The Long-Forgotten Science of Polar Wandering
By Kyle Bennett
Books by Kyle Bennett
|
|
Polar Wandering and the cycle of ages
US - UK
|
Please
join us in welcoming Kyle Bennett as December 2011 Author of the
Month. Kyle is an independent researcher who works as a journalist
by profession, specialising in commercial property and economics. He
has been investigating the subject of polar wandering for over five
years, and has recently published Polar
Wandering and the Cycles of Ages (2011),
which is an updated version of an earlier, unpublished work titled
The
Wayward Chariot (2007).
He has also written a series of groundbreaking articles on the
history of the idea of polar wandering within academia, including
“Earth Crust Displacement and the British Establishment”,
and an article on the 19th
century intellectual Frederik Klee, one of the first men to claim
that memories of polar wandering have been preserved within
mythology.
His
new website is http://pathofthepole.yolasite.com/.
He has previously written as a guest writer for worldmysteries.com,
and sciencedoubts.com).
The idea of polar wandering is most closely
associated with an American professor called Charles Hapgood,
particularly his theory of Earth Crust Displacement. He claimed that
the polar axis periodically changes position upon the earth’s
surface, and speculated that this was caused by the earth’s
crust sliding as a whole over the semi-liquid layers below.
Hapgood
believed that the last Ice Age in North America ended when this
continent moved southward by around thirty degrees Latitude, while
the once-temperate Arctic Ocean and Siberia moved up to the North
Pole. He also claimed that a long term pattern of
polar wandering, caused by successive pole shifts, causes parts of
the earth’s surface to experience extreme climatic change, from
polar to tropical. The evidence for these climatic changes has been
growing steadily over the years, causing modern geologists to
consider polar wandering as an explanation.
Unfortunately, the true history of the idea of
polar wandering has been almost entirely forgotten, even by
supporters of Hapgood’s work. Hapgood is partially to blame, as
he failed to give an accurate history of the idea in his book Path
of the Pole. Nowadays, polar wandering
usually considered to a wacky, marginal idea, associated with
occultists, Atlantis-hunters and New Age believers in 2012
millenarianism. Astonishingly, however, it was in fact developed and
supported by some of the most influential men in the history of
science: Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), Comte George Louis
Buffon (1707-1788), George Cuvier (1769-1832), Sir John Evans,
Francis Galton Darwin, and Albert Einstein. It
even gained popularity amongst the intellectual elite of Nazi
Germany.
What is little known is that many of Hapgood’s
ideas are becoming accepted within mainstream
academia today, usually under the name
of True Polar Wander (see Arthur Ryan’s sciencedoubts.com
[here]
for more articles on this subject). So polar wandering is becoming
mainstream, and geologists’ theories are beginning to converge
with Hapgood’s. Modern science is beginning to resurrect an old
idea whose origins can be traced back to the 17th
century.
|
