I think it is worth pointing out that this isn’t “new” at all. This post on 𝕏 (formerly Twitter) is referring to Chan Thomas and his book,
The Adam and Eve Story: The History of Cataclysms (Bengal Tiger Press, 1965). That is 60 years ago. And it was partially declassified by the CIA in 2013 (
PDF). That was 12 years ago.
So, not new.
But it is pseudo-science. Chan Thomas stands squarely in the 20th-century catastrophist tradition exemplified by Immanuel Velikovsky (
Worlds in Collision) and, earlier, Charles Hapgood (
Earth’s Shifting Crust). In
The Adam and Eve Story, Thomas links global flood myths—from Noah’s biblical deluge to Utnapishtim’s Sumerian account—to cataclysms that recur every six to seven thousand years, reframed as geological events. Thomas described it as a rapid, periodic “crustal displacement” (borrowed from Hapgood) of the entire Earth driven by changes in rotation or electromagnetic forces.
But there is a problem. A rather significant one. No known physics allows the lithosphere to slide wholesale over the mantle without dissipating energy orders of magnitude beyond what Earth’s system can supply. Unlike plate tectonics, which explains continental motion at centimeters per year, his model requires kilometer-scale motion in hours or days,
which would liquefy the crust and sterilize the planet. (The mechanical energy that must be dissipated as friction? It exceeds the combined explosive yield of all nuclear weapons on Earth by many orders of magnitude.) And any attempt to reduce the friction (in order to avoid this) simply removes the forces needed to move the crust at all. The idea fails at the level of basic physics.
Although geomagnetic excursions (e.g., the Laschamp event ~41,000 years ago) are real and confirmed by paleomagnetic data to weaken the earth’s field without causing crustal shifts, Thomas’s ideas remain fringe, critiqued for lacking fossil or stratigraphic evidence of such rapid displacements.
Now, about that video …
The scenario depicted in that animation—massive ocean waves overwhelming the United Kingdom—would pulverize a wooden ark (which would be smaller than a pixel in that video). Close your eyes and imagine the biggest wave you have ever seen in a movie—like the mega-tsunami in
The Day After Tomorrow. Got it? Okay, now throw that image away. It is trivial in comparison.
Before the wall of ocean ever arrives, the atmosphere itself becomes the first weapon. A continent-scale mass of water moving at hundreds of kilometers per hour must forcibly displace the air in front of it. The result is sustained, extreme winds, and I mean a chaotic, compressible, shock-laden flow imposing hundreds of pounds per square foot of lateral force across the ark’s exposed surfaces—applied continuously. Do the math. This is four or five times stronger than a Category 5 hurricane hitting a house. Over a structure hundreds of feet long? We are talking millions of pounds of force. Wooden joints unload, frames distort, planking splits, the whole structure fails. The ark is destroyed.
And that is before the water arrives.
When the ocean mass itself impacts—moving on the order of 400 km/h—the loading jumps by roughly three orders of magnitude. Water is nearly a thousand times denser than air, so
the resulting lateral forces are no longer measured in millions of pounds, but in billions. The “wave” in this video is the whole ocean roaring across the continent. When this reaches whatever is left of a wooden ark? Forget about it. Even if the ark was still standing, the timbers would be obliterated from the shock of the impact. The whole structure and everything and everyone on board would be pulverized into a sludge and mixed into a churning slurry of rock and seawater.
This is not a flood you ride out on a ship. It is getting hit with a sledgehammer the size of a continent. And after trying to wrap your head around the incomprehensible pressures involved in being obliterated by an ocean, recall the amount of heat. The weight would turn wood into powder, the heat would melt a mountain range.
Quite simply, this is not a realistic scenario.
