Earth Crustal Displacement & Pole Shift Chronology

Model proposing rapid slippage of Earth's outer lithospheric shell over the asthenosphere, shifting geographic polar zones.

Specifications & Metrics

type: Catastrophism & Impact Chronologies
timespan: Recurrent Late Pleistocene cycles (~100,000 to 11,600 years BP)
defining boundary: Sudden latitudinal shifts of 15°–30° over millennial intervals
proponents or Body: Charles H. Hapgood (1958, 1970; foreword by Albert Einstein), Hugh Auchincloss Brown, Rand Flem-Ath
key evidence: Asymmetric Hudson Bay / Laurentide glaciation, unglaciated Siberian mammoths, Piri Reis map

Published by historian and geographer Charles H. Hapgood in 'Earth's Shifting Crust' (1958, with a foreword by Albert Einstein) and 'The Path of the Pole' (1970), the model proposes that Earth's rigid outer crust periodically slips as a single shell over the viscous asthenosphere without altering the planet's spin axis in space.
Hapgood reconstructed three Late Pleistocene North Pole positions prior to the current Arctic pole: in the Yukon (~80,000–75,000 BP), in the Greenland Sea (~75,000–50,000 BP), and in Hudson Bay at 60°N, 73°W (~50,000–12,000 BP), explaining why North America was heavily glaciated while Siberia remained temperate enough to support wooly mammoths and steppes.
In 'Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings' (1966), Hapgood analyzed early modern portolan charts — including the 1513 Piri Reis map and the 1531 Oronteus Finaeus map — proposing that they preserved spherical-trigonometric source maps of an ice-free Antarctica charted before a ~9600 BCE crustal displacement moved the continent into the South Polar circle.