In 1958 Charles Hapgood suggested that the Earth's crust had undergone repeated displacements and that the geological concepts of continental drift and sea-floor spreading owed their secondary livelihoods to the primary nature of crustal shift.

According to Hapgood, crustal shift was made possible by a layer of liquid rock situated beneath the surface of the planet.

A pole shift would thus displace the Earth's crust in around the inner mantle, resulting in crustal rock's being exposed to magnetic fields of a different direction.

Earth Crust Displacement
 

"In 1958 Charles Hapgood suggested in his book The Earth's Shifting Crust that the Earth's crust had undergone repeated displacements and that the geological concepts of continental drift and sea-floor spreading owed their secondary livelihoods to the primary nature of crustal shift.

According to Hapgood, crustal shift was made possible by a layer of liquid rock situated about 100 miles beneath the surface of the planet. A pole shift would thus displace the Earth's crust in around the inner mantle, resulting in crustal rock's being exposed to magnetic fields of a different direction." [1]

 

Pole Shifts & Earth Crust Displacement

"An earth crust displacement, as the words suggest, is a movement of the ENTIRE outer shell of the earth over its inner layers. If you remove the peel from an orange and then reattach it to the fruit you can visualize the possibility of the peel moving over the inner layers.

The earth's crust, according to Charles Hapgood, can similarly change its position over the inner layers. When it does the globe experiences climatic change. The climatic zones (polar, temperate and tropical) remain the same because the sun still shines on the earth from the same angle in the sky.

From the perspective of people on the earth at the time, it appears as the sky is falling. In reality it is the earth's crust shifting to another location. Some land moves towards the tropics. Others shift, with the same movement, towards the poles. Yet others may escape such great changes in latitude.

The consequence of such a movement of the entire outer shell of the earth is catastrophic. Throughout the world massive earthquakes shake the land and enormous tidal waves crash into and over the continental shelf. As the old ice caps leave the polar zones they melt, raising the ocean level higher and higher. Everywhere, and by whatever means, people seek higher ground to avoid an ocean in upheaval."[2]

Vavilov found a direct correlation between agricultural origins and lands more than 4,920 feet above sea level.

"Working on the assumption that the earth's magnetic poles are usually close to the poles of rotation, Hapgood collected geomagnetic rock samples, finding evidence that the most recent earth crust displacement must have occurred between 17,000 to 12,000 years ago.

 

The North Pole would have moved from the Hudson Bay area of northern Canada to it's current place in the Arctic Ocean.

 

More recently, Langway and Hansen (1973) gathered climactic data pointing to a dramatic change in climate at 12,000 years ago. At that time, the Pleistocene extinctions, rising ocean levels, the close of the ice age, and the origins of agriculture all seem to coincide."[3]

Earth Crust Displacement: Effects and Evidence

In his best-selling book Earth in Upheaval, historian Immanuel Velikovsky gave an account of what might be expected when the Earth tilts on it's axis:

'Let us assume, as a working hypothesis, that under the impact of a force or the influence of an agent - and the Earth does not travel in an empty universe - the axis of the earth shifted or tilted. At that moment an earthquake would make the globe shudder. Air and water would continue to move through inertia; hurricanes would sweep the Earth, and the seas would rush over continents, carrying gravel and sand and marine animals, and casting them onto land. Heat would be developed, rocks would melt, volcanoes would erupt, lava would flow from fissures in the ruptured ground and cover vast areas.

 

Mountains would spring up from the plains and would climb and travel upon the shoulders of other mountains, causing faults and rifts. Lakes would be tilted and emptied, rivers would change their beds; large land areas and all their inhabitants would slip under the sea. Forests would burn, and the hurricanes and wild seas would wrest them from the ground on which they grew and pile them, branch and root, in heaps. Seas would turn into deserts, their waters rolling away.

'And if the change in the velocity of the diurnal rotation [slowing the planet down] should accompany the shifting of the axis, the water confined to the equatorial oceans by centrifugal force would retreat to the poles, and high tides and hurricanes would rush from pole to pole, carrying reindeers and seals to the tropics and desert lions to the Arctic, moving from the equator up to the mountain ridges of the Himalayas and down the African jungles; and crumbled rocks torn from splintering mountains would be scattered over large distances; and herds of animals would be washed from the plains of Siberia.

 

The shifting of the axis would change the climate in every place, leaving corals in Newfoundland and elephants in Alaska, fig trees in northern Greenland and luxuriant forests in Antarctica. In the event of a rapid shift of the axis, many species and genera of animals on land and in the sea would be destroyed, and civilizations, if any, would be reduced to ruins.'[4]

Neither Hapgood nor Velikovsky were pulling theories out of the air.

The theory that the terrestrial crust is swimming on magma was first offered in the 1850's. The record of bones and trees, and shells and layers of sediment that had been found throughout the world pointed to one or more cataclysms in the Earth's past, some of them as recently as 1,500 B.C.E. and amazingly, 800 B.C.E.

Velikovsky sums up the scientific establishment's past record on answering the questions:

What caused tropical forests to grow in polar regions? What caused volcanic activity on a great scale in the past and lava flows on land and in the ocean beds? What caused earthquakes to be so numerous and violent in the past? Puzzlement, despair, and frustration are the only answers to each and every one of these phenomena.

The theories of uniformity (or gradualism) and evolution maintain that the geological record bears witness that from time immemorial, even from the time this planet began it's existence only minute changes - caused by the wind blowing on rocks, the sand grains swimming to the sea - accumulated into vast changes.

These causes however, are inadequate to explain the great revolutions in nature, and they evoke the expressions of futility on the part of the specialists, each in his field.

Velikovsky continues with his account:

... The evidence is overwhelming that the great global catastrophes were either accompanied or caused by shifting of the terrestrial axis or by a disturbance in the diurnal and annual motions of the Earth ... The state of lavas with reversed magnetization, hundreds of times more intensive than the inverted terrestrial magnetic field could impart, reveals the nature of the forces that were in action ...

 

Many world-wide phenomena, for each of which the cause is vainly sought, are explained by a single cause: the sudden changes in climate, transgression of the sea, vast volcanic and seismic activities, formation of ice cover, pluvial crises, emergence of mountains and their dislocation, rising and subsidence of coasts, tilting of lakes, sedimentation, fossilization, the provenance of tropical animals and plants in polar regions, conglomerates of fossil animals of various latitudes and habitats, the extinction of species and genera, the appearance of new species, the reversal of the Earth's magnetic field, and a score of other world-wide phenomena.[4]

Look into any one of the above fields and you will begin to see the same pattern Velikovsky, Hapgood, Einstein and hundreds of other independent geologists, paleontologists and archeologists have recognized in the Earth's past.

A pattern of repeated, catastrophic change thought to be brought about by crustal displacements activated by one or more outside agents - such as passing comets or fluctuations in the sun's own magnetic field - appears to have been with humanity and its civilizations from the very dawn of mankind.

Rand and Rose Flem-Ath discussed earth-crust displacement' in their book, When the Sky Fell. Seeing evidence of it in almost all parts of the world they described it's effects and the consequences for mankind today.

The displacement that happened, according to them at about 11,000 BC, had:

'... also left other evidence of its deadly visit in a ring of death around the globe. All the continents that experience rapid and massive extinctions of animal species (notably the Americas and Siberia) underwent massive changes in their latitudes...

 

'And coral has been found in Newfoundland, ferns, fossils, coal and fossilized tree-stumps have been found in Antarctica, water lilies and fossilized palm leaves ten and twelve feet long have been found in Spitzbergen, there is evidence that the swamp cypress flourished within 500 miles of the North Pole in the Miocene epoch, and more. The evidence is overwhelming that the Poles have not covered the same parts of the planet for the entire extent of our geological history.

'The consequences of the displacement are monumental. The earth's crust ripples over its interior and the world is shaken by incredible quakes and floods. They sky appears to fall as continents groan and shift position. Deep in the ocean, earthquakes generate massive tidal waves which crash against the coastlines, flooding them. Some lands shift to warmer climes, while others, propelled into polar zones, suffer the direst of winters. Melting ice caps raise the ocean's level higher and higher. All living things must adapt, migrate or die ...

'If the horror of an earth-crust displacement were to be visited upon today's interdependent world the progress of thousands of years of civilization would be torn away from our planet like a fine cobweb. Those who live near high mountains might escape the global tidal waves, but they would be forced to leave behind, in the lowlands, the slowly constructed fruits of civilization.

 

Only amongst the merchant marine and navies of the world might some evidence of civilization remain. The rusting hulls of ships and submarines would eventually perish but the valuable maps that are housed in them would be saved by survivors, perhaps for hundreds, even thousands of years. Until once again mankind could use them to sail the World Ocean in search of lost lands ...'[3]

That something such as this could have happened to the earth seems, in our forward-looking culture of progress, somehow unbelievable.

We are not taught such concepts at school nor are we brought up to think in this way. Suggesting that it could happen in the future can earn everything from the epithet of 'prophet of doom' to outright academic scorn. Nevertheless, look into the holy works and records of the ancient civilizations and you will find corroboration from what remains of the 'media' of their time, their mythology, legends and folklore.

Cataclysmic events on a global scale did strike the civilizations of the ancients, and many recorded it in the clearest and most intelligible ways they were capable of at the time.

The accounts survive throughout the world to this day only as a number of so-called myths about earth-rending, global catastrophes.

[1] Adrian G. Gilbert & Maurice Cotterell. The Mayan Prophecies. Element Books, 1995. ISBN 1-85230-888-5
[2] Rand & Rose Flem-Ath  (Discovering Atlantis) 
[3] Rand and Rose Flem Ath, When the Sky Fell. In Search of Atlantis. Orion Books, 1996. ISBN 0 75280 171 6
[4] Immanuel Velikovsky. Earth in Upheaval. 1955. ISBN 0-671-45282-7