IMPORTANT
ANNOUNCEMENT:
The Path of the
Pole is
now available in paperback, as is Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. You can order from Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble or
directly from the publisher, Adventures Unlimited Press, in Illinois.
You can call 815-253-6390 or go to http://www.wexclub.com/aup/usaindex.html We suggest going directly to the publisher's website
so you can see all the other interesting books they publish,
including their magazine, World Explorer
Club
Charles H. Hapgood was a history professor who began, at the
prompting of some students, to look into the search for the lost
continent of Atlantis. That lead him to the ideas of Hugh Achincloss
Brown: that the entire earth could be made to be repositioned at a
radically new angle on its axis of rotation.
Hapgood realized that the entire planet did not have to
be repositioned around its axis. Only the outer crust need move, just
as the loosely peeled skin of an orange could be slid around the
unmoved inner slices. This line of thinking was
published in Earth's Shifting Crust (1958), in collaboration with James H.
Campbell, a mathematician-engineer.
Hapgood ultimately revised key parts of his thinking
because his calculations convinced him that the mass of the ice cap
on Antartica could not destabilize the earth's rotation.
Hapgood's thinking is expressed most clearly by Hapgood
himself
That book was later revised and
in 1970 republished as The Path of
the Pole by Chilton. In an
introductory note, Hapgood said:
"Polar wandering is based on the
idea that the outer shell of the earth shifts about from time to
time, moving some continents toward and other continents away from
the poles. Continental drift is based on the idea that the continents
move individually...A few writers have suggested that perhaps
continental drift causes polar wandering. This book advances the
notion that polar wandering is primary and causes the displacement of
continents....This book will present evidence that the last shift of
the earth's crust (the lithosphere) took place in recent time, at the
close of the last ice age, and that it was the cause of the
improvement in climate."
Hapgood then goes on to mention
to two areas where he finds much of his evidence, in data derived
from studies of geomagnetism and from carbon 14 dating.
Although he argued that such global disruptions
happened repeatedly, Hapgood by then was rejecting the idea that such
disruptions could happen quickly.
Based primarily on that technical data, he argued that
each shift took approximately five thousand years, followed by 20 to
30 thousand year periods with no polar movements. Also, in his
calculations, the area of movement never covered more than 40
degrees.
The presence of a truly liquid layer between the core
and the outer crust would allow such slippage, moderated by inertial
forces.
Using geomagnetic and carbon dating evidence, he identified the
locations of the pole and its paths as:
Position # 1 -- 63 degrees N, 135 degrees W ( the Yukon
area)
Position # 2 -- 72 degrees N, 10 degrees E (in the
Greenland Sea)
Position # 3 -- 60 degrees N, 73 degrees W (the Hudson
Bar area)
Position # 4 -- the current position
For pictures of these positions, go to
Pole
Paths
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Wandering |
Wegener | Evidence
Chart | Technical
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