Arctic East Siberia had a lower latitude in the Pleistocene

In Arctic East Siberia many remains of mammoths have been found. In this region there is not sufficient sunlight over the year to allow for the growth of the plants on which these animals feed. Consequently the latitude of these regions must have been lower before the end of the Pleistocene than at present. It is a challenge to reconstruct this geographic shift of the poles in a manner compa- tible with known facts. A possible sequence of events is described here. It as- sumes an additional planet, which must since have disappeared. This is possible, if it moved in an extremely eccentric orbit and was hot as a result of tidal work and solar radiation. During a few million years evaporation of this planet led to a disk-shaped cloud of ions moving around the Sun. This cloud partially shielded the Earth from the solar radiation, producing the alteration of cold and warm periods characterizing the Pleistocene. The degree of shielding is sensitive to the inclination of Earth's orbit, which has a period of 100000 years. Two cloud structures are discussed. The first is small and steady. The other builds up to a point where inelastic collisions between particles induce its collapse The resulting near-periodic time dependence of the shielding re- sembles that of Dansgaard-Oeschger events. The Pleistocene came to an end when the additional planet had a close encounter with the Earth, whereby the Earth suffered a one permil extensional deformation. While this deformation relaxed to an equilibrium shape in a time of one to several years, the globe turned relative to the rotation axis: The North Pole moved from Greenland to the Arctic Sea. The additional planet split into fragments, which subsequently evaporated. Simple estimates are used here for the characterization of the complex processes; more elaborate studies are required.Comment: 10 pages, LaTex, Typing error corrected in list of author

Traditions connected with the pole shift model of the Pleistocene

As is well known, during the Last Glacial Maximum, about 20'000 years ago, the ice was asymmetrically distributed around the present North Pole. It reached the region of New York, while east Siberia remained ice free. Mammoths lived in arctic regions of east Siberia, where now their food cannot grow. Therefore the globe must have been turned in such a way that the North Pole was in Greenland. The required rapid geographic pole shift at the end of the ice ages has been shown to be physically possible, on condition that an astronomical object of planetary size in an extremely eccentric orbit existed. In this postulated situation it was red hot and a disk shaped gas cloud reduced the solar radiation on Earth in a time dependent way. A frequent objection to this hypothesis is that the phenomena should be reported in old traditions. This paper quotes such traditions from passages of Platon, Herodotus, Ovid, papyrus Ipuwer, Gilgamesh, the Bible, American Indians and other civilizations. Far from being exhaustive the examples show that apparently strange traditions can report observed facts. This connection is of mutual benefit for science and humanities