HAS THE EARTH TURNED UPSIDE DOWN?

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 1127, 31 July 1913, Page 4

HAS THE EARTH TURNED UPSIDE DOWN?

It is reported that the survivors of Captain Scott’s ill-fated Polar expedition have brought back from the Antarctic continent fossil remains which demonstrate that this region had formerly been a tropical climate. If a critical scrutiny of the fossils confirm this estimate the observation will throw new light on a matter of very ancient history with which the geologists and astronomers are more directly concerned. To be sure, there is nothing revolutionary in the suggestion that the climate of the Polar regions has not always been what it now is. It is a well-known fact that the earth wobbles in its flight through space, and that its axis shiits sufficiently to change its inclination to the sun very markedly in the course cf such periods of time as are compassed by the geological ages. It is estimated that in about 30,000 years from now the axis will point to the star Vega, which lies many degrees removed from the present Polar Star. Such a shift may be expected to modify enormously the climatic conditions of the Arctic zones. But if it should prove, as reported, that the fossils brought back by the Scott expedition give evidence of a truly equatorial climate at the Pole, something more than any calculated shift of the earth’s axis would be required in explanation. Moreover, the matter is made doubly puzzling by the further report that the fossils are found to be distributed in widely separated strata, thus proving the existence not meiely of one, but of two tropical periods. A conceivable explanation of two equatorial periods at the South Pole is not beyond the reach of scientific hypothesis. For instance, it is within the possibilities that the sun was at one time much hotter than at present, which may account for a first hot period at the Pole. Then Professor W. H. Pickering, of Harvard Observatory, once made the suggestion that the earth may possibly have turned completely over, owing to the precessional effect of the gravitation pull on its bulging equator. The possibility was suggested by the observed fact that a small outer satellite of the planet Saturn, discovered by Professor Pickering, revolves in the opposite direction to the rotation of the planet itself. It has been suggested that all the major planets originally rotated in the opposite direction to their direction of evolution, and that the ones nearer the sun, including, of course, the earth, have turned over owing to the gyroscopic action of the gravitation pull, which acted as a sort of tidal brake. It is obvious that it such is really the case there may have been a time when the South Pole pointed towards the sun, at which time the South Polar region must have had a tropical climate, whereas the entire equatorial belt would constitute an arctic or temperate zone.