This article
originally appeared in REHUPA #157
Possibly
the greatest mystery of the Hyborian Age is the Great Cataclysm, an
event that shook Thurian Age Earth to its core. Howard describes the
entire event in one terse paragraph:
"Then
the Cataclysm rocked the world. Atlantis and Lemuria sank, and the
Pictish Islands were heaved up to form the mountain peaks of a new
continent. Sections of the Thurian Continent vanished under the
waves, or sinking, formed great inland lakes and seas. Volcanoes
broke forth and terrific earthquakes shook down the shining cities
of the empires. Whole nations were blotted out."
Sounds
pretty horrific, doesn't it? That the Cataclysm affected the entire
earth is pretty obvious from Howard's description. How did this
happen? What could have caused the destruction of the entire world
so completely?
As
a student of paleogeography, I can see at least three kinds of
cataclysmic trigger events that might have provided a short trip
back to the Stone Age. There are very few ways for the earth to
experience destruction on a worldwide scale. The easiest and best
way would be an extinction-level event, probably an asteroid or
comet strike. A second means would be a near miss of a large
(moon-size or larger) rogue body passing extremely close to Earth.
The third would be some type of axis shift, due to an uneven
distribution of weight on the surface of the earth, but this would
be unlikely to happen by and of itself. It should be noted that
either of the first two events could possibly trigger the third one.
Let's take a look at the various trigger events in detail.
As
comet Shoemaker-Levy proved when it impacted on Jupiter, cataclysms
can and do happen. It all depends on the size and speed of the
impacting body. The Great Cataclysm was probably a series of
asteroidal impacts on the surface of the Earth, since the Earth's
Roche limit would break up a large body due to gravitational
stresses. The immediate worldwide effect of this is a huge, windy
firestorm that would almost immediately affect several hemispheres.
There would be massive flooding, not only along the coast, but
fairly far inland if the strike was an oceanic one. The real killer
would be if the asteroids struck into the earth's spin, they could
possibly slow down the rotation of the Earth's crust. Unfortunately,
the core and mantle would continue to rotate at the same speed. This
would cause tremendous crustal fracturing, possibly leading up to an
axis shift. At the very least, there would be earthquakes and
volcanic activity of the scale written about by Howard. Entire lands
would disappear beneath the sea as the oceans (remember the ocean?)
would displace across the surface of the landmasses in a massive
deluge due to their own inertia. The sky would appear to collapse
due to the enormous amount of dust and gasses thrown into it by
volcanic action and this would probably start a new ice age, since
the reflection of that dust would cool the atmosphere down rapidly.
What few survivors there are would be at the mercy of a world they
would not even recognize. If there was no warning that this was
coming, the survivors would only have the clothes on their backs, as
nearly all of their technology and culture lies buried beneath yards
of mud created by the deluge. Of course due to any number of
reasons, there would be pockets of survivors that hadn't lost
everything, but even they would be hard-pressed to survive in this
world. Welcome to the Stone Age.
The
effect of a near hit from a rogue interstellar body, while still
being disastrous, would be in no way as deadly as a series of
asteroid impacts. The degree of destruction would depend a great
deal on the mass of the body, whether it was electromagnetically
charged, and how close it passed to the earth's orbit. The
immediately apparent effect would be that the body's gravitation
would create a tidal effect, attracting the oceans to a point as
near to the passing body as possible. A close approach would cause
the oceans to pile up into a huge "mountain" of water that
would march across the land as it followed the passage of the body,
wiping away civilization like some huge mop. The plastic mantle of
the earth would also be attracted to the rogue body's gravitation,
creating crustal stress fractures (earthquakes and volcanoes) on a
scale that is pretty hard to imagine. If the passing body was
electromagnetically charged, the earth's pole would swing toward it,
until it was close enough to discharge its electrical potential as a
number of mega-lightning strikes between the two bodies. Anybody who
has read Immanuel Velikovsky's WORLDS IN COLLISION should recognize
this scenario. This shift of the earth's pole would be dynamic
enough to destroy any civilizations that survived the tidal deluge.
The end result would be pretty much the same as that of an asteroid
strike.
The
third possible trigger effect, an axis shift due to an unequal
distribution of weight (ice caps versus landmasses), is pretty
remote due to the earth being shaped as an oblate spheroid. An axis
shift in conjunction with either of the two previous trigger
mechanisms is a real possibility, and it is the only way to explain
the raising and sinking of continental sized land masses. And the
best part is that it is relatively simple to understand the
mechanics involved.
In
1997, Mac B. Strain, an American college student proposed a theory,
based on the work of his grandfather, that attempted to explain mass
extinctions, volcanoes and earthquakes, and how ice and coal ages
came to be. He called it the Dynamic Axis Theory. I'm going to show
you how this theory fits the events of the Great Cataclysm. But
first you need to understand a very condensed version of the theory.
Recent
satellite discoveries show the earth to be shaped like an oblate
spheroid. The diameter at the equator is 22 miles greater than the
diameter at the poles, due to the centrifugal force of the earth's
spin. This force acts not only on the planet's oceans, but also on
the semi-fluid mantle. The shape that this force gives the earth is
called its geode.
The
earth's crust should not be thought of as a rigid shell, but rather
as a semi-solid skin stretched over the mantle. Any shift of the
earth's axis will change the way the crust lies along the geode due
to centrifugal force acting on the fluid pressures of the mantle. A
shifting of the axis would manifest itself as areas of the crust
rising as the fluid pressure beneath them increases and subsiding as
the pressure beneath decreases.
Now
imagine the earth divided into four quadrants. For ease in imagining
this we will divide it along the lines of the hemispheres (NW, NE,
SW, SE). Now imagine the North Pole shifting several hundred miles
southward, toward the center of the NW quadrant. As the crust rides
up the curve of the earth's geode, new lands appear from the sea and
existing lands rise even higher. The quadrant to the immediate south
(SW) would lower as it leaves the geode bulge and its low lying
lands are submerged by the sea. On the opposite side of the world,
the lands of the SE quadrant will rise, while the lands of the NE
quadrant will lower as they get closer to the new pole.
Ideally
this would happen if the earth's crust was very rigid. The actuality
is that the crust is more of a semi-solid skin that stretches and
compresses as it is moved around the geode. This creates classic
geological features like mountain ranges, volcanoes, regional
uplifts, overthrust belts and subduction zones.
Also,
the greatest amount of up and down motion would come along the line
the pole moves as it heads south. There would be very little change
in areas lying 90° either side of the path of the pole shift. The
greatest amount of change in riding up or lowering off of the geode
would occur between 30° and 60° latitude north and south.
Obviously
the Dynamic Axis Theory is much more complex than this. However,
this should be sufficient to illustrate what happened to the earth
during the Great Cataclysm.
I
believe the Earth's northern axis shifted about five degrees
southward on or near 30° east longitude (this would be the
longitude running roughly through Grondar southward). The effect of
this would be that nearly all the land between 60° west longitude
(the sea between Atlantis and the Pictish Isles) and 120° east
longitude (an area corresponding to present-day China) and as far
south as the equator would subside as the bulk of the landmass
lowered itself from the earth's geode.
Nearly
all of Atlantis, save the peaks of its mountains, sank beneath the
sea. The low lying western areas of Valusia subsided beneath the
waves, never to be seen again. Only the inhabitants of the
mountainous areas of northern Valusia (Atlantean) and southern
Valusia (a Pictish colony) escaped the massive flooding. The rest of
the Seven Empires were destroyed as the quaking earth threw up range
upon range of mountains, with their attendant volcanoes. Stressed to
the breaking point, the earth's crust cracked and upthrust for
nearly a thousand miles east to west, parallel to the southern edges
of the Thurian continent, creating a nearly impassable barrier to
the lands to the south. Over a mile high, this upthrust would come
in time to be known as the Kothian Escarpment. The same stresses
creating the escarpment were responsible for the draining of the
shallow sea between Thuria and the continent to the south, although
by some miracle, the prehuman civilization in that area was spared
from any real destruction. In the central areas, the lowering of the
continent created a large chain of lakes and small seas. The far
eastern part of the continent lay 90° away from the path of the
axis shift and so escaped destruction of any real magnitude.
The
quadrant to the south of the Thurian continent experienced uplift as
the bulk of it rose along earth's geode. The southern continent
(Kaa-u?) lost great parts of its western area north of the equator
to submergence, but gained huge areas of land to the south as the
great bulk of what would later be called the "Black
Kingdoms" rose from the sea, comprised of the mountainous
remains of several island chains. The uplift extended into the
region later called Iranistan, connecting it with the bulk of the
Thurian continent. If the uplift created any other new lands in this
quadrant, I can find no record of it.
The
northern quadrant opposite of Thuria experienced an exceptional
amount of uplift, as the Pictish Isles were thrust up to become the
western mountains of a huge new continent. The few surviving Picts
migrated to the fertile central plains and eventually conquered the
continent.
The
final quadrant south of the new Pictish continent suffered from the
same subsidence problems as the Thurian continent experienced.
Lemuria, a large island chain lying across the equator, lost most of
its land to subsidence. In reality, it didn't subside all that much,
probably only tens of feet. But it was enough to drown the majority
of the chain. Only the northern portion survived as a few
mist-shrouded islands. Although it is not mentioned in Howard's
"The Hyborian Age," the time-lost continent of Mu, which
existed to the southeast of Lemuria, disappeared beneath the waves
at this time, the top of the mountains of Valla being the only part
to escape destruction.
The
Dynamic Axis Theory works pretty well in describing the damage done
to the world at the time of the Seven Empires. It effectively ended
the Thurian world-age, and ushered in the beginning of a
post-cataclysmic period of time culminating in the Hyborian
world-age.
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