Earth in Upheaval Read online

  New, unchanged edition (2009).

  The supplement to the original edition, an address by Immanuel Velikovsky delivered before the Graduate College Forum of Princeton University, titled »Worlds in Collision in the Light of Recent Finds in Archaeology, Geology, and Astronomy«, is omitted here. It will be published elsewhere within the new edition of Immanuel Velikovsky’s works.

  Notes by the publisher are marked by { }.

  Original edition (1955) by Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York

  Copyright © by Shulamit V. Kogan and

  Ruth V. Sharon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner, except by reviewers who may quote brief passages to be printed in a magazine or newspaper.

  Published by

  Paradigma Ltd.

  Internet: www.paradigma-publishing.com

  e-mail: [email protected]

  ISBN: 978-1-906833-12-1 (printed edition)

  978-1-906833-72-5 (ebook edition)

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Publisher’s Preface

  Preface 1977

  Preface 1955

  Chapter 1 In the North

  In Alaska

  The Ivory Islands

  Chapter 2 Revolution

  The Erratic Boulders

  Sea and Land Changed Places

  The Caves of England

  The Aquatic Graveyards

  Chapter 3 Uniformity

  The Doctrine of Uniformity

  The Hippopotamus

  Icebergs

  Darwin in South America

  Chapter 4 Ice

  The Birth of the Ice Age Theory

  On the Russian Plains

  Ice Age in the Tropics

  Greenland

  Corals of the Polar Regions

  Whales in the Mountains

  Chapter 5 Tidal Wave

  Fissures in the Rocks

  The Norfolk Forest-Bed

  Cumberland Cavern

  In Northern China

  The Asphalt Pit of La Brea

  Agate Spring Quarry

  Chapter 6 Mountains and Rifts

  Mountain Thrusts in the Alps and Elsewhere

  The Himalayas

  The Siwalik Hills

  Tiahuanacu in the Andes

  The Columbia Plateau

  A Continent Torn Apart

  Chapter 7 Deserts and Oceans

  The Sahara

  Arabia

  The Carolina Bays

  The Bottom of the Atlantic

  The Floor of the Seas

  Chapter 8 Poles Displaced

  The Cause of the Ice Ages

  Shifting Poles

  The Sliding Continents

  The Changing Orbit

  The Rotating Crust

  Chapter 9 Axis Shifted

  Earth in a Vise

  Evaporating Oceans

  Condensation

  A Working Hypothesis

  Ice and Tide

  Magnetic Poles Reversed

  Volcanoes, Earthquakes, Comets

  Chapter 10 Thirty-five Centuries Ago

  Clock Unwound

  The Glacial Lake Agassiz

  Niagara Falls

  The Rhone Glacier

  The Mississippi

  Fossils in Florida

  Lakes of the Great Basin and the End of the Ice Age

  Chapter 11 Klimasturz

  Klimasturz

  Tree Rings

  Lake Dwellings

  Dropped Ocean Level

  The North Sea

  Chapter 12 The Ruins of the East

  Crete

  Troy

  The Ruins of the East

  Times and Dates

  Chapter 13 Collapsing Schemes

  Geology and Archaeology

  Collapsing Schemes

  In Early Ages

  Coal

  Chapter 14 Extinction

  Fossils

  Footprints

  The Caverns

  Extinction

  Chapter 15 Cataclysmic Evolution

  Catastrophism and Evolution

  The Geological Record and Changing Forms of Life

  The Mechanism of Evolution

  Mutations and New Species

  Cataclysmic Evolution

  Chapter 16 The End

  Closing Remarks

  Bibliography

  Around the Subject

  Acknowledgments

  Working on Earth in Upheaval I have incurred a debt of gratitude to several scientists.

  Professor Walter S. Adams, for many years director of Mount Wilson Observatory, gave me all the information and instruction for which I asked concerning the atmospheres of the planets, a field in which he is the outstanding authority. On my visit to the solar observatory in Pasadena, California, and in our correspondence he has shown a fine spirit of scientific cooperation.

  The late Dr. Albert Einstein, during the last eighteen months of his life (November 1953 – April 1955), gave me much of his time and thought. He read several of my manuscripts and supplied them with marginal notes. Of Earth in Upheaval he read chapters VIII through XII; he made handwritten comments on this and other manuscripts and spent not a few long afternoons and evenings, often till midnight, discussing and debating with me the implications of my theories. In the last weeks of his life he reread Worlds in Collision and read also three files of “memoirs” on that book and its reception, and expressed his thoughts in writing. We started at opposite points; the area of disagreement, as reflected in our correspondence, grew ever smaller, and though at his death (our last meeting was nine days before his passing) there remained clearly defined points of disagreement, his stand then demonstrated the evolution of his opinion in the space of eighteen months.

  Professor Waldo S. Glock, Chairman of the Department of Geology at Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota, a recognized authority in dendrochronology (dating of tree rings), with the help of his graduate students searched the literature pertaining to the tree rings of early ages, and also gave me answers to questions in his field.

  Dr. H. Manley of the Imperial College, London, Professor P. L. Mercanton of the University of Lausanne, and Professor E. Thellier of the Observatoire Géophysique of the University of Paris, gave me freely of their knowledge in the field of geomagnetism and sent me reprints of their works.

  Professor Lloyd Motz of the Department of Astronomy at Columbia University, New York, never tired of testing mathematically and of commenting on various problems in electromagnetism and in celestial mechanics which I offered for discussion.

  Dr. T. E. Nikulins, geologist in Caracas, Venezuela, repeatedly drew my attention to various publications in the scientific press that might be of help to me; he supplied me with the source dealing with the discovery of the stone and bronze ages in northeastern Siberia.

  Professor George McCready Price, geologist in California, read an early draft of various chapters of this work. Between this octogenarian, author of several books on geology written from the fundamentalist point of view, and myself, there are some points of agreement and as many of disagreement. The main one among the latter is that while Price is opposed to the very theory of evolution and is supported in his disbelief by the fact that since the scientific age no new animal species have been observed to emerge, I offer in the concluding chapters of this book (“Extinction” and “Cataclysmic Evolution”) a radical solution of the problem.

  With Professor Richardson of the Illinois Institute of Technology I spent several day
s discussing a few problems in physics and geophysics.

  With no one do I share the responsibility for my work; to everyone who gave me a helpful hand while the atmosphere in academic circles was generally charged with animosity, I express here my gratitude.

  To my daughters,

  Shulamit and Ruth

  Publisher’s Preface

  When a book is republished after half a century at first you certainly think of antiquarian, maybe literary, or perhaps historical interest. With the books of Immanuel Velikovsky it is a different case. Their topicality and explosiveness has rather increased since their first publication – in disciplines diverse as geology, anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, classical studies, Egyptology, theology, psychology and also in theory of science. Because in all these disciplines the first publication of his books provoked controversies unprecedented in the history of science since Galileo. At the same time recent findings mainly in earth and planetary sciences have confirmed his results and conclusions in a really impressive manner.

  There are only a few books which – like the present one – preserve their topicality even after half a century without any changes in its text. We consider it all the more important to let the works of Immanuel Velikovsky speak for themselves and to republish them without any omissions or additions. In this way the original work with its revolutionizing contents and its unique style will be made available to the interested readers – scientists and laymen alike – and so hopefully the unbiased interdisciplinary scientific discussion about Velikovsky’s theories will be supported after being long overdue.

  Science should increase our knowledge. In the first place this includes the open and serious discussion of facts and theories, their study, research and – if necessary – the adjustment of the methods and paradigms to the facts, not vice versa. In this respect the study of Velikovsky’s works, and above all the history of their acceptance in academic circles, can teach us a lot about our understanding of science and from a psychological point of view about our understanding of ourselves.

  Summing up, we are convinced that the republication of the complete works of Immanuel Velikovsky can give fundamental impulses for numerous, very diverse fields of knowledge, for science in general as well as for the view of the world of our society – and at the same time lead to a proper appreciation of the life’s work of a man who, searching for knowledge and enlightenment, was personally as well as professionally confronted with the most devastating reactions.

  Paradigma Ltd.

  Preface 1977

  (to the paperback edition of Earth in Upheaval)

  Over twenty years have passed since this work first saw the ink of print and the light of a bookstore display. In these intervening years the clock of unraveling science ticked ever more swiftly, and man’s penetration into the mysteries of space had the aura of revelation.

  The face of the earth, the face of the solar system, the sight of our galaxy and of the universe beyond, all changed from serene and placid to embattled and convulsed. The earth is no abode for peaceful evolution for eons uncounted, or counted in billions of years, with mountain building all finished by the Tertiary, with no greater event in millions of years than the fall of a large meteorite, with a prescribed orbit, unchanging calendar, unchanging latitudes, sediment accumulating slowly with the precision of an apothecary scale, with a few riddles unsolved but assured of solution in the very same frame of a solar system, with planets on their permanent orbits with satellites moving with a better-than-clock precision, with tides coming in time, and seasons in their order, a perfect stage for the competition of species; the spider and worm and fish and bird and mammal all evolved solely by means of competition among individuals and between species, from the common ancestor, a unicellular living creature.

  Man was scheduled for a rude awakening from such a blissful and paradisiacal dream. Whereas not long ago he reproached himself for being a warlike disturber in a peaceful nature, he found himself only imitating aggressive and explosive nature; whereas he relegated the vision of such convulsions into the realm of transcendent and esoteric beliefs – of Satan and Lucifer and the end of the world – he was awakening to find real indices of the awesome past of his mother earth, ash of extraneous origin covering the ground under her water expanse, a ridge split by a deep canyon encompassing the oceans, bearing evidence of an enormous torque in the embrace of which the earth shuddered, her poles repeatedly reversed, and also wandering; her little sister in this bi-planet system – the moon – no more a lovable luminary to lighten our nights, but a sight of an inferno, a ravished world, with no life left, millions of acres of destruction, battered and molten and bubbled, a picture not new, but not realized in its meaning to earth. Our glorious day luminary sends tongues of plasma to lick its planets that splay and harden their magnetic shields to protect themselves from such lovemaking. Radio signals are sent by planets to tell of the anguishes of their inorganic souls, and radio signals come from colliding galaxies, and the placid universe is but an expanse crossed by radiation some of which is lethal, by fragments of disintegrated bodies, by signals of danger sounded from all directions, the only peace coming from the conviction that no great unpleasantness could be in store for us, for the jewel of creation, certainly not by the will of a loving Deity, not by the decree of omniscient science.

  Fair is the outlook considering that this system just emerged from the battles that our ancestors understood as Theomachy – the battle of the gods – and entered a settled state possibly for a very long period in terms of human lives; fair also is the outlook considering that for almost every peril a panacea was provided – by a protective supreme intelligence? – thus the destructive ultraviolet rays and other such radiations are held back by the ionosphere, and the cosmic rays are kept under control by a magnetic shield, and the shield is created by the rotation of the earth and the earth is kept rotating, and though it is not in the center of the universe as man thought only twelve generations ago, it is in the optimal place – at a distance from the sun that assures it of the right measure of heat, so that its water supply in its bulk should stay neither evaporated nor frozen, and the very supplies of water and atmosphere are right for life: In such optimal conditions the living forms that evolved in the paroxysms of nature enjoy another age of growth and plenty – and man, the conqueror of nature which evolved him, reaches for space that always limited him to his native rock and, a victim of amnesia as far as his own recent past is concerned, plays some dangerous games with the atom that he succeeded in cracking open, himself morally not far distant from his ancestor who hit a spark from a flint and made fire.

  The Author (1977)

  Preface 1955

  Earth in Upheaval is a book about the great tribulations to which the planet on which we travel was subjected in prehistorical and historical times. The pages of this book are transcripts of the testimony of mute witnesses, the rocks, in the court of celestial traffic. They testify by their own appearance and by the encased contents of dead bodies, fossilized skeletons. Myriads upon myriads of living creatures came to life on this ball of rock suspended in nothing and returned to dust. Many died a natural death, many were killed in wars between races and species, and many were entombed alive during great paroxysms of nature in which land and sea contested in destruction. Whole tribes of fish that had filled the oceans suddenly ceased to exist; of entire species and even genera of land animals not a single survivor was left.

  The earth and the water without which we cannot exist suddenly turned into enemies and engulfed the animal kingdom, the human race included, and there was no shelter and no refuge. In such cataclysms the land and the sea repeatedly changed places, laying dry the kingdom of the ocean and submerging the kingdoms of the land.

  In Worlds in Collision I presented the chronicles of two – the very last – series of such catastrophes, those that visited our earth in the second and first millennia before the present era. Since these
upheavals occurred in historical times, when the art of writing had already been perfected in the centers of ancient civilization, I described them mainly from historical documents, relying on celestial charts, calendars, and sundials and water clocks discovered by archaeologists, and drawing also upon classical literature, the sacred literature of East and West, the epics of the northern races, and the oral traditions of primitive peoples from Lapland to the South Seas. Geological vestiges of the events narrated in documents and traditions were indicated only here and there, when I felt that the immediate testimony of the rocks must be presented along with the historical evidence. I closed that description of cataclysmic events with a promise to attempt, at a later date, the reconstruction of similar global catastrophes of earlier times, one of them being the Deluge.

  I had intended, after piecing together the history of these earlier global upheavals, to present geological and paleontological material to support the testimony of man. But the reception of Worlds in Collision by certain scientific groups persuaded me, before reviving the pageant of earlier catastrophes, to present at least some of the evidence of the rocks, which is as insistent as that carried down to our times by written records and by word of mouth. This testimony is never given in metaphors; and as with the pages of the Old Testament or of the Iliad, nothing can be changed in it. Pebbles and rocks and mountains and the bottom of the sea will bear witness. Do they know of the days, recent and ancient, when the harmony of this world was interrupted by the forces of nature? Have they entombed innumerable creatures and encased them in rock? Have they seen the ocean moving on continents and continents sliding under water? Was this earth and the expanse of its seas showered with stones and covered by ashes? Were its forests, uprooted by hurricanes and set afire, covered by tides carrying sand and debris from the bottom of the oceans? It takes millions of years for a log to be turned into coal but only a single hour when burning. Here lies the core of the problem: Did the earth change in a slow process, a year added to a year and a million years to a million, the peaceful ground of nature being the broad arena of the contest of throngs, in which the fittest survived? Or did it happen, too, that the very arena itself, infuriated, rose against the contestants and made an end of their battles?