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
Exhibit 7
As we saw in Part I, sedimentary cores collected from the bottom of the
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.
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Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
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
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
10 Path of the Pole, p. 107.
11 See Part I.
12 Path of the Pole, p. 111ff.
13 See Part I for details.
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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
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
• 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
14 The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, pp. 109-10.
15 Path of the Pole, p. 66.
16 Ibid., pp. 93, 96.
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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 largescale 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 usu
ally called upon to
explain ice ages ... The rapidity of the deglaciation suggests that some
extraordinary factor was affecting climate ...’19
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
17 Ibid., p. 99.
18 See Part IV.
19 Ibid.
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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, everexpanding 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?
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.
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.
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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
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
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
26 Thomas Huxley cited in Path of the Pole, p. 294.
27 Scientific American, December 1985.
28 Path of the Pole, pp. 47-9.
29 Ibid., p. 49.
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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
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 earthcrust 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