Charles Hapgood’s proposal that the earth’s crust can slide as a single piece over the softer layer beneath it, relocating the poles by thousands of kilometres in a geologically short time and setting off ice-sheet collapse, flooding and extinction. Hapgood suggested accumulating polar ice as the trigger. Einstein’s 1958 foreword to the book called the idea worth attention and identified the weak point in the same sentence, that “the only doubtful assumption is that the earth’s crust can be moved easily enough over the inner layers”. No mechanism capable of moving it has been found, and the palaeomagnetic and seafloor evidence that arrived in the 1960s is accounted for by plate tectonics, so the hypothesis has no standing in geology. It is distinct from true polar wander, which is real, slow, and does not move the crust relative to the mantle. Graham Hancock argued from it throughout Fingerprints of the Gods, denied withdrawing support for it in a 1999 statement, and stopped using it from 2015 in favour of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.
Connections
Charles Hapgood · Graham Hancock · Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis · Proto-Ancient Human Hypothesis