POLE-SHIFT SIMULATOR

What am I looking at?

This is a “what-if” globe. You pick where Earth’s North Pole moves to, and the simulator slides the whole crust to match — then shows the consequences as honestly as it can.

The colours: teal = land that is newly under water · tan = old seabed now exposed · green = dry land · blue = ocean. As you change the pole, water finds its new level and the map repaints.

The marks: red dots are places more likely to have earthquakes; orange triangles are volcanoes that could become more active. They appear where the shift changes the stress on the ground enough to matter.

It is not a prediction. It shows where stress is nudged enough to be worth noticing, using deliberately simple physics. The small ✓ ~ ? badges say how solid each effect is: ✓ established, ~ debated, ? unverified. Turn on Plain language to relabel the controls, or open Honest limitations for the detail.

Reading the effects layer — honest limitations

The markers are a deliberately simplified proxy: the change in water load from the pole shift converted to a change in vertical stress (σ = ρgh ≈ 9.81 kPa per metre of water; triggering threshold ≈ 0.01 MPa, after King, Stein & Lin 1994 and Stein 1999). They show where stress is perturbed enough to matter — not a forecast of specific events. The sea-level math itself is a real-time linearization of what rigorous (non-real-time) tools solve in full — e.g. LIOUSHELL (Patočka 2021) for true polar wander, SELEN4/giapy for glacial-isostatic sea-level — cited here, not ported in.

1. Magnitude, not sign. Both new flooding (loading) and drainage (unloading) advance faults toward failure — confirmed by post-glacial faulting (Pärvie, M_w≈8; Arvidsson 1996; Lindblom 2015), erosional unloading (Steer 2014) and reservoir drawdown. So earthquakes are placed wherever |Δσ| exceeds threshold, regardless of direction.
2. Fault orientation is ignored. The real triggering quantity (Coulomb ΔCFS) flips sign with fault geometry — the same load clamps some faults and unclamps others. With no fault dataset, the sim reports "stress changed enough to matter for some plausibly-oriented fault," not a located rupture. Optional: load plate_boundaries.json (Bird 2003) and enable Gate to Faults to keep only markers near real plate boundaries — still orientation-blind, but restricted to active crust.
3. Surface ≠ depth. σ = ρgΔh is the stress change at the surface; at seismogenic depth it is attenuated and depends on the load's spatial wavelength. The "1 m of water ≈ threshold" equivalence is a surface proxy. Optional: Depth Attenuation applies exp(−2πz/λ) for a chosen seismogenic depth z and load wavelength λ — note that for a near-global water redistribution λ is planetary, so the decay is small (itself an honest result, not a bug).
4. Clock-advance only. Triggering merely brings forward (or delays) events on faults already loaded near failure by tectonics (Stein 1999). Crust with no stored stress will not rupture however large |Δσ| is. Markers mean "encouraged," not "guaranteed."
5. No magnitudes or timescales. The proxy says nothing about event size, and real responses lag from years (seasonal/reservoir) to millennia (post-glacial faulting; decompression-melt ascent). The sim treats the water redistribution as instantaneous.
6. Volcanoes = unloading tendency. Removing surface load drives decompression melting and eruption (Iceland rose 5–30× after deglaciation — Maclennan 2002, Eksinchol 2019; Santorini erupts at sea-level lowstands — Satow 2021), while loading suppresses it. So volcano markers sit only at the strongest unloading sites. The link is robust for Iceland/global stacks but ambiguous per-volcano — treat markers as an illustrative tendency, not a per-edifice prediction.
7. Antipodal triggering (E9) is graded. That a large quake raises seismicity globally via its surface waves is mainstream (Hill 1993; Velasco 2008; Pollitz 2012 — up to ~5× the M≥5.5 rate for days after the largest events). That this is enhanced near the antipode (within ~30°) rests essentially on one study (contested: O'Malley 2018) and is in direct tension with Parsons & Velasco 2011, who found no remotely triggered large events. That the triggered events are preferentially deep is speculative with no literature support — deep quakes are in fact the least aftershock-productive and least tidally susceptible class — so "Deep Pref" is OFF by default and labeled as such. In the engine these are separate switches: Global Dynamic Trigger renders the mainstream field (triggering everywhere, decaying with distance, the near-source zone excluded as it is already the primary quakes); Antipodal Bonus reshapes that field into the contested O'Malley pattern (secondary peak ~45° from the source, minimum ~90°, primary maximum within the antipodal cap); and Deep Pref is the speculative option. The magenta markers are an illustrative tendency, not a forecast.
8. LOD / rotation-rate modulation (E10) is contested. A statistical ~25–30% rise in annual M≥7 counts coincides with intervals of Earth's rotational slowing (Anderson 1974; Bendick & Bilham 2017; Bilham 2022), lagging ~5–6 yr and concentrated at shallow equatorial plate boundaries (~10°N–30°S). But the implied stresses (~14 Pa per ms of length-of-day change, up to ~0.4 MPa) are orders of magnitude below a ~3 MPa coseismic stress drop, so the proposed mechanism is synchronization of already-critical faults — not magnitude triggering — and its proponents concede no satisfactory causal physics. So the cyan rings add no events; during "slowing" they merely flag the equatorial subset of already-over-threshold quakes as synchronization-favoured. The 5–6 yr lag is not modeled (the sim has no time axis); treat the rings as an illustrative tendency, not a forecast.
9. Deglaciation→volcanism (E11) is established — but the rate, not the schedule. Removing surface load depressurizes the mantle and raises the melt fraction, so eruption rates climb: 2–6× globally after the last deglaciation (Huybers & Langmuir 2009) and up to ~30× in Iceland when ~2 km of ice (~20 MPa) was unloaded in ~1 kyr (Maclennan 2002; rule ~10 MPa/km → ~0.1% melt-fraction per km). The yellow plumes scale each unloading volcano by that multiplier (capped at the Max Eruption × you set) and flag those above your Plume Threshold; the HUD shows the peak ×. The physics is robust for global and Iceland-scale stacks but the per-volcano rate is uncertain and the melt-transport lag (years to millennia) is not resolved — read the plumes as an amplified tendency, not a schedule, and note this is rate amplification layered on the same unloading sites, not new volcanoes.
10. GIA rebound seismicity (E12) is established. When the removed load lets the solid Earth rebound, glaciation-accumulated horizontal stress is released as large thrust (postglacial) faulting — the Fennoscandian glacially-induced faults, e.g. the 155 km Pärvie fault with a paleo-earthquake of Mw ~7.9 (Wood 1989), single events to Mw ~8.2 (Arvidsson 1996). Rebound is viscoelastic (τ=η/μ ≈ 450 yr for η≈10²¹ Pa·s — the same real-Earth mantle-viscosity estimate behind the Pärvie sequence above, not a number invented for this sim), so here it is tied to the bulge-relaxation state: the blue cubes are ZERO while the bulge is rigid and grow as you Relax Bulge → 0 (the mirror image of the instant-flood markers, which fade as rigidity→0). Faulting is placed at unloaded sites where the rebound ΔCFS exceeds the threshold (~0.01 MPa). The Mw 7.9-vs-8.2 figures themselves conflict in the literature — read the cubes as illustrative great- earthquake potential during rebound, not a dated sequence, and recall the real lag spans centuries.
11. Solar-seismic coupling (E13) is debated, and the weakest-supported layer here. Some statistical work links solar/proton forcing to seismicity — proton flux tracking up to 23–28% of M6.5+ intensity with a ~18-day decay and a ~26.6-day solar-rotation period (Lyubushin & Rodionov 2025), coronal-hole high-speed streams in the solar-cycle decay phase (Anagnostopoulos 2021), a 2–7-day lag after current pulses with the Sept-2017 X9.3 flare preceding a ~68% rise in global M4+ (Zeigarnik 2022). But the implied energies are minuscule, the only defensible role is a "last straw" on faults already at 90–98% of failure, and the direct geomagnetic→ earthquake link is disputed — Marchitelli (2020) reports a correlation while Love & Thomas (2013) find no significant triggering and a 2022 review suspects an artifact. So the green markers add no events: a 'Proton Flux' knob merely re-flags the nearest-to-failure existing quakes, zero at flux 0. This is the weakest-supported layer here — treat it as scenario curiosity, not mechanism.
12. EQ→volcano cascade (E14) is established, but the triggered fraction is small. A great earthquake raises the VEI≥2 eruption rate for a few days at volcanoes within ~750 km (~250 km for a merely large quake); there is no significant effect below ~M7.5 (Nishimura 2017), the chance excess is well under 1%, and only ~0.4% of eruptions are plausibly earthquake-triggered (Manga & Brodsky 2006; Linde & Sacks 1998). Real lags run from days to 3–10 years. So the pink markers and links do not say these volcanoes will erupt — they show which unloading volcanoes sit inside a great quake's published triggering radius (the link points to the source quake). The 'Cascade Mag Floor' sets how strong a quake must be to act as a source; raise it to keep only the truly great events. Read it as exposure, not a forecast.
13. Fault-style classification (E15) is first-order regime, not focal mechanisms. Reorienting the crust over the equatorial bulge sets up a degree-2 stress pattern (Melosh 1980; Matsuyama & Nimmo 2008/2011): crust moving toward the equator stretches → normal faulting, crust moving poleward compresses → thrust, and the flanking zones shear → strike-slip (the pattern peaks ~45° from the pole-shift axis). Here each quake is coloured by the sign of its change in distance-from-equator under the shift, with a tunable dead-band for strike-slip. This is the expected regime only: it ignores each fault's pre-existing orientation and the local tectonic stress, so it is not a mapped focal mechanism. And because Earth keeps almost no fossil bulge (Mitrovica & Wahr 2011), the real magnitude for a slow pole shift is small — the styles are most meaningful for the rapid, elastic-response scenario this sim depicts.
14. Flank-collapse tsunami (E16) is established — as exposure, not a wave model. A coastal or island volcano whose flank fails sends the collapse into the sea and raises a tsunami: Anak Krakatau collapsed about two minutes after a small earthquake in 2018 (~430 dead), Fogo's ~73 ka collapse left run-up deposits above 270 m (Ramalho 2015), and Tenerife's ~170 ka deposits reach 132 m — roughly a quarter of volcanic fatalities come from volcano-induced tsunamis. The aqua rings flag the engine's unloading volcanoes that sit above the reoriented sea level with submerged crust adjacent (so a collapse would enter water) and draw an illustrative reach whose radius scales with the unloading proxy up to the Max Tsunami Reach you set. There is no water-surface simulation here: the ring is a reach estimate, the collapse itself is not predicted, and real run-up depends on collapse volume, bathymetry and coast geometry the sim does not resolve. Read it as which coasts are exposed, not a forecast.
15. Climate zones (E17) are established for insolation, instantaneous by design. A pole shift moves every point to a new latitude relative to the fixed spin axis, so its annual insolation — and therefore its climate belt — changes (Daradich 2017); the nearest real-world check is the Jurassic ~30° true polar wander event, which moved whole regions across climate belts exactly as this reclassification logic predicts (Muttoni & Kent 2019). The overlay recomputes each cell's belt from its new world latitude using the standard boundaries (tropical |lat| < 23.5°, temperate < 66.5°, polar beyond), and can instead highlight only the crust that crossed a belt. Two honest limits: the insolation/zone change is effectively instant, but the ocean and ice-sheet response lags centuries to millennia (not modelled — there is no time axis here), and the three-belt scheme is a coarse insolation proxy, not a full climate model (no circulation, precipitation, or ocean-heat transport). Read it as the new insolation geography, not a forecast of realised climate.
16. Perturbing body (E18) is the driver layer — and the physics says it can't drive the shift. A passing mass raises a real tidal (differential) stress, a_tidal ≈ 2·G·M·R⊕/d³ — but the numbers are unforgiving: the Moon itself manages only ≈1.1×10⁻⁶ m/s², a few kilopascals, well below the ~0.01 MPa that triggers a fault. The readout shows the body's Coulomb contribution against that 0.01 MPa line as you change its mass and closest approach; you have to dial in a physically absurd body (many lunar masses skimming inside the Moon's orbit) before it even reaches threshold, and such a body would be one of the brightest objects in the sky for weeks. So the body is shown as a cause you can play with, not a mechanism the engine endorses — the user-set pole shift stays the real driver. The ΔCFS scaling here is illustrative; the threshold, lunar tidal figure, and inverse-cube falloff are real. Speculative/fringe by construction.
17. Solar storm / proton flux / magnetosphere (E19) splits into three claims of very different standing. The proton-flux pulse is modelled as a FRED double-exponential (sharp rise, 3–7 day decay) that multiplies the E13 amplitude, so seismicity bumps during the storm window — but the flux→earthquake link itself is contested (Marchitelli 2020 reports it; Love & Thomas 2013 find none). The magnetopause compression is established physics — the standoff really does contract sunward as dynamic pressure rises (R_mp ∝ P_dyn^−1/6, Shue 1997) — but that the compression drives quakes is not. The eclipse is speculative: the body's angular size only reaches the Sun's ~0.53° for a Moon-sized body at the Moon's distance, and multi-day totality would require something so large and close it would be one of the brightest objects in the sky for weeks beforehand. And the body→solar gate is the least supported link of all, with no known mechanism — the only peer-reviewed adjacent work is planetary tides faintly pacing the ~11-year solar cycle (Stefani 2016/2019), not triggering flares on demand. All four are off by default and badged separately, so the engine shows the mechanism without endorsing it.
18. Monument alignments (E22): the measurements are fact, the inference is contested — and here the data argues against a recent shift. The idea is that ancient builders aligned monuments to the pole of their day, so a later pole shift would leave a measurable deviation. The azimuths are real and published; what is contested is reading a deviation as rotational rather than constructional. Three things this layer shows, and the first is the most important. (1) Giza already matches today's pole to 0.067° — four arcminutes, exactly the "better than four minutes of arc" Glen Dash (2017) measured, and the mainstream reading is that even this residual is surveying method (a consistent counterclockwise rotation across all three large pyramids, consistent with a fall-equinox shadow method; Spence 2000 dates the alignment to ~2467 BC by stellar transit). Any large pole shift after ~2500 BC would have left a residual of degrees, not arcminutes. So this dataset constrains a recent shift to be near-zero — it is evidence against the scenario, not for it, and it is shown here for exactly that reason. (2) A "match" to a hypothesised pole can be pure geometry. Giza sits at 31.13°E; the ECDO pole is placed at 31°E — essentially the same meridian. A north–south axis points at anything on its own meridian regardless of that thing's latitude, so Giza's 0.255° "alignment" to the ECDO pole is a coincidence of longitude, not evidence. The panel flags this (⚠ same meridian) whenever the site and the set pole are within 2° of longitude — check for it before reading any close match as meaningful. (3) Only cardinal-aimed sites can test a pole at all. Göbekli Tepe's Enclosure D is a proposed stellar alignment and Teotihuacán's Avenue of the Dead is offset ~15.5° east of north deliberately (Šprajc: a solar/calendrical horizon target). Neither encodes north, so neither scores as pole evidence — they are drawn in grey and labelled "not a pole indicator." Three cited sites are shown rather than a long list, because a residual is only as good as the published azimuth behind it. The bearing is a standard great-circle forward azimuth, and monument axes are lines, not rays, so the residual folds to 0–90°.

The water mechanic itself is established geodesy: once the pole moves, sea level re-settles toward the new gravitational equipotential set by Earth's rotational bulge (WGS84 a−b ≈ 21.38 km) — that part isn't in dispute, and it's derived straight from those physical constants, not fit or calibrated to any historical flood. What's speculative is the genre-level caveat that governs everything above: whether that resettlement happens at flood speed. Set Bulge Rigidity → 0 and the flood — and every marker — vanishes; the real bulge relaxes over ~10³–10⁴ yr, not the instant this sim depicts by default. This is a scenario explorer, not a forecast.