Chapter 51 - The Hammer and the Pendulum


Although beyond the scope of this book, a detailed exposition of the earth-crust displacement theory is to be found in Rand and Rose Flem-Ath’s When the Sky Fell (published by Stoddart, Canada, 1995).

As noted, this geological theory was formulated by Professor Charles Hapgood and supported by Albert Einstein. In brief, what it suggests is a complete slippage of our planet’s thirty-mile-thick lithosphere over its nearly 8000-mile-thick central core, forcing large parts of the western hemisphere southward towards the equator and thence towards the Antarctic Circle. This movement is not seen as taking place along a due north-south meridian but on a swivelling course—pivoting, as it were, around the central plains of what is now the United States.

 

The result is that the north-eastern segment of North America (in which the North Pole was formerly located in Hudson’s Bay) is dragged southwards out of the Arctic Circle and into more temperate latitudes while at the same time the north-western segment (Alaska and the Yukon) swivels northwards into the Arctic Circle along with large parts of northern Siberia.

In the southern hemisphere, Hapgood’s model shows the landmass that we now call Antarctica, much of which was previously at temperate or even warm latitudes, being shifted in its entirety inside the Antarctic Circle. The overall movement is seen as having been in the region of 30 degrees (approximately 2000 miles) and as having been concentrated, in the main, between the years 14,500 BC and 12,500 BC—but with massive aftershocks on a planetary scale continuing at widely-separated intervals down to about 9500 BC.

According to the earth-crust displacement theory, large parts of Antarctica were positioned outside the Antarctic circle prior to 15,000 BC and thus could have been inhabited, with a climate and resources suitable for the development of civilization. A cataclysmic slippage of the crust then shifted the continent to the position it occupies today—dead centre within the Antarctic circle.

Suppose that, before the displacement of the earth’s crust, a great civilization had grown up in Antarctica, when much of it was located at green and pleasant latitudes? If so, that civilization might easily have been destroyed by the effects of the displacement: the tidal waves, the hurricane-force winds and electric storms, the volcanic eruptions as seismic faults split open all around the planet, the darkened skies, and the remorselessly expanding ice-cap.

 

Moreover, as the millennia passed, the ruins left behind—the cities, the monuments, the great libraries, and the engineering works of the destroyed civilization—would have been ever more deeply buried beneath the mantle of ice.

Little wonder, if the earth-crust displacement theory is correct, that all that can be found today, scattered around the world, are the tantalizing fingerprints of the gods.

 

These would be the traces, the echoes of the works and deeds, the much misunderstood teachings and the geometrical edifices left behind by the few survivors of Antarctica’s former civilization who had made it across the turbulent oceans in great ships and settled themselves in faraway lands: in the Nile Valley, for example (or perhaps, first, around Lake Tana at the headwaters of the Blue Nile), and in the Valley of Mexico, and near Lake Titicaca in the Andes—and no doubt in several other places as well ...

Here and there around the globe, in other words, the fingerprints of a lost civilization remain faintly visible. The body is out of sight, buried under two miles of Antarctic ice and almost as inaccessible to archaeologists as if it were located on the dark side of the moon.

 

Fact?

Or fiction?

Possibility?

Or impossibility?

 

Is it a geophysical possibility or a geophysical impossibility that Antarctica, the world’s fifth-largest continent (with a surface area of almost six million square miles) could (a) previously have been located in a more temperate zone and (b) have been shifted out of that zone and into the Antarctic Circle within the last 20,000 years?

Is Antarctica movable?
 


A lifeless polar desert
‘Continental drift’ and/or ‘plate-tectonics’ are key terms used to describe an important geological theory that has become increasingly well understood by the general public since the 1950s. It is unnecessary to go into the basic mechanisms here. But most of us are aware that the continents in some way ‘float around’, relocate and change position on the earth’s surface.

 

Common sense confirms this: if you take a look at a map of the west coast of Africa and the east coast of South America it’s pretty obvious that these two landmasses were once joined. The time-scale according to which continental drift operates is, however, immense: continents can typically be expected to float apart (or together) at a rate of no more than 2000 miles every 200 million years or so: in other words, very, very slowly.1

 

1 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 3:584.

Plate-tectonics and Charles Hapgood’s earth-crust displacement theory are by no means mutually contradictory. Hapgood envisaged that both could occur: that the earth’s crust did indeed exhibit continental drift as the geologists claimed—almost imperceptibly, over hundreds of millions of years—but that it also occasionally experienced very rapid one-piece displacements which had no effect on the relationships between individual landmasses but which thrust entire continents (or parts of them) into and out of the planet’s two fixed polar zones (the perennially cold and icy regions surrounding the North and South Poles of the axis of spin).

Continental drift?

Earth-crust displacement?

Both?

Some other cause?

I honestly don’t know. Nevertheless, the simple facts about Antarctica are really strange and difficult to explain without invoking some notion of sudden, catastrophic and geologically recent change.

Before reviewing a few of these facts, let us remind ourselves that we are referring to a landmass today oriented by the curvature of the earth so that the sun never rises on it during the six winter months and never sets during the six summer months (but rather, as viewed from the Pole, remains low above the horizon, appearing to transcribe a circular path around the sky during each twenty-four hours of daylight).

Antarctica is also by far the world’s coldest continent, where temperatures on the polar plain can fall as low as minus 89.2 degrees centigrade. Although the coastal areas are slightly warmer (minus 60 degrees centigrade) and shelter huge numbers of seabird rookeries, there are no native land mammals and there is only a small community of cold-tolerant plants capable of surviving lengthy winter periods of total or near-total darkness.

 

The Encyclopaedia Britannica lists these plants laconically:

‘Lichens, mosses and liverworts, moulds, yeasts, other fungi, algae and bacteria ...’2

2 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 1:440.

In other words, although magnificent to behold in the long-drawn-out antipodean dawn, Antarctica is a freezing, unforgiving, almost lifeless polar desert, as it has been throughout mankind’s entire 5000-year ‘historical’ period.

Was it always so?
 


Exhibit 1
Discover The World Of Science Magazine, February 1993, page 17:

‘Some 260 million years ago, during the Permian period, deciduous trees adapted to a warm climate grew in Antarctica. This is the conclusion palaeobotanists are drawing from a stand of fossilized tree stumps discovered at an altitude of 7000 feet on Mount Achernar in the Transantarctic mountains. The site is at 84° 22’ south, some 500 miles north of the South Pole.

‘ “The interesting thing about this find is that it’s really the only forest, living or fossil, that’s been found at 80 or 85 degrees latitude,” says Ohio State University palaeobotanist Edith Taylor, who has studied the fossil trees.

 

“The first thing we palaeobotanists do is look for something in the modern records that is comparable, and there are no forests growing at that latitude today. We can go to the tropics and find trees growing in a warm environment, but we can’t find trees growing in a warm environment with the light regime these trees had: 24 hours of light in the summer and 24 hours of dark in the winter.” ’3

3 Discover The World Of Science, February 1993, p. 17.

The fifteen mineralized tree stumps, presumably the remnant of a much larger forest, range from three and a half to seven inches in diameter. They were saplings of a well-known genus of seed fern, Glossopteris [found in much of the southern hemisphere’s coal]. Unlike true ferns, seed ferns had seeds instead of spores, were often treelike, and are now extinct ... All around the Mount Achernar tree stumps, Taylor’s colleagues found the tongue-shaped imprints of fallen Glossopteris leaves.

Deciduous trees are an indicator of a warm climate, and so is the absence of ‘frost rings’. When Taylor analysed the growth rings in samples from the stumps she found none of the ice-swollen cells and gaps between cells that arise when the growth of a tree is disrupted by frost. That means there wasn’t any frost in the Antarctic at that time.

‘In our memory Antarctica has always been cold,’ says Taylor. ‘It’s only by looking at fossil floras that we can see what potential there is for plant communities. This fossil forest, growing at 85 degrees latitude, gives us some idea of what is possible with catastrophic climate change.’

N.B. The trees were killed by a flood or mudflow—another impossibility in Antarctica today.

4 The Path of the Pole, p. 61. 5 Ibid., pp. 62-3.

 


Exhibit 2
Geologists have found no evidence of any glaciation having been present anywhere on the Antarctic continent prior to the Eocene (about 60 million years ago.)4 And if we go as far back as the Cambrian (c. 550 million years ago) we find irrefutable evidence of a warm sea stretching nearly or right across Antarctica, in the form of thick limestones rich in reef-building Archaeocyathidae:

‘Millions of years later, when these marine formations had appeared above the sea, warm climates brought forth a luxuriant vegetation in Antarctica.

 

Thus Sir Ernest Shackleton found coal beds within 200 miles of the South Pole, and later, during the Byrd expedition of 1935, geologists made a rich discovery of fossils on the lofty sides of Mount Weaver, in latitude 86° 58’ S., about the same distance from the Pole and about two miles above sea level.

 

These included leaf and stem impressions and fossilized wood. In 1952 Dr Lyman H. Dougherty, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, completing a study of these fossils, identified two species of a tree fern called Glossopteris, once common to the other southern continents (Africa, South America, Australia) and a giant fern tree of another species ...’5
 

Exhibit 3
Admiral Byrd’s own comment on the significance of the Mount Weaver finds:

‘Here at the southernmost known mountain in the world, scarcely two hundred miles from the South Pole, was found conclusive evidence that the climate of Antarctica was once temperate or even sub-tropical.’6
 

Exhibit 4

‘Soviet scientists have reported finding evidence of tropical flora in Graham Land, another part of Antarctica, dating from the early Tertiary Period (perhaps the Paleocene or Eocene) ... Further evidence is provided by the discovery by British geologists of great fossil forests in Antarctica, of the same type that grew on the Pacific coast of the United States 20 million years ago. This of course shows that after the earliest known Antarctic glaciation in the Eocene [60 million years ago] the continent did not remain glacial but had later episodes of warm climate.’7
 

Exhibit 5

‘On 25 December 1990 geologists Barrie McKelvey and David Harwood were working 1830 metres above sea level and 400 kilometres [250 miles] from the South Pole in Antarctica. The geologists discovered fossils from a deciduous southern beach forest dating from between two and three million years ago’.8
 

Exhibit 6
In 1986 the discovery of fossilized wood and plants showed that parts of Antarctica may have been ice free as little as two and a half a million years ago. Further discoveries showed that some places on the continent were ice-free 100,000 years ago.9
 

6 In Dolph Earl Hooker, Those Astounding Ice Ages, Exposition Press, New York, 1958, page 44, citing National Geographic Magazine, October 1935.

7 Path of the Pole, p. 62.

8 Rand Flem-Ath, Does the Earth’s Crust Shift? (MS.).
9 Daniel Grotta, ‘Antarctica: Whose Continent Is It Anyway?’, Popular Science, January 1992, p. 64.
 


Exhibit 7
As we saw in Part I, sedimentary cores collected from the bottom of the Ross Sea by one of the Byrd Antarctic Expeditions provide conclusive evidence that ‘great rivers, carrying down fine well grained sediments’ did flow in this part of Antarctica until perhaps as late as 4000 BC. According to the report of Dr Jack Hough of the University of Illinois:

‘The log of core N-5 shows glacial marine sediment from the present to 6000 years ago. From 6000 to 15,000 years ago the sediment is fine-grained with the exception of one granule at about 12,000 years ago. This suggests an absence of ice from the area during that period, except perhaps for a stray iceberg 12,000 years ago.’10
 

Exhibit 8
The Orontaeus Finnaeus World Map reviewed in Part I accurately depicts the Ross Sea as it would look if it were free of ice and, in addition, shows Antarctica’s ranges of lofty coastal mountains with great rivers flowing from them where only mile-deep glaciers are to be found today.11

Charles Hapgood, The Path Of The Pole, 1970, page 111ff:

‘It is rare that geological investigations receive important confirmation from archaeology; yet in this case, it seems that the matter of the deglaciation of the Ross Sea can be confirmed by an old map that has somehow survived many thousands of years ... It was discovered and published in 1531 by the French geographer Oronce Fine [Oronteus Finnaeus] and is part of his Map of the World ...

It has been possible to establish the authenticity of this map. In several years of research the projection of this ancient map was worked out. It was found to have been drawn on a sophisticated map projection, with the use of spherical trigonometry, and to be so scientific that over 50 locations on the Antarctic continent have been found to be located on it with an accuracy that was not attained by modern cartographic science until the 19th century.

 

And, of course, when this map was first published, in 1531, nothing at all was known of Antarctica. The continent was not discovered in modern times until about 1818 and was not fully mapped until after 1920 ...’12

10 Path of the Pole, p. 107.

11 See Part I.
12 Path of the Pole, p. 111ff.

13 See Part I for details.

 

 

Exhibit 9
The Buache Map, also reviewed in Part I, accurately depicts the subglacial topography of Antarctica.13 Does it do so by chance or might the continent indeed have been entirely ice-free recently enough for the cartographers of a lost civilization to have mapped it?
 


Exhibit 10
The reverse side of the coin. If the lands presently inside the Antarctic Circle were once temperate or tropical, what about lands inside the Arctic Circle? Were they affected by the same dramatic climate changes, suggesting that some common factor might have been at work?

‘On the island of Spitzbergen (Svalbard), palm leaves ten and twelve feet long have been fossilized, along with fossilized marine crustaceans of a type that could only inhabit tropical waters. This suggests that at one time the temperatures of the Arctic Ocean were similar to the contemporary temperatures of the Bay of Bengal or the Caribbean Sea.

 

Spitzbergen is half way between the northern tip of Norway and the North Pole, at a latitude of 80 degrees N. Today, ships can reach Spitzbergen through the ice only about two or at the most three months during the year.’14

There is firm fossil evidence that stands of swamp cypress flourished within 500 miles of the North Pole in the Miocene [between 20 million and 6 million years ago], and that water-lillies flourished in Spitzbergen in the same period:

‘The Miocene floras of Grinnell Land and Greenland, and Spitzbergen, all required temperate climatic conditions with plentiful moisture.

The water lillies of Spitzbergen would have required flowing water for the greater part of the year. In connection with the flora of Spitzbergen it should be realized that the island is in polar darkness for half the year. It lies on the Arctic Circle, as far north of Labrador as Labrador is north of Bermuda.15


Some of the islands in the Arctic Ocean were never covered by ice during the last Ice Age. On Baffin Island, for example, 900 miles from the North Pole, alder and birch remains found in peat suggest a much warmer climate than today less than 30,000 years ago. These conditions prevailed until 17,000 years ago:

‘During the Wisconsin ice age there was a temperate-climate refuge in the middle of the Arctic Ocean for the flora and fauna that could not exist in Canada and the United States.’16

14 The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, pp. 109-10.

15 Path of the Pole, p. 66.

16 Ibid., pp. 93, 96.
 

Russian scientists have concluded that the Arctic Ocean was warm during most of the last Ice Age. A report by academicians Saks, Belov and Lapina covering many phases of their oceanographic work highlights the period from about 32,000 to about 18,000 years ago as being one during which particularly warm conditions prevailed.17

As we saw in Part IV, huge numbers of warm-blooded, temperate adapted mammal species were instantly frozen, and their bodies preserved in the permafrost, all across a vast zone of death stretching from the Yukon, through Alaska and deep into northern Siberia. The bulk of this destruction appears to have taken place during the eleventh millennium BC, although there was an earlier episode of large-scale extinctions around 13,500 BC.18


We also saw (Chapter Twenty-seven) that the last Ice Age came to an end between 15,000 and 8000 BC, but principally between 14500 and 12,500 BC, with a further outburst of extraordinarily intense activity in the eleventh millennium BC. During this geologically brief period of time, glaciation up to two miles deep covering millions of square miles which had taken more than 40,000 years to build-up suddenly and inexplicably melted:

‘It must be obvious that this could not have been the result of the gradually acting climatic factors usually called upon to explain ice ages ... The rapidity of the deglaciation suggests that some extraordinary factor was affecting climate ...’19

17 Ibid., p. 99.

18 See Part IV.

19 Ibid.

 


The icy executioner
Some extraordinary factor was affecting climate ...

Was it a 30° one-piece shift of the lithosphere that abruptly terminated the Ice Age in the northern hemisphere (by pushing the most heavily glaciated areas southwards from the northern pole of the spin axis)? If so, why shouldn’t the same 30° one-piece shift of the lithosphere have swivelled a largely deglaciated six-million-square-mile southern hemisphere continent from temperate latitudes to a position directly over the southern pole of the spin axis?

On the issue of the movability of Antarctica, we now know that it is movable and, more to the point, that it has moved, because trees have grown there and trees simply cannot grow at latitudes which suffer six months of continual darkness.

What we do not know (and may never know for certain) is whether this movement was a consequence of earth-crust displacement, or of continental drift, or of some other unguessed-at factor.

Let us consider Antarctica for a moment.

We have already seen that it is big. It has a land area of 5.5 million square miles, and is presently covered by something in excess of seven million cubic miles of ice weighing an estimated 19 quadrillion tons (19 followed by 15 zeros).20 What worries the theorists of earth-crust displacement is that this vast ice-cap is remorselessly increasing in size and weight: ‘at the rate of 293 cubic miles of ice each year—almost as much as if Lake Ontario were frozen solid annually and added to it.’21

The fear is that when it is coupled with the effects of precession, obliquity, orbital eccentricity, the earth’s own centrifugal motion, and the gravitational tug of the sun, moon and planets, Antarctica’s huge, ever-expanding burden of glaciation could provide the final trigger-factor for a massive displacement of the crust:

The growing South Pole ice-cap [wrote Hugh Auchincloss Brown, somewhat colourfully, in 1967] has become a stealthy, silent and relentless force of nature— a result of the energy created by its eccentric rotation. The ice-cap is the creeping peril, the deadly menace and the executioner of our civilization.22

Did this ‘executioner’ cause the end of the last Ice Age in the northern hemisphere by setting in motion a 7000-year shift of the crust between 15,000 BC and 8000 BC—a shift that was perhaps at its most rapid, and would have had its most devastating effects, between 14,500 BC and 10,000 BC?23

 

Or were the sudden and dramatic climate changes experienced in the northern hemisphere during this period the result of some other catastrophic agency simultaneously capable of melting millions of cubic miles of ice and of sparking off the worldwide increase in volcanism that accompanied the melt-down?24

Modern geologists are opposed to catastrophes, or rather to catastrophism, preferring to follow the ‘uniformitarian’ doctrine: ‘that existing processes, acting as at present, are sufficient to account for all geological changes’. Catastrophism, on the other hand, holds that,

‘changes in the earth’s crust have generally been effected suddenly by physical forces.’25

Is it possible, however, that the mechanism responsible for the traumatic earth changes which took place at the end of the last Ice Age could have been a geological event both catastrophic and uniform?


20 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 1:440; John White, Pole Shift, A.R.E. Press, Virginia Beach, 1994, p. 65.

21 Pole Shift, p. 77: Twenty billion tons of ice are added each year at Antarctica.

22 H. A. Brown, Cataclysms of the Earth, pp. 10-11.

23 See Part IV.

24 Ibid.

25 Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 228.


The great biologist Sir Thomas Huxley remarked in the nineteenth century: To my mind there appears to be no sort of theoretical antagonism between Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism; on the contrary, it is very conceivable that catastrophes may be part and parcel of uniformity. Let me illustrate my case by analogy. The working of a clock is a model of uniform action. Good timekeeping means uniformity of action. But the striking of a clock is essentially a catastrophe.

The hammer might be made to blow up a barrel of gunpowder, or turn on a deluge of water and, by proper arrangement, the clock, instead of marking the hours, might strike at all sorts of irregular intervals, never twice alike in the force or number of its blows. Nevertheless, all these irregular and apparently lawless catastrophes would be the result of an absolutely uniformitarian action, and we might have two schools of clock theorists, one studying the hammer and the other the pendulum.26

 

26 Thomas Huxley cited in Path of the Pole, p. 294.

Could continental drift be the pendulum? Could earth-crust displacement be the hammer?
 


Mars and earth
Crustal displacements are thought to have taken place on other planets. In the December 1985 issue of Scientific American, Peter H. Schultz drew attention to meteorite impact craters visible on the Martian surface. Craters in polar areas have a distinctive ‘signature’ because the meteorites land amid the thick deposits of dust and ice that accumulate there.

 

Outside the present polar circles of Mars, Schultz found two other such areas:

‘These zones are antipodal; they are on opposite faces of the planet. The deposits show many of the processes and characteristics of today’s poles, but they lie near the present-day equator ...’

What could have caused this effect?

 

Judging from the evidence, Shultz put forward the theory that the mechanism appeared to have been,

‘the movement of the entire lithosphere, the solid outer portion of the planet as one plate ... [This movement seems to have taken place] in rapid spurts followed by long pauses.’27

If crustal displacements can happen on Mars, why not on earth? And if they don’t happen on earth, how do we account for the otherwise awkward fact that not a single one of the ice-caps built up around the world during previous Ice Ages seems to have occurred at—or even near—either of the present poles.28 On the contrary, land areas bearing the marks of former glaciation are very widely distributed. If we cannot assume crustal shifts, we must find some other way to explain why the ice-caps appear to have reached sea level within the tropics on three continents: Asia, Africa and Australia.29

 

27 Scientific American, December 1985.

28 Path of the Pole, pp. 47-9.

29 Ibid., p. 49.

Charles Hapgood’s solution to this problem is simple, extremely elegant and does not affront commonsense: The only ice age that is adequately explained is the present ice age in Antarctica. This is excellently explained. It exists, quite obviously, because Antarctica is at the pole, and for no other reason. No variation of the sun’s heat, no galactic dust, no volcanism, no subcrustal currents, and no arrangements of land elevations or sea currents account for the fact.

 

We may conclude that the best theory to account for an ice age is that the area concerned was at the pole. We thus account for the Indian and African ice sheets, though the areas once occupied by them are now in the tropics. We account for all ice sheets of continental size in the same way.30
 

30 Ibid., p. 58.

The logic is close to inescapable. Either we accept that the Antarctic ice cap is the first continent-sized ice sheet ever to have been situated at a pole—which seems improbable—or we are obliged to suppose that earth-crust displacement, or a similar mechanism, must have been at work.
 


Memories of the polar dawn?
Our ancestors may have preserved in their most ancient traditions memories of a displacement. We saw some of these memories in Part IV: cataclysm myths that appear to be eyewitness accounts of the series of geological disasters which accompanied the end of the last Ice-Age in the northern hemisphere.31

 

There are other myths too, which may have come down to us from that epoch between 15,000 and 10,000 BC. Among these are several which speak of lands of the gods and of former paradises, all of which are described as being in the south (for example, the Ta-Neteru of the Egyptians) and many of which seem to have experienced polar conditions.

The great Indian epic, Mahabaratha, speaks of Mount Meru, the land of the gods:

At Meru the sun and moon go round from left to right every day, and so do all the stars ... The mountain by its lusture, so overcomes the darkness of night, that the night can hardly be distinguished from the day. ... The day and night are together equal to a year to the residents of the place ...32

Similarly, as the reader will recall from Chapter Twenty-five, Airyana Vaejo, the mythical paradise and former homeland of the Avestic Aryans of Iran, seems to have been rendered uninhabitable by the sudden onset of glaciation. In later years it was spoken of as a place in which:

‘the stars, the moon and the sun are only once a year seen to rise and set, and a year seems only as a day.’33

In the Surya Siddhanta, an ancient Indian text, we read, ‘The gods behold the sun, after it has once arisen, for half a year.’34

 

31 See Part IV.
32 The Mahabaratha, cited in The Arctic Home in the Vedas, pp. 64-5.

33 Ibid., pp. 66-7.
34 Cited in Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole, p. 199.

 

The seventh Mandala of the Rigveda contains a number of ‘Dawn’ hymns. One of these (VII, 76) says that the dawn has raised its banner on the horizon with its usual splendour and reports in Verse 3 that a period of several days elapsed between the first appearance of the dawn and the rising of the sun that followed it.35 Another passage states, ‘many were the days between the first beams of the dawn and actual sunrise’.36

 

Are these eyewitness accounts of polar conditions? Although we can never be sure, it may be relevant that in Indian tradition the Vedas are believed to be revealed texts, passed down from the time of the gods.37 It may also be relevant that in describing the processes of transmission, all the traditions refer to the pralayas (cataclysms) which occasionally overtake the world and claim that in each of these the written scriptures are physically destroyed.

 

After each destruction, however, certain Rishis or ‘wise men’ survive who re-promulgate, at the beginning of the new age, the knowledge inherited by them as a sacred trust from their forefathers in the preceding age ... Each manvantara or age thus has a Veda of its own which differs only in expression and not in sense from the antediluvian Veda.38


35 Arctic Home in the Vedas, p. 81.

36 Ibid., p. 85.
37 Ibid., pp. 414, 417.
38 Ibid., p. 420.

 


An epoch of turmoil and darkness
As every schoolboy geographer understands, true north (the North Pole) is not quite the same thing as magnetic north (the direction compass needles point). Indeed the magnetic north pole is presently situated in northern Canada, about 11 degrees from the true North Pole.39 Recent advances in the study of palaeomagnetism have proved that the earth’s magnetic polarity has reversed itself more than 170 times during the past 80 million years ...40

What causes these field reversals?

While he was teaching at the University of Cambridge the geologist S. K. Runcorn published an article in Scientific American which made a pertinent point:

There seems no doubt that the earth’s magnetic field is tied up in some way to the rotation of the planet. And this leads to a remarkable finding about the earth’s rotation itself ... [The unavoidable conclusion is that] the earth’s axis of rotation has changed also. In other words, the planet has rolled about, changing the location of the geographical poles.41

39 Pole Shift, p. 9.

40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., p. 61.

Runcorn appears to be envisaging a complete 180-degree flip of the poles, with the earth literally tumbling—although similar palaeomagnetic readings would result from a slippage of the crust over the geographical poles. Either way, the consequences for civilization, and indeed for all life, would be unimaginably dreadful.

Of course, Runcorn may be wrong; perhaps field reversals can occur in the absence of any other upheavals.

But he may also be right.

According to reports published in Nature and New Scientist, the last geomagnetic reversal was completed just 12,400 years ago—during the eleventh millennium BC.42

This is of course the very millennium in which the ancient Tiahuanacan civilization in the Andes seems to have been destroyed. The same millennium is signalled by the alignments and design of the great astronomical monuments on the Giza plateau, and by the erosion patterns on the Sphinx.

 

And it was in the eleventh millennium BC that Egypt’s ‘precocious agricultural experiment’ suddenly failed. Likewise it was in the eleventh millennium BC that huge numbers of large mammal species all around the world vanished into extinction. The list could continue: abrupt rises in sea level, hurricane-force winds, electrical storms, volcanic disturbances, and so on.

Scientists expect the next reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles to occur around AD 2030.43


Is this an intimation of planetary disaster? After 12,500 years of the pendulum, is the hammer about to strike?
 


Exhibit 11
Yves Rocard, Professor of the Faculty of Sciences at Paris:

‘Our modern seismographs are sensitive to the ‘noise’ of limited agitation at every point in the earth, even in the absence of any seismic wave. One may in this noise discern a man-made vibration (for example, a train four kilometers away, or a big city ten kilometers off) and also an atmospheric effect (from changing pressure of the wind on the soil) and sometimes one registers also the effects of great storms at a distance. Yet there remains a continued rolling noise of cracklings in the earth which owes nothing to any [such] cause ...’44

42 Nature, volume 234, 27 December 1971, pp. 173-4; New Scientist, 6 January 1972, p. 7.
43 J. M. Harwood and S. C. R. Malin writing in Nature, 12 February 1976.

44 The Path of the Pole, op. cit., Appendix, pp. 325-6.
 


Exhibit 12

‘The North Pole moved ten feet in the direction of Greenland along the meridian of 45 degrees west longitude during the period from 1900 to 1960 ... a rate of six centimeters (about two and a half inches) a year. [Between 1900 and 1968, however,] the pole moved about twenty feet. [The pole therefore] moved ten feet between 1960 and 1968, at a rate of about ten centimeters (four inches) a year ...

 

If both these observations were accurate when made, as we have every right to expect in view of the eminence of the scientists involved, then we have here evidence that the lithosphere may be in motion at the present time [and that it is experiencing] a geometrical acceleration of the rate of motion ...45
 

Exhibit 13
USA Today, Wednesday 23 November 1994, page 9D:

‘INTERACTIVE IN ANTARCTICA: Students Link With South Pole

Scientists

‘A live remote broadcast from the South Pole featuring Elizabeth Felton, a 17-year-old graduate of Chicago public schools, will take place Jan 10. Felton will use US Geological Survey data to reposition the copper marker designating the Earth’s geographic South Pole to compensate for the annual slippage of the ice sheet.’46

45 Ibid., p. 44.
46 USA Today, 23 November 1994, p. 9D.
 

Is it just the ice sheet that is slipping, or is the entire crust of the earth in motion? And was it just an ‘unusual interactive education project’ that took place on 10 January 1995, or was Elizabeth Felton unknowingly documenting the continued geometrical acceleration of the rate of motion of the crust?

Scientists do not think so. As we shall see in the final chapter, however, the coming century is signalled in a remarkable convergence of ancient prophecies and traditional beliefs as an epoch of unprecedented turmoil and darkness, in which iniquity will be worked in secret, and the Fifth Sun and the Fourth World will come to an end ...
 


Exhibit 14
Kobe, Japan, Tuesday 17 January 1995:

‘The suddenness with which the earthquake struck was almost cruel. One moment we were fast asleep, an instant later the floor—the entire building—had turned to jelly. But this is no gently undulating liquid motion. This is jarring, gut-wrenching shuddering of awesome proportions ...

‘You are in bed, the safest place in the world. Your bed is on the floor, what you used to think of as solid ground. And with no warning the world has turned into a sickening roller-coaster ride, and you want to get off.

‘Possibly the most frightening part is the sound. This is not the dull rumble of thunder. This is a deafening, roaring sound, coming from everywhere and nowhere, and it sounds like the end of the world.’ (Eyewitness report on the Kobe earthquake by Dennis Kessler, Guardian, London, 18 January 1995. The tremor lasted 20 seconds, registering 7.2 on the Richter scale, and killed more than 5000 people.)

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