Rather than expanding the previous post I have added a second post which provides some sources for the idea of wobbles at the axis of rotation. Very little has been published on the subject as you will see from an internet search. However, Paul Dunbavin has explored the subject as he wanted to find reasons for a sea level rise around 3000BC. This, according to an old archaeology comment board, now defunct, can be seen mostly in the drowned river valleys around the coastline of Britain and Ireland. They did in fact claim this occurred on three occasions, at around 3000BC, in late third millennium BC, and again, towards the end of the first millennium BC [end of LB in Near and Middle East but end of Middle Bronze age in Britain]. These were also connected to a build up of peat across NW Europe, in three successive phases of heavy and persistent rainfall. Whether that means a wobble or not is unclear but Dunbavin’s intention was to strengthen his hypothesis of a wobble and sea level change to account for the drowning of Lyonesse in Cornwall and the flooding of formerly settled regions in the Irish Sea, such as Cardigan Bay, and the legends all of these engendered. He therefore created a situation akin to the Atlantis legend – but confined to the British Isles. Hence the title of his first book, The Atlantis Researches.
The drowning of the river valleys, now the estuaries of the Severn, Thames, Shannon, and Ouse, and so on, occurred long after the flooding of the southern basin of the North Sea, which occurred between 6000 and 6500BC [known as the 8 ky event] contemporary with other rises in sea level around the world – in the Persian Gulf, for example, and in Indonesia. A significant rise in sea level that had a global dimension. Hence, we may assume a wobble and a shift in the axis of rotation in some kind of way might have been responsible, realigning the geoid of the earth. A sort of mini version of the dryas events as the climatic effects lasted a much shorter period of time – somewhere between 2 and 3 hundred years [although not a lot of study here has taken place]. It is assumed by mainstream that the drowning of the northern North Sea basin in early Holocene and the drowning of the southern basin can be factored by an elegant sea level curve. This, it is alleged is all to do with Britain bouncing back from the Ice Age in an up and down motion. A bit like the idea southern England is going down but the top of Scotland is going up, an idea that avoids mentioning that the Orkneys are situated on the continental shelf beyond Scotland and display distinct evidence of flooding. Are the Orkneys going down, one might ask – or the Shetlands. The situation with the Isles of Scilly in the extreme SW of Britain is also odd as a basalt ridge runs right through Devon and Cornwall but slopes downwards – and continues under the sea to the Scillies. What is now above sea level were hills on a much larger piece of land, and these are sometimes crowned with Neolithic tombs. At some stage it was physically displaced and that could have occurred during a shift in rotation, I imagine – or a change in the tilt of the earth. It can also be compared with the tilting line of lakes in the high Andes of Chile. It is also the basics of the Lyonesse legend. A horse rider escapes the rising sea by galloping back to the mainland, suggesting a rapid event. Legends are of course unreliable – but some Aboriginal stories have turned out to have some resemblance to actual recent geological changes.
Dunbavin’s theory would rely on global sea level changes around 3000BC but he concentrates on the British Isles – in the main. He does illustrate how a change in the geoid would affect different regions in the world. Some would be drowned but others would be elevated. He suggests the latter may apply to South America. That might be more appropriate for the 8 ky event but is less clear in the third millennium BC. It is all a matter of how much research has been done on the possibility of such a global shift in sea levels. At the moment it can be explained by the sea level curve. In contrast to that point of view the 8 ky year event has been associated with a huge earthquake and tsunami wave at that time on the Storegga Shelf off Norway – but a tsunami wave would not drown the southern basin permanently. Other factors were clearly in play as now recognised, and the Storegga Shelf collapse only affected the eastern coastline of Britain and could not play a global role as far as sea level change in the rest of the world is concerned. It could hardly have affected the drowning of the Solent in southern England either. At this time what had been a river valley became a wide body of water that separated the Isle of Wight from the mainland. This could well have widened still further at 3000BC and points thereafter. Hence, Dunbavin’s research has opened a field of study that requires exploration.
Dunbavin has continued to write books and articles expanding on his ideas. Such as ‘Prehistoric Papers‘ [2020] which are a series of papers that you can read at his web site https://www.third-millennium.co.uk … but see also his book ‘Under Ancient Skies: ancient astronomy and terrestrial catastrophe‘ [2005]. Here we learn there are two modes of transient wobble. One is the better known Chandler Wobble which is damped back down after around 20 years, and the other mode is much longer lived and may last on occasion for up to two and a half thousand years. Thus, you can see why I suggested the dryas events reflect a wobble at the axis of rotation. He adds, geophysicists do not really understand how such wobbles begin and why they can last so long. They now call it Free Core Nutation which is a searchable term. If a change in obliquity was in progress, he goes on, then it would be evident as a spiralling motion of the rotational pole about the celestial pole. This could cause seven year rhythms in weather and climate. We might associate that with the Biblical story of Joseph and 7 years of plentiful crops followed by 7 years of lean crops, and famine. Joseph has an astrological connection with the constellation of Taurus the Bull in the prophecy of Balaam. Dunbavin also made a parallel with the spiral of seven turns in an ancient Egyptian game known as Mehen. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehen_(game) … In the Wiki image there are only 5 spirals rather than 7 but it depends where that image came from. If it was later rather than in Predynastic or Old Kingdom times, it may simply be a symbol rather than a true reflection of the game played much earlier in time. Such a wobble should be preserved in myth from around the world. I shall have to ask van der Sluijs if he came across anything like this in his comprehensive research. Spirals do not seem to have been a feature of Egyptian art, it is worth noting, but the pyramids were aligned precisely to the celestial pole. It was known as the thigh of the Bull for some reason – and in myth the bull itself, and not just thigh, was associated with defecating on the world below. Is that another way of saying meteors raining on the earth? See also Maarten van Hoek [1993] ‘The Spiral in British and Irish Megalithic Rock Art‘ at https://www.europublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/gas.1993.18.18.11 .. although it might be possible to find it more simply at https://doi.org/10.3366/gas.1993.18.18.11 … There is, of course, another way of looking at spirals as meteors rotate as they descend. Would people have had the time to note that as most meteors are not seen until they explode.
In chapter or article 3, ‘On the Coligny Calendar and the Neolithic Calendar‘ where Dunbavin suggests such a calendar was essential to Celtic seasonal festivals – but how did such a calendar work? This article was also published in SIS C&C Review 2018:2. In another book, Tower of Atlantis‘ [2017] he has an appendix on pole shift and pole tides. His books are apparently also available as Kindle editions. All his books have extensive bibliographies and sources. However, Dunbavin did not explore geomagnetic connections with wobbles, which is a pity. Mainstream, during the same period of time, also did not take it seriously. Presumably that is the reason why – and perhaps a connection with fringe science. He was at pains to keep his research away from anything tainted by the likes of Velikovsky as essentially he was also intent on looking at the past through a catastrophic lens. I first came across him at a weekend conference in Derbyshire, not too far from where he lived. The idea was presumably to bring his first book to public attention. However, there were a lot of New Age types in the audience and I suspect a lot of the science went above their heads. I got to talking to him afterwards and later, after contacting Jill and Val, I suggested him as a speaker at one of our SIS meetings. They took place at the Harlequin Theatre in Redhill in those days. This was duly arranged and he went on to publish a couple of articles. Later, he withdrew a couple of other articles, one of which involved wobbles, as Jill and Val insisted on a mention of Velikovsky’s catastrophism. So SIS had only a limited association with Dunbavin. It is useful to note that Val was interested primarily in chronology, especially the revision of David Rohl, while Jill was into the electric universe and the ideas of Talbot and Thornhill. Hence, Dunbavin’s work as a stand alone did not particularly appeal to them. It was a pity how it panned out as SIS was set up to examine the ideas of Velikovsky by research and not to fixate on them. That was the remit of the original founders, a lot of them students in the 1970s and open to all sorts of ideas. They in turn lost any interest in Velikovsky’s catastrophism as described in Worlds in Collision, long before the end of the 20th century. They had also, in the 1980s, reduced Velikovsky’s chronological reconstruction by a large number of years [a scheme presented at the SIS Glasgow [University] Conference organised by Archie Roy and Euan MacKie. The latter was still a young man in those days. Peter James and David Rohl have different versions of the so called New Chronology but even these are too big a reduction, although James did favour sticking to the raw radiocarbon data rather than the mainstream calibrated version. The SIS team had grown up and they knew a lot more than they did when they were students. However, the membership of the society remained committed to Velikovsky which explains why Jill and Val asked for a link to him by Dunbavin. He was adamant he would not as that might estrange his research from mainstream scientists.