There is no doubt that the Planet Earth's Polar Axis has shifted during its geological history. Evidence of such shifting can be found all over the world. Any academic difference of opinion resides in the question of exactly when these Polar Axis Shifts occurred. On the one hand, there are traditional scientists and geologists who date these shifts millions of years into the past, stating that there is absolutely no evidence that such shifts occurred within recent geologic times. But on the other hand, there is the Velikovskian School which dictates that at least one of these Polar Axis Shifts, perhaps even two or three of them, occurred within recorded historic times. This academic disagreement was partly reflected in what has become known as "The Velikovsky Affair", in which mainly Ivy League professors such as the late astronomer Carl Sagan of Cornell University and the controversial paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University disputed the science of the theories of the late Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky of Princeton University.

As a longtime Velikovskian, I belong to the Velikovskian School and agree that a Polar Axis Shift did indeed occur in historic times, namely in the 16th Century BCE, as Dr. Velikovsky theorized in Worlds In Collision; and to wit, exactly in the year 1587 BCE. The North Pole shifted from a position in the North Atlantic Ocean to its current Arctic location, and the South Pole shifted from off the southern coast of Australia to the current Antarctica.

Regardless of which side of the timeframe fence one sits on, there is a single point of agreement amongst everyone, a common perplexity : what were the precise causes of these past Polar Axis Shifts? Most scholars admit that they could not have occurred without the intervention of a powerful external body capable of "torqueing" the Earth from one axis to another; the Earth could not shift on its own, from internally. Speculation has ranged from a giant comet passing too close-by, or an asteroid hitting the Earth, or some unknown "cosmic body" passing in our vicinity, all on a purely unpredictable and random basis. To date, however, no one has devised a completely satisfactory explanation for this mysterious phenomenon. Apparently, no one knows the answer as yet.

Here -- and only here -- I am proposing that the "cosmic agent" causing these periodic Polar Axis Shifts is the nomadic Rogue Planet Nibiru, which was responsible for the last catastrophes in the 16th Century BCE. So far, no one else, including Zecharia Sitchin or even anyone within the Velikovskian School, has proposed such an alternative theory. And I also propose that these shifts are predictable both in time and location, because these shifts occur once every 3,600 years along Polar Belts determined by a Polar Pivotal Axis, which is a line drawn straight down through the top of the Great Pyramid of Egypt and coming out in the Mid-Pacific Ocean at 30 degrees south latitude and 150 degrees west longitude, exactly opposite the Pyramid which is at 30 degrees north latitude and 30 degrees east longitude.

The arrival sequence of the Planet Nibiru and its attempt to tether itself to the North Polar Belt by the use of an electromagnetic beam results in a pivoting torqueing effect, causing the Pyramid-Oceania Polar Pivotal Axis to tilt to New Polar Zones. HOWEVER, the Great Pyramid Complex itself would STILL be located 30 degrees above the NEW Equator and 60 degrees south of the NEW North Pole, as it is today. The same would be true for the opposite pivotal point in Oceania. ONLY these two locations would have the same latitudinal position as before, 30 degrees above the Equator and 60 degrees away from their respective Poles. Every other geographic location on Earth would change, some by not very much, others greatly by comparison.

And here the proposition is taken for granted, that there were no traditional "Ice Ages", that these so-called "Ice Ages" simply reflect the presence of Polar Ice in various other Polar Zones around the globe. The ice of the present-day North and South Poles did NOT expand southwards and northwards, causing these strange ice-sheets in otherwise unfrozen modern locations. Nevertheless, the locations of these ice-sheets would be most critical with respect to the construction of a pattern of shifting.

Primarily in Earth In Upheaval, Dr. Velikovsky's described many anomalies of geological evidence from around the world. A good example would be the existence of extinct tropical coral reefs underneath the present North Polar Ice, indicating that at one epoch in time our now-frozen Arctic Ocean had a tropical climate. Dr. Velikovsky gives us evidence of ice-sheets in India, South Africa, Northeastern Brazil, Ghana, North America, Europe, Mexico, Hawaii and Australia. If one plots these various locations on a world globe, one first sees how a group of them tend to ring the area of Egypt, at a distance of about 50-60 degrees in all directions. Furthermore, there is absolutely no evidence of an "Ice Age" in the modern Middle East itself. It is from that point of view that I began -- in 1973 -- to make my assumptions regarding the Great Pyramid of Egypt as having been deliberately built in that geographic location, amongst other reasons, "to mark the spot" of the Polar Pivotal Axis. That, of course, is a most radical supposition, and I am the first to admit it.

If one disassembles a world globe and inscribes upon it a circle with its center at Cairo and a radius from there to the current North Pole, that circle would become the North Polar Belt. Similarly, if one inscribes a circle with its center exactly opposite Cairo in Oceania and a radius to the South Pole, that circle would become the South Polar Belt. These two circles would denote the thickest parts of the ice-sheets in other locations, with Polar Ice extending away from those lines in proportion to what it extends today outwards from the Arctic and Antarctic. All "Ice Ages" fall within these Polar Belts, and there is no evidence of "Ice Ages" in other locations. Coincidence? You decide.

Next, if one further inscribes an equatorial line between the Pyramid-Oceania Polar Pivotal Axis, this line would become a Pyramid-Oceania Polar Pivotal Equator; and it would divide the globe into two Polar Hemispheres, a North Polar Hemisphere with its center at the Great Pyramid of Egypt and a South Polar Hemisphere with its center in Oceania, separating these two hemispheres exactly halfway between the North and South Polar Belts. All geographic locations along this Pyramid-Oceania Polar Pivotal Equator would NEVER experience or have experienced extreme polar glaciation of any sort. This line passes through the following modern geographic locations : Southwestern Wisconsin, Central Minnesota, Northwestern Canada, Anchorage, Okinawa, Mindanao, Celebes, Bali, South Indian Ocean, South Atlantic Ocean, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, Haiti, South Carolina and back to Southwestern Wisconsin, which boasts along his southwestern highways how that part of the state was never glaciated in an "Ice Age" and has been officially classified as a "Driftless Zone"! Such areas like Anchorage, which is near the Arctic Circle and therefore cold and wintry, is itself never under the greater part of a Polar Icecap, despite the presence of several technical glaciers in its general vicinity. St. Petersburg is at the same 60-degree north latitude as Anchorage, and we certainly do not consider modern St. Petersburg to be "glaciated". Anchorage, incidentally, will someday be in a comparable southern location as it is today, when a future South Pole will be located just northeast of the Hawaiian Islands, except that Anchorage will be the same distance from that SOUTH Pole, not North Pole.

In the above photograph, you can see the Cairo-Oceania Polar Pivotal Equator running through the middle of the globe, top to bottom, between the four circles that denote Polar Zones. The two circles on the left are South Polar Zones; the two on the right, North Polar Zones. People have sent me email, asking how the Great Pyramid Complex could currently point due-north if, after its construction, the Polar Axis shifted. My reply is that perhaps there are either four or eight Polar Axis locations (north and south) and either a side or a corner of the Great Pyramid always points to one of the various North Poles. In the photograph, when the North Pole is located in South Africa, the current south face of the Great Pyramid would be pointing north, towards South Africa. If there are 8 Polar Zones to correspond with the 4 sides and 4 corners of the Great Pyramid, then there would be 8, not 6, sets of Polar Zones. They would overlap and the progression of ice would seem uninterrupted from one zone to the next. If the next North Pole is located in the vicinity of Mongolia, the current northeast corner of the Great Pyramid will then point due-north. It could be that when, as now, the actual entrance to the Great Pyramid points to the north, this indicates either the beginning or the end of a greater Cosmic Cycle following a series of Polar Axis Shifts. Incidentally, in SLOW-MOTION DOOMSDAY, I neglected to include this idea, so I hope people will read it here.

Although it would actually be impossible from existing evidence to predict exactly where on the Polar Belts each succeeding Polar Alignment would be located, in that these shiftings could be either random or systematic, it is the hypothesis here that they shift in an orderly fashion in a CLOCKWISE manner when viewed from the overhead standpoint of the Great Pyramid of Egypt. As Dr. Velikovsky's theoretical North Pole shifted from the North Atlantic to the Arctic in a clockwise manner, so also might the next shift be in the same clockwise direction from the Arctic towards Mongolia and the previous shift have been from the Mid-Atlantic to the North Atlantic.

After one prepares a world globe to represent all of the various Polar Zones and Equators, as well as the Pyramid-Oceania Polar Pivotal Equator, one can spend many hours speculating about this or that detail. For example, if the North Pole were located in the Mid-Atlantic Ocean between Luanda, Angola, and Recife, Brazil, and the South Pole were located just southwest of the Marshall Islands, then the resulting Equator would pass through Antarctica and travel across the presently eastern Pacific Ocean to Acapulco, Mexico City, Laredo, Dallas, Tulsa, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Hudson Bay, Northern Greenland, Spitzbergen Island and then go across the Barents Sea into Russia, pass through Perm and the Aral Sea, and stretch into Afghanistan, Pakistan and Western India before heading out into the Indian Ocean via Diego Garcia, back to Antarctica. In such a Polar Alignment, the present-day Arctic Ocean would be located near the equatorial tropics and would certainly contain coral reefs of which, as was noted, we have modern evidence. And many other similar observations can also be made, when one considers various areas of the world which have apparently undergone extreme climatic changes from polar to equatorial (Arctic), which used to be forests but now are deserts (Saudi Arabia), or which used to be under the ocean but now are dry land (Texas).

At a June 1999 Catastrophism Conference, hosted by Professor Emilio Spedicato at the University of Bergamo in Italy, a number of respected authors and researchers presented a series of papers and lectures. Reprinted below, as they appeared in the September 2000 edition of "The Velikovskian" Journal (Volume V, Number 1) published by Charles Ginenthal in Forest Hills, New York, are three "abstracts" or overviews of these papers and lectures, as they pertain to Polar Axial Displacement.

CHANGES IN THE ROTATION AXIS OF EARTH AFTER ASTEROID OR COMETARY IMPACTS
By Flavio Barbiero,

Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici
Capodiponte, Italia

Evidence exists that the poles have changed position during the recent past in a very rapid way -- in a matter of days. This possibility, however, so far has been disregarded by official science on the basis that such a phenomenon is thought to be physically impossible : no mechanism is known and no energy capable of provoking it. The hypothesis that the inclination of the terrestrial axis in relation to the ecliptic and the position of the poles might change has however been taken into consideration since last century. Some of the greatest scientists of the time, including J.C. Maxwell and Sir George Darwin, considered this problem but decided that the stabilizing effect of the equatorial bulge was so great that no conceivable force originating within the Earth could lead to a shifting of the axis, except for the collision with another planet.

They did not take into account, however, the phenomena of instability which could occur to an Earth-like gyroscope, consisting of a plastic shell, easily deformed by centrifugal forces, covered by freely-moving liquids -- the only body of this kind in the solar system.

Our work shows that the impact of extraterrestrial objects as small as an Apollo class asteroid could "trigger" a process which in a matter of days would cause a "reshaping" of the equatorial bulge around a different axis, inducing therefore a shift of the poles and a change of the tilt. In order to trigger the process, the peak value of the torque developed by the impact has to overtake a "threshold" value, equal to the stabilizing torque developed by the equatorial bulge. A rough calculation shows that the threshold value can be reached during the impact with a body much smaller than a one-kilometer-sized asteroid.

A shift of the poles would cause worldwide destructive phenomena such as : earthquakes and volcanic activity in all areas interested [sic] by adjustments of the crust; violent winds and torrential rains, with unprecedented floods all over the world; wide fluctuations of the oceans' level, with subsequent temporary submersion of large parts of the continents; perturbation of the magnetic field. On top of that, there would be permanent changes of the climate, due on one side to the shift of the poles (and therefore to a change of latitude of many regions, deviation of oceanic and atmospheric currents and so on); on the other side, to the change of the tilt, with subsequent modification of the seasonal pattern.

A shift of the poles occurring at the end of the Pleistocene, with all its related destructive phenomena, could explain coherently the climatic situation before that date, and the situation observed after that date, as well as ancient traditions about a worldwide catastrophe.

THE DELUGE IN THE PEOPLES' TRADITIONS AND GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE
By Alexander Tollmann, University of Vienna, Austria

In 1992 the geologists Edith and Alexander Tollmann published a monograph which claimed that the Noachian Deluge was the consequence of a cometary impact about 9,500 years ago. A series of geological facts supported the claim, together with a critical analysis of mankind's traditions. Geological proofs of the impact include a crater with iridium, shatter cones, stress lamination of minerals, radiocarbon dating, dendrochronology, a peak of acid in the Greenland and so on.

Over a thousand worldwide traditions describe moreover every detail of the catastrophe following the impact and the spiritual consequences on the human mind.

In our present communication we will add new proofs of the impact. They include analysis of the Koefels crater in Tyrol and new radiocarbon dating. The hiatus of settlements for this time is recorded from many places in the world, both from villages and caves. The impact led to the development of religions, to a confusion of languages, to the transition from a hunting and collecting economy to an agricultural and cattle-breeding economy and so on.

Another impact, the "Late-Glacial Impact", occurred as a forerunner about 3,500 years before the Noachian Flood. We have been led to its existence by several indications : torrential rainfalls, fallout of nitric acid, the extinction of most of the Pleistocene mega-mammals. ... The Late-Glacial Impact is also supported by the discovery of its conflagration (Weltenbrand) horizon, which has been documented by J.B. Kloosterman in more than a dozen countries on three continents. The epoch of this impact is the Allerod time, about 13,000 BP [that is, BCE], still in the younger Paleolithic (Termination IA), whereas the Noachian Flood Impact occurred in the Mesolithic (Termination IB), about 9,500 years BP. The Late-Glacial Impact was caused by a comet : its fragments struck the northern hemisphere, in particular the ice of the Canadian Ice Shield, leading to the giant "Debacle" flood (Ontario, 450 km. wide) and the Spokane Flood, in the Columbia Basin.

DENDROCHRONOLOGICAL DATING, RESULTS AND OPEN PROBLEMS
By Mark Baillie,

Queen's University Belfast,

United Kingdom

The availability of long, year-by-year, tree-ring chronologies from a spread of locations has allowed the exploration of several abrupt, apparently catastrophic, environmental events in recent millennia. This paper will explore the ways in which data are accumulating relevant to these events. It will also explore the chronological pitfalls encountered when evidence from sources of differing dating quality are encountered. In many cases there are definite limits to the precision with which environmental parameters can be dated. This applies particularly to palynological and sedimentary records; even varve records and ice-cores have their limitations when it comes to highly refined dating questions. Currently it is fair to say that, for anything earlier than the present millennium, there is no good understanding of the causes of the various environmental downturns noted in the tree-ring records., The paper will also explore some of the possibilities which have been tentatively addressed so far, namely volcanism, extraterrestrial bombardment and undersea outgassing.

In 1984 Val LeMarche and Kathy Hirschboeck pointed out a severe frost ring in the Californian bristlecone pine tree-ring record relating to the calendar year 1627 BC. Their suggestion that this frost event might have been due to the eruption of the Santorini volcano in the Aegean is still a source of active debate. Their work stimulated the observation of a series of narrowest-ring events in an Irish oak chronology at dates 3195 BC, 2345 BC, 1159 BC, 207 BC and AD 540. These dates, it turns out, fall in the vicinity of several possibly traumatic environmental events marked in human records by such phenomena as dynastic changes, Dark Ages and plagues (Baillie, 1995). Circumstantial cases can be erected which would allow the environmental downturns to explain some of the human effects. Curiously, mythology hints that several of the events may have had cometary associations. Such cases then allow the formulation of research programs aimed at uncovering physical evidence from suitable deposits. Detailed examination of oak specimens in which the narrowest-ring events were observed, and consideration of the detailed responses of trees in various geographical areas to the events, hint at complex reactions over periods of years; and it may be some considerable time before definitive solutions are available. In the meantime, active speculation in the literature is aimed at flushing out relevant information from specialists in a wide variety of fields.

Note that in these "abstracts" the authors ASSUME that some sort of "cometary impacts" were necessary to trigger these axis shifts. It is highly significant that existing records of the Planet Nibiru, as Sitchin has described, suggest that it is "cometary" in appearance because of its "tail" which is in fact nothing more than the electromagnetic tethering beam that it unleashes in order to attach itself to our North Polar Belt.

Years ago, I also advocated a Santorini/Exodus date of 1627 BCE; however, subsequently, I have adjusted my own date forwards in time by 40 years to the date of 1587 BCE.

These "abstracts" demonstrate further the difficulty that one encounters in determining a cause for Polar Axial Displacement outside of the framework of the periodical returns/arrivals of the Planet Nibiru, not to mention the futility of calculating exactly when each repetition recurs if they are considered as "random" rather than predictable events within this Solar System.

Rob Solàrion, Texas,