FUNDAY

NCGT Journal, V. 3, No. 1, March 2015. www.ncgt.org 71
ESSAYS
MASSIVE CHANGES IN CLIMATE & SEA LEVEL
(Excerpt #1, abridged from an unpublished monograph,
EXTINCTIONS: the Pattern of Global Cataclysms)
Peter M. JAMES
Dunalley, Tasmania 7177, Australia
petermjames35@gmail.com

ABSTRACT: Examples of climate change over Recent and Pleistocene times are  demonstrated to occur at rates far in excess of those available under the mobile  plate tectonics model. Polar wander, probably accompanied by recognizable  precessional variations, is proposed as a genesis. Both phenomena generate  immediate responses from the earth's water veneer and are demonstrated to cause  massive changes in sea level. Evidence of very low sea levels is available from  DSDP results and the ubiquitous submarine valleys. Elevated sea levels are  indicated from wave cut platforms and events like the Missoula "floods", the  existence of tablazos, the Lake Titicaca enigmas. In the subsequent essay, these  factors will all be demonstrated to provide a nexus with extinction events  throughout pre-history and back over geological time.
Keywords: rates of climate change, polar wander, precessional wobble, massive sea  level changes, extinctions
1 Introduction
here is no question that there have been dramatic changes in climate over  geological time. Sequences such as polar ice caps covering what are now tropical  latitudes and glacial sediments, interbedded with coal seams/coral reef deposits,  have been recorded in all parts of the globe. The extreme climate changes involved  have obviously occurred at rates far in excess of the rates at which continents are  alleged to drift. A couple of examples should suffice.
Antarctica is normally taken to have been under its polar ice cap for most of the  past 15 million years. Not so long ago, however, fossilised wood was found in the  Trans Antarctic Mountains, at 1,800 m elevation, in sediments only 2 or 3 million  years old, New Scientist, 2/6/89. Trees growing in the mountains of Antarctica  would indicate it was then much warmer, with a latitude something like 40º less  than it now occupies. A forty degree change in latitude over a period of 2 to 3  million years would indicate a rate of change of well over a thousand kilometres  per million years: about fifty times faster than continents are alleged to "drift".  But if this is taken in conjunction with other contemporary evidence of climates in  the northern Hemisphere, another possibility enters the equation. When the  aforementioned trees were growing in the Antarctic mountains, cold water  foraminifera were being deposited off the coast of Oregon, (Borehole DSDP 35, among  others). That is, the north west Pacific was quite a bit colder than today.
The pattern of a warmer Antarctic and a colder Oregon would fit a mechanism of a  polar shift quite happily: a North Pole migrating forty degrees from its present  position towards the northwest Pacific and a South Pole migrating a similar  distance up into the Indian Ocean.
Nearer our own time, the late Pleistocene Ice Age is taken to extend from c 20,000  to 12,000 years ago in the North America, with a slightly later onset in northwest  Europe and an extension of a couple of thousand years more. This Ice Age is  normally spoken of as a global phenomenon, in which case it would have a global  genesis, such as an earthly encounter with the shadow of a meteor swarm, or a  simple variation in the sun's radiation. These possibilities lie somewhat outside  the scope of the author's cognizance but the following comments are offered. If a  meteor swarm lay inside the Earth's path around the sun, then one would expect this  sort of astronomical cooling to be a frequent and regularly spaced event. On the  other hand, if variations in the sun's radiation was the cause, this would imply,  first, a decrease in radiation extending over a couple of thousand years to kick  off the ice age; second, only a few thousand years later, a turn around to an  increase in radiation to melt the expanded ice sheets; thirdly, a cessation in this  radiation cycle when the ice sheets resumed their former size. In such a scenario,  it might be questioned – even if the waxing and waning of the ice sheets had been a  straightforward process - whether a body as large as our permanent star could  produce a reversible change in radiation with such rapidity. When considered in  light of the fact that the Ice Age was not just a simple waxing and waning of the  ice sheets but one of numerous fluctuations, Dawes and Kerr (1982), Frenzel (1973), the solar variation postulate becomes even less attractive.
So let us take a different view of the possible cause. During at least one part of  the Ice Age, evidence for a centre of ice indicates a North Pole located at Baffin  Island. And for some of the same Ice Age period Siberia was warmer than today. If  the two events were quasi-simultaneous, they could both be explained by a simple  shift in the Pole, not by any change in the areal extent of the ice cap, Figure 1.
Figure 1 The centre of ice with the North Pole at Baffin Island, c 15,000 BP,  compared with today's ice cap.
When conditions only a few thousands of years ago present conundrums of this type,  how much more difficult, then, to determine the simultaneous climatic conditions in  different parts of the globe, tens of millions of years ago? In view of these  potential Gordian Knots, let us begin a synopsis of past climatic changes during  the period we know most about, the last millennium, in an attempt to determine  whether we might find some clues to support the above suggestions that changes in  the mode of spin of the Earth are a prime cause of climate changes - at least in  the absence of any modern day anthropogenic input.
2 The Most Recent Two Millennia
During the most recent period of Earth history there have been modest but  recognisable climate changes recorded in the Northern Hemisphere. Initially, around  the time of William the Conqueror, England was warm enough to allow the conquering  Normans to plant grape vines: a horticultural practice that was not again possible  in England until the later decades of the 20th Century. The same warm period was  also well enough established to give the Scandinavians confidence to cross the seas  and colonise Iceland, Greenland, and even the north eastern corner of North  America. In Greenland, communities with dairy farming and other agricultural  ventures were established.
However, the balmy days were not to last. Prolonged cold weather is taken to have  commenced in England by the 16th Century. In 1536, Henry VIII travelled down an ice  covered Thames on a horse-drawn sleigh, from Hampton Court to Greenwich. Twenty  eight years later, Queen Elizabeth was able to walk out onto the thick ice of the  Thames, at London. The cold spells continued on through the 17th C and 18th C and  sometimes into the early part of the 19th C, gaining for the period the name of  Little Ice Age, LIA.
During the LIA, the North Sea was sometimes available for passage by foot on the  ice. The LIA was also famous in England for "Frost Fairs" that were held when the  frozen surface of the Thames was considered thick enough for crowds to venture  safely out upon it. The first recorded Frost Fair was in 1607-08 and ice was again  thick enough for similar events in 1684, 1739-40, 1788 and, for the last time, in  1813-14.1 In other words, although the winters may have been exceptionally severe,  the thick ice production on the Thames
1 Apparently, the Frost Fairs came to an end one year when the ice cover broke up  prematurely and large fragments floated out to sea with people still upon them.
NCGT Journal, V. 3, No. 1, March 2015. www.ncgt.org 73
does not appear to have been constant. Indeed, even before the LIA, the Thames had  frozen over on a couple of other, possibly exceptional, occasions: an early event  in 250 AD has been recorded and another in 923 AD, the latter one when England  should have been preparing for warmer times. In the once warm Greenland, the LIA  was infamous for its freezing over of the Scandinavian settlements that had been  developed there four or five centuries earlier.
Despite the variations, one could nonetheless conclude that northwest Europe was  generally colder in 16th to 19th Centuries, colder than in William the Conqueror's  time and colder that today. The historical records at Rye, once a small port on the  English Channel, reveal an affinity between the above climate changes and sea level  changes which, at first glance, could be interpreted as the result of waxing and  waning of Arctic ice.
The history of Rye, located on Figure 2, goes something like this:- In the 11th  Century, during the warming of northwest Europe, when the Scandinavians were  settling in Greenland and William the Conqueror's heirs were planting vines, the  town of Winchelsea had been located to the south of Rye, on a shingle barrier. This  barrier was eroded in a storm surge of 1250 AD, and Winchelsea was eventually  submerged in 1280. About this time, sea water had risen up to cover the land as far  inland as Appeldore, some 15 km to the north of Rye, and a sea crossing was  necessary between Rye and Lydd, where an airport is now in use. The river on which  Rye was originally situated had its mouth at New Romney, some 17 km to the east,  but this was changed to its present position in 1290 and, a century later, much of  the Brede valley, behind the relocated Winchelsea, was under water
Figure 2 Present location of Rye, southern England, almost on the English Channel
Thus, high sea levels were associated with the medieval warming period. But things  were about to change. In the 1440s viniculture was abandoned because of the cooler  weather. By 1596, nearing the height of the Little Ice Age, the channel of the  Rother River, through Rye, had silted up and was too shallow for ships. The harbour  was abandoned at the end of the 17th Century and, by 1730, the channel was all but  gone. In 1635, some 20,000 acres in the district were reclaimed from the sea and  more land was reclaimed sixty years later. These episodes of sea level retreat thus  correspond with the cooler period which could be said to be explained by waxing of  the Arctic ice sheet. One might even contend that this periodic freezing recorded  in north west Europe and Greenland was of wider proportions. Work on the Great  Barrier Reef, off the north east coastline of Australia, by E. Henty of the  Australian Institute of Marine Science, discovered evidence of colder weather in  the antipodean coral reef growths at the same period as the Frost Fairs. Thus, the  first impression is of a global cooling event.2
Or it would be, if not for a single instance recorded from outside the northwest  Europe region and its antipodes. By luck, ship’s logs from four Spain-to-Chile  voyages in the late 16th and early 17th Centuries, were recently located in Seville  by Maria de Rosario Prieta (1993). Between 1578 and 1599, only a few decades after  Queen Elizabeth walked out onto the frozen Thames and only a decade before the  first Frost Fair, the weather in the Straits of Magellan was recorded as being warm  and balmy. Winds were from the
2 In 1931, however, the pendulum was found to be swinging back again. The sea level  in the English Channel was rising again and, in the 1960s, the rate of rise was  measured as 2mm per year. This again corresponds with evidence of warming but  predates any serious global warming set off by human efforts.

north east, instead of the normal freezing winds from the west, and glaciers in  Patagonia were calving to produce ice bergs in the Straits, seen as another, unusually warm, phenomenon.  Thus, the contemporary weather in Patagonia was the complete opposite of the well  documented LIA changes in northwest Europe. Introducing the idea of polar wander  again provides a helpful explanation for this contradiction. If one were to suggest  that the Little Ice Age was associated with some migration of the North Pole down  towards the North Atlantic, then the South Pole would have migrated up into  antipodean regions, like Australia. In this manner, colder conditions would have  affected both regions. In South America, however, this same hypothetical polar  shift would have distanced the South Pole away from Patagonia, thus making it  warmer. On this basis, one could conclude that the unusual climate changes recorded  over the last thousand years do not point to any solar phenomena, but rather to some change in the mode of spin of the Earth. And, if so, there is more to it. On a majority of occasions during the LIA, the Thames had not  frozen. This point needs to be cleared up as the variations between the frozen and  the unfrozen Thames appear to have taken place too frequently to be accounted for  by polar wander, alone. One possible solution for rapid climatic variations might  be sought in the introduction of another change in the Earth's mode of spin:  changes in magnitude of precession. This proposal is treated in some detail below, based on early  astronomical research at Alexandria. But the point for the moment is that  precession could take place more quickly than polar migration and such wobbles  would impose their own fluctuations on the general global weather patterns. It is  unfortunate that most of the LIA period came before the Observatory was set up at  Greenwich, otherwise we would have direct confirmation, or not, of the above sorts  of change. Prior to moving onto further astronomical topics, a brief outline of  some of the meteorological changes in the first millennium AD is set out below to  fill in the gaps in time. During the first four and a half centuries of the first  millennium AD, Britain was occupied by the Romans but little history comes down to  us as a result of their stay. Unfortunately, the natural history following Roman  times is largely restricted to dramatic meteorological aspects, such as storms,  floods, hurricanes and rain like blood. These were tabulated up to 1000 AD and  assembled by C.E. Britton (1937) in Geophysical Memoirs,
Volume 8, No1, and include the following:- · In c 50 AD (Caligula's reign?), there  was a frost so hard that all the rivers and lakes were passable from November to  the beginning of April. · In 68 AD, the Isle of Wight was allegedly separated from  Hampshire by inundations. (This sounds as
though some change in sea level was involved.) · In 134 and 153 AD, the Thames  froze over for two and three months, respectively, while in the middle of this, in  139, the river was recorded as having dried up for two days. · In c 250 AD, the  Thames froze over for nine weeks and, in 291, most of the rivers in Britain were  frozen for six weeks. This occurred again in 329 and again (for six weeks) in 525.  · A drought with scorching heat was mentioned in 605 AD while, in 684, a great  frost descended so
that lakes and rivers in Ireland were frozen as also the sea between Ireland and  Scotland, allowing "journeys to be made to and fro on the ice". · In 695 AD, the  Thames was frozen for six weeks allowing booths to be built upon it. The first  Frost Fair, no doubt.
The next three centuries register more of the unusual climatic events, from severe  winters to hot summers, but no more references to the freezing of the rivers in  England, until the one mentioned earlier, in 923, just prior to the warming of  England in preparation for the arrival of William the Conqueror. What the above  listings suggest, however, is a less than stable climate for Britain in the first  millennium AD and, hence, that changeable weather might be a fairly normal and  natural situation. Whether this has been due to any form of polar wander or changes  in the rate or magnitude of precession cannot be determined at this stage.  Fortunately, we have more data from observations made at Alexandria during the  preceding millennium. 3 The First Millennium BC
Eclipse Observations
The birth of natural philosophy in the first millennium BC is traditionally taken  to have been launched when
Thales predicted a total eclipse of the sun in Greece in 585 BC. Thales had spent  time in Egypt and had been exposed to Chaldean (Babylonian) astronomy, so he obviously had information on  eclipse seasons, etc., sufficient to make his prediction. However, while this  eclipse did occur as predicted, modern day back calculations show that it should  not have been visible in Greece. In this, it was one of the early maverick eclipses  recorded in that millennium, occurring on the right day but (according to back  calculations of modern astronomers) in the wrong location.
Another example of this right day/wrong place comes from Thucydides who recorded a  total solar eclipse at Athens on August 5, 431 BC, during the Peloponnesian War.  Back calculations agree that there was an eclipse on that day, but no calculations  can make the path of totality pass anywhere near Athens. One celebrated British  astronomer, J.K. Fotheringham in 1921, came up with the suggestion that maybe  Thucydides was drunk on that day and did not known where he was. Other maverick  observations include the one mentioned above, which was later reported by  Herodotus; one on March 20, 71 AD, reported by Plutarch at Chaeronea; and another  on November 11, 129 BC, recorded as total in the Hellespont and 80% at Alexandria,.  This last event was at a time when the celebrated Hipparchus was still carrying out  his research at Alexandria, but even this record has been discounted – again by  Fotheringham - on the basis that his own back calculations showed that no eclipse  should have been visible at Alexandria since one of August 15, 310 BC. Fotheringham  went on to suggest, in this case, that confusion over dates was the most likely  explanation. How two such distant events could have been confused at a place like  Alexandria, at that time, is another matter.
As an aside, maverick recordings are not restricted to the Mediterranean. Similar  observations come from the Far East. In China, official records do not begin until  the end of the Chou Dynasty (c 950 BC, to use the Western calendar), but China did  have a well established code of legends from much earlier. The dates of two solar  eclipses reported from that early period, in 2155 and 2128 BC, are found to be  confirmed by back calculations. However, once again, the calculations reveal that  the second one should not have been seen in China.
The last known recording of a maverick total solar eclipse in Europe, this one with  stars visible, was observed in Germany on May 8, 810 AD. The date of this eclipse  is again confirmed by back calculations but no set of calculations can make the sun  disappear on that day in Germany. So it must have left Fotheringham with a puzzle.  But the alternative, that of a possible change in Earth behavior, does not appear  to have been considered. Yet it is not a great step to accept that eclipses,  observed first hand by people who were as reliable as any present-day academic with  his computer, do represent actual events at specified locations.
In fairness, there is one excuse, maybe a rather lame one, for modern scientific  skepticism about right dates, wrong places. Not all of the ancient eclipse  recordings are maverick. An eclipse of 763 BC, at Ashur, behaves as it should.  Likewise one in 240 BC and one again in 190 BC, at Rome. More than thirty  recordings of solar eclipses given in the Annals of Lu are found to fit with  calculations and locations, the more recent discrepancies being one on June 19, 518  AD, another in 600 AD and a third in 718 AD, which event is not so much earlier  than the last recorded maverick in Germany. Since then, things appear to have  settled down from whatever caused the maverick eclipses in the first place.
Which brings us to an event observed at Babylon on April 15, 136 BC, and event that  comes down to us with impeccable credentials. Back calculations by modern  astronomers again confirm that there was a total solar eclipse on that day, but the  same set of calculations show that the path of totality of this eclipse should not  have passed anywhere near Babylon, but at some point 4000 km to the west, Figure 3.

Figure 3. Total solar eclipse of April 15, 136 BC, observed at Babylon when the  path of totality should have been some 4000 km to the west.
Attempts were made by Sir Harold Jeffreys at Cambridge - among others - to explain  this discrepancy as being related to a slowing down in the rotation of the Earth.  This approach again leads to problems. Firstly, if all the maverick eclipses of  ancient times were the result of a slowing down in the Earth’s rate of rotation,  there should have been a pattern apparent in the anomalies. But there is not; both  maverick eclipses and well behaved ones are interspersed over the centuries of  ancient times. Secondly, deceleration in the Earth’s rate of spin is far too slow  to explain the Babylon discrepancy. Modern measurements of the rate of slowing down  of the rotating Earth are of the order of 2 milli-seconds per century. On this  basis, there would be no discrepancy worth worrying about in the path of totality  of the "Babylon" eclipse.
The rate of slowing down over geological time, determined from the growth rings of  fossil corals, is somewhat higher. In the Devonian Period, 400 million years ago,  fossilised growth rings indicate something like a year of 390 - 400 days. A hundred  million years later, in the Carboniferous, the number of days had reduced to 385.  This represents a slowing down to today’s rate of approximately 4 milliseconds, or  one tenth of a second of arc, per year. But even applying this rate to the Babylon  eclipse provides for a shift in the path of totality of little more than 5 km, not  the 3000 - 4000 km recorded.
Thus, we are surely dealing with something outside both the long term and the  present day “normal” behaviour of the Earth. Within the spectrum of possible  causes, the concept of major wobble is very attractive. If there were transient  increases in wobble spanning the time of the above eclipses, there would also be,  according to the conservation of angular momentum, transient slowing down in the  rate of spin of the Earth.3 Such a slowing down would obviously displace the path  of the eclipse totality by some unknown, but potentially large, amount. When the  wobble reduced once more to normal, the rate of spin would speed up, to compensate,  so that the maverick eclipses above were generally able to occur on the right days,  or near enough.
Latitude Fixes
The Alexandria astronomer, Hipparchus, was an inveterate latitude fixer and what he  discovered, not long before 128 BC, was that his observations of star positions  differed from those made just over a century earlier by Eratosthenes. Under normal  precession conditions, the geographical shift in the star positions, over that  interval, would have been 1 - 2º. Not great, but probably measurable. As a result  of these findings Hipparchus is credited with identification of Precession of the  Equinoxes, although precession was probably

3 The analogy of a spinning top is useful although not fully accurate since a top  is subject to friction at the “south pole”. Nonetheless, most of us would have  witnessed how the rate of spin of the top slows when the top is precessing and then  speeds up again when the top assumes steady state spin.

the last thing on his mind. (Allegedly, the discrepancies between his observations  and those of Eratosthenes annoyed him more than anything else.) The other thing  that probably annoyed him was that the latitudes he obtained from solar  observations – which are unaffected by precession - also differed from those made  by Eratosthenes. They also differ from the established latitudes of today; some are  lower, some are higher. (One wonders whether he would have been annoyed had he  known that would happen.)
One example of the discrepancies:- Born in Marseille, Hipparchus placed its  latitude on the same latitude as Byzantium (Istanbul, today). A parallel of  latitude through both locations is shown in Figure 4. The one by Hipparchus  deviates from today’s parallel of latitude by an angle of about 4º and it would put  the North Pole near the northern tip of Russia (Bol’shevik Is), outside the limits  of the modern permanent pack ice and some 1000-1500 km from its present location.
If Hipparchus was correct in his interpretation, one could suggest several  explanations for the discrepancy. Let’s get the first possibility out of the way:  that associated with any form of continental drift. The rate of movement implied by  a shift of the Hipparchus' North Pole to the North Pole of today is about ten  thousand times faster than any motion proposed for mobile plates. A second  explanation – and one favoured by many modern astronomers – is that the maverick  latitudes recorded by Hipparchus and Eratosthenes are the result of faulty  observations.
Figure 4 The Mediterranean showing today's parallels of Latitude (35º and 40º N)  compared to that of Hipparchus, the top line of Latitude, running from Marseille to  Byzantium (Istanbul)
This claim of faulty observations is sometimes made despite the fact that  Hipparchus was probably the most celebrated observational astronomer in  Alexandria's history and most of his other observations have been taken as  satisfactory. A third explanation is that the mode of spin of the Earth was subject  to some form of change during the period - whether an increased but transient form  of precessional wobble or whether some other form of polar wander is an open  question.4 Here, fortunately, we are able to call on the findings of Copernicus,  just over a millennium and a half after the Alexandrian data.
Copernicus, a monk in Poland in the 16th C, was a former professor of maths in  Rome, where the astronomical data from Alexandria and also that from many centuries  of observations made at Babylon were kept. Copernicus was given possession of the  data, to find out what it all revealed. There was, allegedly, growing gossip from  the Middle East on the topic of heliocentricity and it obviously would have been in  the church's interests to muzzle such gossip. So one might now wonder whether it  had been Rome's intention for Copernicus to come up with the firm conclusion that  Aristotle and Ptolemy were correct: the Earth did really

4 The sorts of change in the Earth's mode of spin, interpreted by the author though  analysis of the sun-worship alignments of megalithic monuments in N.W. Europe,  James (1993), suggests that significant changes in precession were probably  involved. Incidentally, a similar conclusion was reached in a study of megalithic  monuments in Siberia, Gregoriev (2011).

stand at the centre of the universe. But, if that was the intention, it all came  unstuck. Copernicus turned out to be as honest as he was conscientious and he found  that what had been preached for a millennium and a half was incorrect; the centre  of our part of the universe was the sun, not the Earth. That finding was, indeed, a  burn-at-the-stake number at the time but Copernicus avoided punishment, firstly by  dedicating his book to the Pope and, secondly, by not allowing its publication  until after his death.
Copernicus, in his research, identified that the phenomenon Hipparchus had noted  was indeed Precession of the Equinoxes and a century later Newton was able to  explain it as being caused by the differential pull of the sun and the moon on the  Earth’s equatorial bulge. Precession of the Equinoxes has since been accepted as  immutable, but it seems to be less known – or less mentioned - that Copernicus also  identified changes in this rate of precession. From the time of Eratosthenes (3rd C  BC) to Ptolemy (2nd C AD), the rate of Precession of the Equinoxes was more than  30% slower than from the time of Ptolemy until late in the 1st Millennium AD.  Indeed, this fits the proposal given above on the role played by the conservation  of angular momentum: the slower precessional period would have occurring during the  same period as the maverick eclipses and maverick latitude fixes were recorded at  Alexandria. Moreover, the post-Ptolemy rate up until about the time of the last  maverick eclipse in Germany was marginally higher than today’s.
Further discussion on the topic of precessional wobbles during the second and third  millennia BC is available in a study made of the megalithic alignments of north  west Europe by the writer, James (ibid).
4 Distribution of the Earth's Water Veneer
The point of the above astronomical peregrination has been to lead into the role  that changes in the Earth's mode of spin might play in the distribution of the  Earth's water veneer.
Every point on the earth’s surface is subject to centripetal accelerations, by dint  of the Earth’s rotation. Points along the equator experience the maximum and  magnitude decreases with the effective radius of rotation (latitude) to become  virtually zero at the poles. The centrifugal forces are, of course, relatively  minor in relation to gravity since we do not notice any significant changes when  crossing the latitudes. However, the same need not be entirely true for the oceans.  If the Earth were a smooth spherical body, but otherwise identical to its present  shape, mass, and rate of rotation, the forces of rotation would cause the water  veneer to amass at the equator and drain away from the poles. To a first  approximation, this effect can be quantified by equating the kinetic and potential  energy involved, neglecting secondary effects such as minor changes in gravity with  latitude, tidal and frictional effects. The height to which a column of water would  rise at any latitude would thus be given by
Potential energy, m.g.h = Kinetic energy, ½ m.v2
Or h = v2 / 2g
Where h = height of water column
g = gravitational constant
v = angular velocity, ω . r
The term ω equals 2 π r per 24 hours where r is the effective radius of spin: zero  at the poles and a maxim at the equator. If one inserts end values into the above  equation, the results are:
Height of a column of water at the pole: 0 km
Height of a column of water at the equator: 11.9 km
This variation in depth sounds large, but if the Earth were the size of a 30 cm  diameter desk globe, the difference would amount to little more than the thickness  of good quality notepaper. Such a distribution of water on a spherical Earth does,  however, assume that there is adequate water to cover the full surface area and, if  so, the distribution would look something like Curve A on Figure 5. The actual  distribution of the oceans is, of course, quite different and more orthogonal in  shape, line B.
It might be noted by inspection that the actual ocean volume under line B is  considerably less than under the hypothetical Curve A. This means that, if the  Earth were spherical, the present ocean volumes would be insufficient to cover the  whole surface and the higher latitudes would probably be dry. Curve Ci might then  give a better illustration of this hypothetical distribution of the water veneer on  a spherical Earth. In practice, of course, the Earth body itself should adjust to  these same rotational forces producing the equatorial bulge and polar flattening and this would obviously play a large part in producing the regular oceanic distribution indicated by Line B.
Figure 5. Relationship between theoretical distribution of water on a spherical  Earth. Curve A, with the actual distribution something like Line B, indicating a  much smaller volume. The volume equivalent to Line B on the hypothetical spherical  Earth is shown as Curve Ci, and the effect of a hypothetical shift of 20 º in the  poles on the distribution of the oceans is shown as Curve Cii.
The “deficient” oceanic volume is important for the polar wander model. For, if  some form of polar wander were to take place, changing the pattern of centripetal  forces, there would be an immediate response from the seas. Water would attempt to  amass at the new equatorial location(s) although nodal positions are unlikely to be  affected to any great extent. Water would also tend to drain away from the new  polar areas, so that the old polar areas would suffer inundation. The effect can be  roughly predicted for a sphere, Curve Cii, but the Earth's major geoidal features  such as the equatorial bulge and the zones of polar flattening, with the further  complication of continental bulwarks, makes the picture more complicated.
Nonetheless, even with the present shape of the Earth, the two C-Curves suggest  there would be an immediate – and significant - response from the water veneer  associated with any form of polar wander. Possibly, in time, the major geoidal  features of the Earth body itself would adjust to the changes. It would no doubt  take longer for a new equatorial bulge and new polar flattening zones to develop  but, when this happened, one could expect that ocean levels should more or less  return to their previous datum. How long this adjustment would take is a matter for  further consideration.
This explanation for massive sea level changes now needs some observational back- up. Large scale lowering of sea levels in the geological past is now likely to be  covered by deep oceans, so the most obvious place to begin a search for clues on  sea level lowering would be in the deep ocean environment where two promising areas  of investigation are available: the findings from deep sea drilling program and the  ubiquitous presence of submarine valleys and abyssal sediment fans. Evidence of  past sea levels elevations could easily be removed by ongoing erosion processes,  but there are still clues available as set out below. Firstly, let us deal with the  case of massive sea level lowering.
5 Deep Sea Drilling Results
Much of the DSDP program has been aimed at supporting plate tectonics predictions  so that information relevant to sea level change is largely fortuitous.  Nonetheless, boreholes drilled in the deep ocean, hundreds of kilometres from land,  have recovered evapourites, coarse sediments, terriginous materials, wood and even  leaves. To date, all these items – except for the evaporites - have typically been  labelled the result of turbidity current activity, despite the fact that this has  typically meant stretching the known principles of hydraulics past breaking point.  Selected boreholes are quoted below.

Borehole 156 (Galapagos area). Basalt met at a depth of 2.5 km below the surface of  the ocean was found to be oxidized, indicating exposure to air, either by sea level  change or massive subsidence of the land in this locality. Or perhaps some new way  of producing oxidation of rock under deep water? Incidentally, the exploration  program associated with this borehole revealed that the sea floor in this  equatorial region is deeply dissected and eroded in an east-west direction.
Borehole 240, recovered land detritus and reef material within sand deposits in the  upper stratigraphic units. This was drilled in the Indian Ocean, some 500 km from  the equatorial African coast, in water of some 5 km depth.
Borehole 518 recorded an erosional unconformity at the Miocene/Pliocene boundary,  revealing that the region was then either dry or at least a shallow water domain.  It is now at some 4 km depth and the unconformity is overlain by deep water  sediments.
Borehole 217, drilled in deep water on the 90º E Ridge, recovered Cretaceous Age  sediments containing dried out mud cracks.
Borehole 661, drilled in the Atlantic off Africa’s north west coastline,  encountered a deposit of Cretaceous anhydrite. Evaporites are indicative of a  shallow, enclosed, tropical basin and such deposits also occur in the Mediterranean  which is known to have been dry on a couple of occasions. Such deposits have also  been recorded the Red Sea. Now, they have been found in the ocean depths.
6 Submarine Valleys
Underwater canyons and valleys are present in all the world’s seas and oceans and  almost ninety percent of them can be traced back to existing drainage systems on  land, although sometimes the linkage is disturbed or lost where the former drainage  system crosses the continental shelf. Normally, however, it can be picked up once  more on the continental slope, from where a majority of submarine valleys continue  on down to the abyssal plains. Here, in water depths that can range up to four  kilometres or more, large alluvial-type fans have been deposited.
In their systems, submarine valleys exhibit most of the major characteristics of  terrestrial drainage systems: gorges cut in the hard rock of the continental  slopes; tributaries; distinct bedding; incised drainage patterns in the surfaces of  the alluvial fans. All these features would normally be seen as the result of  gravitational forces and hydraulic gradients that are in operation only above sea  level. Indeed, according to Shepard and Dill in their classic tome on Submarine  Valleys and Other Sea Valleys (1966), the most logical explanation to fit all the  submarine valley features would be a drowned river origin: that is to say, valleys  formed in the manner of normal terrestrial rivers and then subsequently submerged.  However, they jibbed at the idea of such massive drops in sea level.
Many oceanographers also jib at the idea of massive sea level changes and look for  alternative explanations such as turbidity currents, despite the fact that no one  has ever successfully demonstrated how an intermittent and superficial turbidity  current, acting under water without the power of hydraulic gradients, is able to  erode a massive canyon in hard rock. There is another problem with the turbidity  current premise. Turbidity currents are currents supercharged with sediments, which  sediments they tend to drop on the run, as it were, as their velocity reduces after  leaving the continental slope. This process produces graded deposits: initially  gravels or gravelly sands, grading out into sands and then into silts as one  progresses out from the base of a continental slope. However, sediments deposited  in the abyssal fans typically exhibit defined bedding planes, as found in  terrestrial streams.
Examples of submarine valleys are given below to illustrate the above arguments,  starting with the submarine valleys of the Mediterranean Sea, which is known to  have been dry on a couple of occasions, the last time being dated at around five  million years ago.5 The Mediterranean therefore provides no problem with regard to  a drowned river origin. Canyons in the Mediterranean are also quite frequent, with  some significant ones being extensions of the Rhone. Another occurs beneath the  mouth of the Nile, running from

5 Although Greek mythology does speak of a more recent occasion when Hyperion, the  sun god, was persuaded to let his incompetent nephew drive the sun chariot across  the sky. The unruly steeds became uncontrollable and the chariot crashed to earth,  causing the Mediterranean to boil dry and the Ethiopians to turn black.

the ground surface near Memphis and deepening down to the base of the Mediterranean  at some distance out to sea. This canyon is now infilled to form the Nile Delta.
Precipitous canyons are present around the island of Corsica, beginning not far  above present sea level as little more than notches in the present-day rocky  coastline. That is, there is no potential here for any turbidity current activity.  Below sea level, however, the notches develop rapidly into canyons in the hard rock  and, in this form, continue down to the base of the sea at several kilometres  depth. The sediment loads of shallow water materials, such as sea grass, have been  spilt out onto the sea floor as a small fan deposits.
The morphology of the drowned Mediterranean canyons can now be compared with other  submarine canyons present in the major oceans, where the removal of the much larger  bodies of water is less easy to explain.
The east coast of Sri Lanka has several canyons, the largest being the Trincomalee  Canyon extending off the country’s largest river, the Mahaweli. This canyon runs a  twisting, precipitous course in a V-shaped valley that has cut its way down through  hard pre-Cambrian granites and quartzites to a final oceanic depth of around 4-5  km, some 60 km out from the land. Now, the Mahaweli ("Big Sand") River has the  potential to carry a reasonable sediment load and hence an origin related to  turbidity currents has sometimes been proffered to explain its impressive gorge in  hard rock. But the Trincomalee Canyon is not alone on the east coast of Sri Lanka.  There are several more canyons to the south, each of similar magnitude and each  eroded into hard rock. But, in these instances, there is no major river at the head  of the canyons and no potential for any large sediment load to call on, if one were  considering a turbidity current origin. The logical solution is to accept that, at  some stage in the geological history of the region, the sea level in this part of  the Indian Ocean was four kilometres lower than it is today. This is not as absurd  as it first sounds.
Travelling east into the Bay of Bengal, supporting evidence for the above  interpretation is to be found in the Bengal submarine system. This voluminous  system extends out from the mouth of the Ganges River, firstly as discrete canyons  in the rock of the continental slope, then as a meandering and braided network of  valleys incised in a huge sediment fan, which stretches south for a distance of  2,500 km from the Ganges mouth, Figure 6.
Figure 6. The submarine valley system of the Bay of Bengal. Elongate shaded areas  represent incised channels in the sediment fan.
The presence of coarse layers within the predominant silts of the fan indicates  that there have been four major pulses of sedimentation, ranging in age from the  Cretaceous, though the Miocene and Pliocene, to the Quaternary. The youngest  deposit, of Pleistocene Age, is overlain by deep sea ooze. This, in itself, is a  prime example of changes in the relative elevations of land and sea.

The present-day ocean depths over the length of the fan increase from about 3 km in  the north to almost 5 km in the south. This represents a sea bed gradient of less  than 1 : 1000. Attempting to explain the origin of this extensive and almost flat  sediment fan by turbidity current activity is beyond any known principles of  hydraulics: particularly when one is asking the turbidity currents to deposit their  extensive sediments in horizontally bedded sequences. The turbidity current origin  becomes even less attractive when one is asking deep ocean currents to erode major  channels in the surface of the fan, under water, at gradients of 1 : 1000, or less.  If the above objections to are not enough to reject the idea of a turbidity current  origin, the proposal can be seen as even more fatuous when DSDP Borehole 217,  located on the 90 º Ridge, recovered Cretaceous muds with drying cracks.
Examples of abyssal fans in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans further confirm the  drowned river origin.
The Congo submarine valley, at 6º S, begins some 20 km up from the mouth and can be  traced some 400 km out to sea. Features of this system include major underwater  tributaries and a sediment fan at depth containing, as in the case of the Bengal  fan, incised channels, with the added feature of levees and sand grains with  hematite coatings. Admittedly, the hematite coatings could have been formed before  the sands were transported out into the ocean. However, twigs have also been  recovered from these same deep sea sediments, which does suggest that the upper  levels of the sediment fan are quite recent as well as being terrestrial in origin.  The base of the Congo abyssal fan is Cretaceous in age, as is the Bengal fan, and  rests on evaporite deposits, which presents another indicator of shallow water that  was itself drying out.
The submarine valley systems off either coastline of North America are also  instructive with regard to origin. Starting with the west coast, submarine valleys  occur from Canada to the Mexican border: the Quinault, Grays, Willapa, Colombia,  Astoria, Delgada et al. All are unequivocally sited off the mouths of terrestrial  streams, except possibly the Delgada, which is located just south of Cape Mendocino  where a branch of the San Andreas Fault is tangential to the coast. The Deep Sea  Drilling Program nonetheless found fresh water diatoms and wood of Pleistocene age  in 4.5 km depth of water on the distal parts of this Delagda fan. Again, the  structure of all these canyons appears to be independent of the size of the  counterpart terrestrial stream, on land. Sharp contacts between beds of mud and  sand are again typical, a situation that once more rules out a turbidity current  origin.
The Eel Canyon, of northern California, has poignant example of terrestrial  behaviour: a detour around a sea floor high, as a normal terrestrial stream might  do, Figure 7.
Figure 7. The Eel submarine valley detours around a topographical high.
The largest canyon on the west coast, one which rivals the Grand Canyon in relief,  begins in Monterey Bay, Figure 8. It is joined on its descent to the abyssal plain  by two large tributary canyons related to The Carmel and the Santa Cruz Rivers.  These tributary canyons form hanging valleys at the junctions, a probable  indication vertical movements associated with the San Andreas Fault, Martin (1992).  The Monterey Canyon also crosses a major feature sympathetic to the main alignment  of the San Andreas Fault, as shown on the figure. At this point the canyon contains  Pliocene age sediments. One would think that, if the San Andreas Fault has been  moving as a transform fault since the Pliocene – at the ongoing rates imputed to it  by plate tectonics dogma - there should now be a large kink in this canyon’s trace,  with a displacement of a couple of hundred kilometres. There is no obvious  indication of any such lateral movement.

Figure 8. Monterey Canyon. Both the Soquel and Carmel junctions occur as hanging  valleys and weathered granite occurs near the Carmel junction, at 2km depth. Large  gravels are present in the distal fan.
At almost 2 km depth, weathered granites are exposed in the main canyon wall,  Martin (64). At 3 km depth, near the far end of the canyon’s sediment fan, gravels  up to 7 cm in diameter have been deposited. Again, one could not realistically  expect these to have been moved by deep sea currents which seldom attain velocities  in excess of one knot. Nor, indeed, is such a deposit concordant with the activity  of turbidity currents from the distant continental slope.
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On the opposite coast of North America, there is a similar sequence of submarine  canyons in the Atlantic Ocean although those of the Atlantic are typically longer  than those of the Pacific. For instance, the Amazon Canyon continues up almost as  far as Puerto Rico while one of the world's largest examples is to be found in the  Bahamas: a length of some 200 km with side walls several kilometres in height at  the surprisingly steep inclinations of 9 - 12º. Its valley floor, at depths of 4 –  5 km, is flat and not composed of deep sea oozes as might be expected, but of  cobbles and boulder deposits interbedded with sands. The sands sometimes exhibit  current bedding, typical of shallow water deposition.
The Hudson Canyon contains sedimentary sequences ranging down though the Recent and  Pleistocene to the Pliocene/Miocene transition. Cobbles, gravels and shallow water  shells have been found along the channel floor, now at 3.5 km depth. The longest of  the North Atlantic features is the Mid-Ocean Submarine Valley, which starts off  between Canada and Greenland and continues down the abyssal plain. Shallow water  Tertiary deposits are present along its length, overlying Cretaceous sediments that  appear to have been deposited in sequences. DSDP Borehole 185 encountered Pliocene  beds resting unconformably on older sediments along this feature.
A final example comes from Hawaii. Here, submarine canyons are to be found off the  precipitous and rocky coastline, as in Corsica. And, as in Corsica, there is no  obvious source of sediment to produce turbidity currents. The canyons are typically  located below erosion notches in the steep basalt terrains and they continue at  relatively constant gradients of 100 metres per kilometre to depths of almost 2 km.  Sequences of discrete clay beds, overlain by gravels and subsequently by coarse  sands, have been recovered from depths of 1 km, together with shallow water shells.  Pleistocene reefs have also been found at depths of 2 km on the Hawaiian slopes.  Elsewhere, it has been argued by the author that subsidence of a sea mount is not a  factor to be considered in explaining occurrences of this nature.
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Further evidence for large sea level changes comes from Barbados, where a Tertiary  coal deposit is overlain by globigerina ooze. That is, in order to produce  conditions for the deposition of the proto-coal formation, a once shallow and  subtropical freshwater environment existed during the Tertiary. This zone then  found itself in a deep ocean environment for a period long enough to allow the  deposition of ooze. After its spell at the bottom of the ocean, the area was then "uplifted" above sea level once more. All  this happened in the last 10 – 12 Ma. Barbados lies close to the Caribbean Plate  boundary and this is sometimes used as a self-sufficient explanation for the  massive environmental changes. But, if land subsidence/uplift is proposed, it would  mean complete reversibility in the crust, at an on-going rate of at least 1 mm per  year, the sort of rate measured for local uplifts in active volcanic regions. There  is really no evidence for preferring oscillation of the land over the simpler  oscillation in sea level - except a long standing prejudice against the latter. A  similar geological situation has been recorded in Indonesia, where deep sea  radiolarian ooze again occurs above sea level, sandwiched between shallow water  Tertiary sediments. Thus, the Barbados case is not unique.
7 Elevated Sea Levels
On a model of sea level change related to the mode of spin of the Earth, one should  expect that if there were low sea levels in one part of the globe there should be  compensatory high sea levels in another part. Evidence of high sea levels is,  unfortunately, less likely to be preserved owing to the normal erosion processes on  land. Often, it is the case that many ambiguous inferences of high sea levels tend  to be dismissed. For instance, on the Malayan Peninsula, erosion platforms at  elevations of 200m or more in post-Tertiary granites have been reported by the  geological survey, but this is seldom quoted and, as often, is dismissed. Elevated  beach strands and gravel beds occur at numerous locations around the world but tend  to be explained by isostatic uplifts - or, more often these days, tend to get  tainted by the claim of "tsunami" if the site is in view of a body of water. This  has been the fate of elevated wave cut platforms on the east coast of Australia and  also in the north west of the country.
A similar wave cut feature at 300m elevation in Hawaii has also been claimed as the  product of a tsunami, which is stretching the bounds of credulity. For, a start, it  would be the experience of most people who have visited the sites of tsunami  events, that these leave little or no geological trace of their passing, at least  not in the form of semi-permanent features such as wave cut platforms in rock.  Additionally, the highest tsunami waves recorded during events like Krakatau are  around 30 m and this in shallow waters. Out in the open ocean, nothing more than  around 10% of this height has ever been recorded.
On the Canadian prairie, there is a different situation. The Saskatchewan Gravels  are difficult to explain by any other mechanism than a high sea level stand. The  age of the gravel deposition has been suggested as tertiary, Hunt (1990), but is  not known with any certainty. The gravels have been deposited up to a kilometre and  a half above the present day sea level and occur with the configuration of a very  long beach strand that extends from just below the Canada-USA border (to the south  east off Medicine Hat, at Lat 48º, Long 109º) and stretches north to cross the  Alberta-Saskatchewan border at Lloydminster (east of Edmonton). From there, the  strand bends slightly northwest, passing through Fort Vermilian and it continues  for another couple of hundred kilometres to the Arctic Circle. The "gravels" are  immediately recognisable, comprising a predominance of spherical pre-Cambrian  quartzite cobbles, like startlingly white cannon balls.
The total length of the broadcast exceeds a thousand kilometres and there is a  gradual drop in elevation (approximately 1 : 1000) to the north, that is, towards  the Pole.6
The broadcast has been explained by one authority, Hunt (ibid), as the result of  massive a tsunami following a major meteorite impact. However, as already  mentioned, the geomorphology better fits an origin of continued wave action at a  high sea level, forming a long beach strand. Incidentally, the same white cannon  balls are also to be found on the western side of the Rocky Mountain Cordillera, in  Canada, notably near Revelstoke where a huge accumulation of white cannon balls has  been heaped up beside a river bend. So perhaps there are other factors involved.  The author has also found scattered evidence of the same white cannon balls in road  cuttings south from Revelstoke, as far down as the USA border, at approximately  Long. 119.5º.
Perhaps the best examples of high wave-cut platforms are to be found along the  Pacific coastline of South America. Termed tablazos, these monolithic-type  structures stand as isolated coastal plateaux extending from Peru to Tierra del  Fuego. The features were first recorded in scientific literature by Charles Darwin  and have been subsequently discussed by Sheppard (1927) and others. Horizontal  marine sediments cap most tablazos

6 Interestingly, the strand line of what was once presumably a horizontal lake  surface of Lake Titicaca, now exhibits a gradual drop in elevation (approx. 1 :  2500) towards the Pole - according to today's geodetic standards.

and these have been variably dated from Pliocene to Recent, De Vries (1988),  Cantalamessa and Di Celma (2004). Tablazo elevations in excess of 300 m occur in  the north but the elevations gradually decrease in height to the south. This  inclination has been attributed to uneven uplift of South America. But, the view of  isostatic readjustment has been refuted quantitatively by the writer, James (2007),  and in South America it also lacks any convincing evidence in the profiles of the  rivers on either the east or west coastlines.
Charles Darwin, when in Patagonia on the Atlantic side of South America, was  interested in the wide, almost horizontal, pampas plains that would be periodically  truncated on their eastern side by steep cliff faces sometimes approaching a  hundred metres in height. He surveyed one alignment and estimated an overall  elevation drop, from the foothills of the Andes to the Atlantic Ocean, of less than  two hundred metres: an average slope of the order of 1:5000 to 1:2500. Shells of  Recent appearance were common on the flat pampas surfaces and Darwin presumed that  the "steps" (or relic sea cliffs) had been formed as a result of uplift of the  land. The assumed uplift would make it slightly less than the elevation of the  Tablazos on the other side of the Andes, but there is no reason to assume that this  is the result of land uplift any more than it is to assume the topography was  formed by a slowly subsiding sea level, after a period of sea level elevation. The  latter explanation is again suggested to be more fitting when it comes to very much  larger changes in the land/sea relationships, posed by Lake Titicaca and the  associated Altiplano, and also by the Great Missoula Floods. These two enigmatic  phenomena have been treated in detail by the author elsewhere, James (2011) and  (2008) respectively, and are not pursued herein.
AUTHOR'S NOTE. The above essay is intended to pave the way for a following  submission on what might be labelled "global cataclysms": a prime mechanism of  extinction events.