brain race of Atlanteans. And although it’s often suggested that Atlantis sank to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, Hapgood’s theory is that the population may have instead suffered a similar fate to those flash-frozen flavour-sealed woolly mammoths that we mentioned earlier: A cataclysmic pole shift moved the continent formerly known as Atlantis closer to the South Pole and swiftly buried the city beneath the ice where it remains undiscovered to this day in the continent that we now recognise as Antarctica. It’s a chilling thought.

Magnetic Flips and True Wanders

Charles Hapgood may have had some unusual ideas, but he was no scaremonger. He was never trying to imply that we’re all due to face another cataclysmic pole shift in the very near future and that we need to be stocking up on emergency woolly hats and mittens. However, you can’t say the same for American former TV host turned podcaster and conspiracy theorist Joe Rogan. On a recent edition of his Joe Rogan Experience podcast broadcast in January 2023, Joe was chatting to YouTuber Jimmy Corsetti about the possibility of a different kind of polar shift taking place very soon – a shift of the magnetic poles.

Corsetti was explaining the theory that the magnetic poles effectively flip right over every 6,500 years before the Earth corrects itself seven days later. During this period of confusion, everything turns to shit for about a week – and the big concern is that we’re already long overdue for the next magnetic flip. Rogan asks his guest: “How much of that is agreed upon, that there could be a time where the magnetic poles actually shift?” Corsetti’s answer is simple: “This is science.”

But is it really science? And just how scared do we need to be?

Chan Thomas and The Adam and Eve Theory

One of the first people to popularise the theory of imminent magnetic pole shift was American writer and former electrical engineer Chan Thomas in his controversial 1963 book The Adam and Eve Theory – The History of Cataclysms. It’s widely reported in modern times that this book was viewed by the CIA as being too hot to handle, and that most of it was banned for fifty years until it was eventually declassified in 2013. I’m not entirely convinced that this is true. It’s a little confusing but it seems that the CIA did classify other documents which contained pages from Chan Thomas’s work as reference material, but it doesn’t look as if the book itself was specifically classified at any point. In fact, it looks more like nobody bothered to properly publish it until 2013, after which it developed something of a cult following, largely fuelled by intrigue over what the CIA was supposed to have banned.

But it’s difficult to find anything in the book which the CIA would have seemed unfit for public consumption. Chan Thomas argued that the magnetic poles shift every few thousand years, resulting in catastrophic events which come close to wiping out all life on Earth. He believed that the first magnetic shift occurred during the time of Adam and Eve – hence the name of his book and theory – whilst the second was responsible for causing the great flood that kept Noah and his animal chums so busy in around 2350 BC. He also believed that the third magnetic pole shift may well be on the way very soon.

Before we get too carried away, we should also point out that Chan Thomas claimed to be a psychic, and he also reveals in the book that Jesus Christ was abducted by aliens. So he’s clearly talking bollocks, right? Well, yes, but he may not have been as far from the truth as you might think.

The Reality of Magnetic Pole Reversals

As we mentioned before, the magnetic poles are a very different proposition to the geographical poles. The Earth’s magnetic field is generated deep in the bowels of the planet by the convection of liquid iron within the core, helped along its way by planetary rotation. You can imagine the top half of the field poking out at the magnetic North Pole whilst the bottom half pokes out at the magnetic South Pole. And this magnetic field is pretty important to life on Earth as it protects us from nasty solar winds and cosmic rays and lethal doses of UV radiation whilst also helping all life on Earth – not just humans – navigate their way around the planet.

But the magnetic field is in a constant state of flux – so is it out of the question that over a long period of time, the polarity could be completely reversed so that the magnetic north and south places effectively swap places? It turns out the answer is yes. It has happened before and it will happen again.

Researchers have been able to reconstruct the history of the Earth’s magnetic field over the last 160 million years by sampling rocks and fossils from the ocean floor and using radiometric dating techniques to uncover the historical evidence buried within. And it’s now widely accepted that when the magnetic field weakens before surging in strength in the opposite direction, this eventually creates a magnetic pole reversal which has actually happened hundreds of times over the last 160 million years.

But whereas Chan Thomas and others had reckoned that these magnetic pole reversals occur every few thousand years, a complete flip of the locations only takes place roughly every 200,000 or 300,000 years. We’ve experienced a titchier breed of reversals – or ‘excursions’ – in relatively recent times, during which there is a field reversal in the liquid outer core but not the solid inner core. The last one was known as The Laschamps Excursion and occurred around 42,000 years ago. The whole lazy excursion lasted for around a thousand years, and there is no evidence that it caused any significant upheaval to the planet.

But here’s something that might sound like a good reason to panic; Although a full-on pole reversal occurs roughly every 200,000 or 300,000 years, the last one was a whopping 780,000 years ago. So this does mean that we’re long overdue for the next one? And what will happen when it comes?

Well, the first thing to bear in mind whilst some alarmists reckon that the whole process causes a rapid catastrophe over the course of a week, it actually takes up to five thousand years to complete. And even if a magnetic pole reversal got underway tomorrow, you’d never know a thing about it in your lifetime. Neither would your children or grandchildren. The whole process would gradually unfold over many, many generations, and there’s no reason to believe that it would involve hugely dramatic consequences.

I mean, it would prove to be a pain in the arse for humans trying to make sense of their old compass, although I suspect that at least one shrewd company out there will pounce on the gap in the market for backwards compasses. It may have more troubling consequences for migrating animals who use their internal compasses to reach their destination and are more likely to end up roaming around in the exact opposite direction that they intended. But we’re certainly not talking about earthquakes or giant Noah-style floods or the rapid acceleration of climate change. There’s no evidence at all of any historical link between a magnetic pole flip and climate change.

According to NASA – who usually know what they’re talking about – the evidence collected from geological and fossil records is that there would be no dramatic changes in store for the Earth, except perhaps a little turbulence with the electrical grids.

As for when the next one is due…it might seem that we’re long overdue for another Geomagnetic Reversal, but the truth of the matter is that nobody really knows why there’s been such a long gap since the last one, and nobody has a clue when the next one is likely to strike. It might be another thousand years. It might be another 200,000 years. It might be another 780,000 years. But either way, despite what you may have heard on The Joe Rogan Experience, there’s no need for us to start getting especially worried if one got underway tomorrow as we’re unlikely to see the full effect for another few thousand years.

True Polar Wander

So if magnetic poles are very much capable of shifting about, maybe the geographical poles also fancy a change of scenery from time to time. As recently as 2018, geologists came to the now widely-accepted conclusion that the geographical poles have indeed moved about in a phenomenon known as ‘True Polar Wander’, and that the poles really were in different places millions of years ago.

It’s not quite the same as what Charles Hapgood and his pals were suggesting, as we’re talking about the rotation of the Earth with respect to a fixed spin axis which causes the actual spin axis to lie over a new physical location. Still with me? Good. It really just boils down to a planetary balancing act caused by an uneven distribution of weight in the Earth’s mantle which lies between the core and the thin outer crust.

If the Earth finds itself battling with uneven weight, it will tilt and rotate in a bid to push the extra weight somewhere nearer the equator.

So, if for example, an absolutely mind-bogglingly massive volcano begins to form away from the equator, the force from the rotation of the Earth will try to pull the volcano closer towards the equator to try and reorientate the whole planet. Whilst the poles will still be pointing in the same direction, they will have physically moved to a new location on the surface.

Researchers have analysed the evidence left behind on the ocean bed by movements of the Earth’s tectonic plates, and reached the conclusion that the planet has witnessed the effect of True Polar Wanders in the past. The location of the poles may have shifted by as much as fifty degrees. But you have to go back a long way and you have to be very patient to observe a True Polar Wander in motion. It’s now believed that the rate of true polar wander is less than one degree every million years, and that you may have to go back several million years to notice any significant difference to the landscape.

So it’s not so much a cataclysmic pole shift – it’s more of a very leisurely meandering stroll with little relation to what Hapgood was proposing about a rapid change in location with respect to the underlying surface rather than to the axis. And again, it’s not really something to keep us awake at night as it’s hardly going to impact our immediate or even far distant future.

A Cataclysmic Failure

It would seem that even Charles Hapgood and Albert Einstein were destined to have a few changes of heart about the original hypothesis expressed in the 1958 book The Earth’s Shifting Crust – specifically to do with the cause of such a rapid geographical shift. You may remember that Hapgood ventured that the shift was caused by the heavy build-up of ice at one of the poles which would cause imbalance and prompt the panicked planet’s crust to try and destabilise the rotation by shoving the polar regions towards the equator. This was an idea that Hapgood appeared to have borrowed from an earlier hypothesis put forward by Hugh Auchincloss Brown in 1948.

But Einstein had second thoughts about this after the publication of the book, feeling that the accumulation of ice would not be remotely powerful enough to have any effect on the crust. In his own words: “Without a doubt the earth’s crust is strong enough not to give way proportionately as the ice is deposited.”

When Hapgood got around to putting together a revised version of his work The Path of The Pole in 1970, he took Einstein’s point and conceded that “My own further research confirmed the truth of his observation, which involved technicalities of geophysics.”

Okay, so what other answer did Hapgood and Einstein boil up between them as an alternative explanation for the cause? Hmm. Well, they didn’t really have one. Hapgood just reached the vague conclusion that it must be something to do with a mysterious unidentified causative force beneath the surface of the Earth.

That might seem a bit outlandish, but it seems on about the same footing as trying to bring the lost city of Atlantis into the conversation as evidence for the devastation that these pole shifts have wreaked in the past. We’re talking about a fictional island which Plato completely made up in 360 BC to make a point about the dangers of hostile imperialism. We might as well be searching for Narnia.

And yet so much of the evidence that Hapgood puts forward is related to those maps which apparently depict a lost continent. He actually claims to have hundreds of maps in his collection which all point to the same conclusion, although the majority of them have never been offered up for public viewing. The main map that gets spread out onto the table as proof is the portion of the Piri Reis map from 1513 – a map which also just happens to contain images of sea monsters, men with dog faces, and a headless man having a chat with a monkey.

But we have to question the credibility of a map which seems to include a mixture of real places and mythical locations which we know for sure have never existed, whilst strangely excluding locations that were known at the time. There is some debate over whether Piri Reis had quite as much ancient source material as he claimed, and just how accurate that source material would have been in the first place.

Long before Antarctica was first spotted in 1820, it was speculated as far back as ancient times that there must be some undiscovered continent lying on the south of the Earth but nobody really had a clue about it – so some of the earliest world maps just planted a misshapen blob on there which was given labels such ‘The Southern Land Not Yet Known.’ Hapgood may have been under the impression that the blob on the 1513 map must have been home to a lost civilisation living in a warmer Antarctica, but it has been disputed that Hapgood’s Blob really resembles Antarctica at all in size and shape. It could be just one of many phantom blobs slapped onto an unreliable world map created by people who didn’t know what the whole world looked like yet. Even Hapgood himself admits that much of the map is completely wrong or mislabelled, yet for some reason he seems to have convinced himself that Piri Reis was clearly firing on all cylinders when it came to depicting a fictional city in a misplaced continent.

The Truth About Flash-Frozen Mammoths

But let’s sail away from fictional islands and turn our attention to more factual matters. Like those flash-frozen woolly mammoths, for example. I’m pretty sure that woolly mammoths once roamed the Earth, unlike the high-brain Atlanteans. So there must have been something fishy going on with the flash-frozen variety which were discovered with fresh buttercups in their mouths.

Well, it seems that there’s quite a significant difference between the original press reports from the turn of the 20th century and the more contemporary accounts retold by Polar Truthers. There was no great flurry of discovery of flash-frozen woolly mammoths. German entomologist Alfred Otto Herz did indeed find a woolly mammoth carcass by the Berezovka River in Siberia, and it’s true that he found small superficial parts of the cadaver had been quite well-preserved in the ice – so much so, that he later considered making a snack out of it. But the internal organs of all the carcasses uncovered during this period were found to have rotted away long before the ice set in.

Alfred Otto Herz apparently found traces of food between the animal’s teeth which is not entirely surprising as tooth picks had not yet been invented, but over the years this somehow evolved into a story in which he plucked out fresh buttercups in the beast’s mouth. He didn’t even believe that this particular woolly mammoth had been frozen to death at all. He thought it more likely that it had clumsily wandered off the top of a cliff and plummeted to its grisly demise – an important point which gets forgotten in modern variations of the tale.

And as for his plans for a woolly mammoth banquet…it’s reported that he did half-jokingly suggest making a meal out of the better-preserved parts of the cadaver, but quickly went off the idea when he was hit by the smell of decomposed flesh during the kitchen preparation. He did apparently serve a tiny portion of it to some of the dogs on the expedition, and they survived the experience. Although they weren’t able to provide a detailed critique, I suspect it just tasted a bit like beef jerky.

But it appears that the more rational and sensible press reports from the turn of the 20th century were gradually embellished over the years, reaching a point where everyone seemed convinced that hundreds of flash-frozen woolly mammoths had been found with blooming flowers in their mouths and slightly startled expressions on their faces. Whilst we still don’t know what exactly caused the mass extinction of the woolly mammoth, we can rest assured that they weren’t all just instantly frozen by a cataclysmic pole shift.

The Scientific Verdict

So this doesn’t really leave us with much else to go on. As we mentioned before, Charles Hapgood was no geologist, and his work seems more rooted in excitable speculation than any real crusty evidence. He openly concedes in his later book that he has no idea what would cause an Earth Crustal Displacement other than a mysterious unidentified causative force beneath the surface of the Earth – but the force required for such a rapid shift would need to be driven by such impossible power that it would most likely just rip the whole planet apart instead of shuffling things around a bit.

He also doesn’t seem able to make up his mind about the specifics of what exactly he’s proposing. On one page of his original book, he might talk about the astonishing rapid effects of a sudden quick cataclysm, but a few pages later he’s suggesting that the displacement happens over centuries or even millennia.

Big-brains today feel that any cataclysmic pole shifts from history would have left compelling geological evidence in their wake – something a bit more persuasive than a pirate treasure map pointing out where there be dragons. Meanwhile, the later wide acceptance of plate tectonics has led to further genuinely useful and credible discoveries relating to how continents evolve and really do move around a bit during a True Polar Wander which is quite different from what Hapgood was hypothesising.

It could be argued that it’s not possible to conclusively disprove the Earth Crust Displacement Theory, but that’s not really the point. It’s also not possible to conclusively disprove my own theory on a giant grumpy hippopotamus asleep within the bowels of the planet, but I’m not expecting a Nobel Prize in the post any day soon. In short, Hapgood’s work was largely met with scorn within the scientific community when first published, and is now widely disregarded as an outdated idea based on incomplete data and misunderstanding.

Yet it’s a theory which shows no signs of freezing over in disinterest. If anything, we seem to be bringing up the perceived dangers and devastation of imminent polar shifts more than at any other point in the last 800 million years. And there might just be a hidden agenda at work.

Turning Up the Heat

Back when Hapgood was waffling on about geographical pole shifts and Chan Thomas was waffling on about magnetic pole shifts, it’s fair to say that the effects of climate change was not really at the forefront of many people’s minds. Of course it’s a very different story today, but there are still those who insist that climate change is just a clever hoax perpetuated by tree-huggers, China, scientists trying to keep themselves in jobs, the Illuminati, and David Attenborough who always seems to be moaning about something.

The issue here is that some conspiracy theorists appear to have latched onto the idea that even if climate change is real – a bit far-fetched, I know – then it’s got nothing to do with fossil fuel emissions generated by the human race. It’s all Mother Earth’s fault and it’s all perfectly natural. Climate change is all down to random planetary forces moving the continents around and there’s nothing we can do about it. So instead of piling all the blame and responsibility onto ourselves, we should just shrug and accept it whilst going back to sucking from plastic straws, travelling in private jets, spraying pesticide in each other’s faces, and burning tyres in our backyards, without feeling the slightest hint of guilt.

And this kind of disinformation can be alarming when you see that a whole bunch of new TikTok videos released in 2023 – which talk of impending doom from the effects of an overdue polar shift which is going to either boil or freeze your hometown tomorrow – are quickly racking up over 20 million views each. The conspiracy theorists have seized the fairly innocent ponderings of misinformed writers and are now using them as ammunition to convince you that reusable shopping bags are largely just a waste of everyone’s time.

Conclusion

If you’re still a little worried about getting instantly frozen to death tomorrow afternoon, let’s just recap the main points: Magnetic pole reversals are very real, and it’s been an unusually long time since we last experienced one. But it’s impossible to predict when the next one will take place, and even if one swung into action tomorrow, you wouldn’t notice the relatively minor effects for a good few thousand years.

True Polar Wanders are also very real and have a more significant impact on the Earth over an incredibly long period of time, but bearing in mind that the rate of wander is less than one degree every million years, there’s no need to think about moving house just yet.

As for Cataclysmic Geographical Pole Shifts, this is just a hypothesis from a less-enlightened period which is now largely dismissed by experts as nothing more than pseudoscience backed up by zero evidence.

So, the next time you’re sipping at exotic cocktails whilst enjoying a sun-baked holiday with Barry Onions, don’t fret too much about the possibility of getting suddenly shifted closer to the polar regions and instantly frozen like a fishfinger. Save all that mental energy for worrying about getting struck by a random asteroid, a high energy solar flare, a local gamma ray burst, or getting vaporised in a nuclear war. And don’t forget to send us a postcard. Sooner rather than later.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Cataclysmic Pole Shift Hypothesis?

The Cataclysmic Pole Shift Hypothesis suggests that the Earth’s geographical poles have rapidly shifted multiple times in the past, leading to catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. This hypothesis proposes that the entire surface of the Earth can move as a single piece over the liquid core, causing sudden climate changes and geological upheavals.

Who is Charles Hapgood and what is his contribution to the Pole Shift Hypothesis?

Charles Hapgood is an American professor and author who is known for his work on the Cataclysmic Pole Shift Hypothesis. He proposed that the Earth’s crust has shifted three times over the last 80,000 years, each shift no bigger than 40 degrees. His book ‘The Earth’s Shifting Crust’ was published in 1958 and was met with derision by scientists, although Albert Einstein thought he might be onto something.

What are the differences between geographical poles and magnetic poles?

Geographical poles are fixed positions where the planet’s axis of rotation intersects the surface, while magnetic poles are the points on the surface where Earth’s magnetic field lines converge. The magnetic poles are not fixed and can swap positions in a process known as a ‘Geomagnetic Reversal’ or ‘Magnetic Flip’.

What evidence does Charles Hapgood use to support his hypothesis?

Hapgood uses old maps, such as the Piri Reis map from 1513, which he believes shows the location of a lost civilization in the Antarctic. He also cites the discovery of flash-frozen woolly mammoths and the work of Chinese coral expert Ting Ying Ma, who believed that warm coralline seas used to flow across Antarctica.

What is the significance of the Piri Reis map in the Pole Shift Hypothesis?

The Piri Reis map from 1513 is significant because it shows a landmass that Hapgood believes is Antarctica, but in a different position. He argues that this map, along with others, provides evidence of a lost civilization that was affected by a cataclysmic pole shift.

What is the difference between True Polar Wander and the Cataclysmic Pole Shift Hypothesis?

True Polar Wander is a phenomenon where the geographical poles move to new locations on the surface due to an uneven distribution of weight in the Earth’s mantle. This process is very slow, occurring at less than one degree every million years. In contrast, the Cataclysmic Pole Shift Hypothesis proposes rapid shifts of the geographical poles, leading to sudden and catastrophic changes.

What is the relationship between the Pole Shift Hypothesis and climate change?

Some conspiracy theorists use the Pole Shift Hypothesis to argue that climate change is a natural phenomenon caused by planetary forces, rather than human activities. They suggest that the Earth’s movements are responsible for climate changes, downplaying the role of fossil fuel emissions.

What is the current scientific consensus on the Cataclysmic Pole Shift Hypothesis?

The Cataclysmic Pole Shift Hypothesis is largely dismissed by the scientific community as pseudoscience. It is based on incomplete data and misunderstandings, and there is no compelling geological evidence to support it. The later acceptance of plate tectonics has also led to more credible explanations for the movement of continents.

What are some of the historical theories related to pole shifts?

Historical theories related to pole shifts include those proposed by Georges Cuvier, Frederik Klee, and Sir John Evans in the 19th century. These theories suggested that catastrophic events, including pole shifts, have affected the Earth’s surface and climate. Edgar Cayce, a psychic, also predicted a future pole shift.

What is the significance of the discovery of flash-frozen woolly mammoths?

The discovery of flash-frozen woolly mammoths with undigested food in their stomachs has been used as evidence for sudden climate changes caused by pole shifts. However, more contemporary accounts suggest that the internal organs of these mammoths had rotted away before freezing, and the stories of fresh buttercups in their mouths are embellishments.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Cataclysmic Pole Shift Hypothesis
• Hero image source by thegetty / openverse, cc0.