Arctic East Siberia had a lower latitude in the Pleistocene

Abstract

Remains of mammoths in Arctic East Siberia, where there is not sufficient sunlight over the year for the growth of the plants on which these animals feed, indicate that the latitude of this region was lower before the end of the Pleistocene than now. Reconstructing this geographic pole shift, we introduce a massive object, which moved in an extremely eccentric orbit and was hot from tidal work and solar radiation. Evaporation produced a disk-shaped cloud of ions around the Sun. This cloud partially shielded the solar radiation, producing the cold and warm periods characterizing the Pleistocene. The shielding depends on the inclination of Earth's orbit, which has a period of 100,000 years. The cloud builds up to a point where inelastic particle collisions induce its collapse The resulting near-periodic time dependence resembles that of Dansgaard-Oeschger events. The Pleistocene ended when the massive object had a close encounter with the Earth, which suffered a one per mil extensional deformation. While the deformation relaxed to an equilibrium shape in one to several years, the globe turned relative to the rotation axis: The North Pole moved from Greenland to the Arctic Sea. The massive object split into fragments, which evaporated.

On the change of latitude of Arctic East Siberia at the end of the Pleistocene

“…[11] of Ref. [22] valid for circular motion). For an estimate, using the mass of an O-atom, and an orbital radius of 1.5•10 11 m (Earth's distance from the Sun), the lifetime becomes 400 f years, where f is the absolute value of the ratio between the light force and the gravitational attraction to the Sun.…”

“…A first version of this paper [22] was written under the impression, that a terrestrial origin of the inclusions in bore ice had been demonstrated. Therefore the question arouse, whether a cloud that does not reach Earths distance from the Sun was possible.…”

On the choice of ingredients for a theory of the Ice Ages

“…The discussion of the mechanism of a rapid geographic pole shift [4] shows, that the postulates A and B can be realized, provided the following list of conditions holds. We admit that the processes are complex, while we could only use simple considerations, mostly order of magnitude estimates.…”

What Caused the Ice Ages?

“…The reduced orbits have a higher probability for further collisions. Light carries little momentum, so that these processes end in small orbits with the initial angular momentum (Woelfli& Baltensperger, 2007a). The Poynting-Robertson drag (Gustafson, 1994), a sort of friction with light, finally leads the particles into the Sun.…”