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Not many people ponder the standard story of Earth’s deep geological history. Most of us know there have been many ice ages, but few realize that the science to explain them is far from settled.

According to the groundbreaking work of Mario Buildreps, pen-name for Maarten D, the so-called Milankovich cycles cannot explain recurring ice ages (in all fairness, there is controversy around this theory). Buildreps’ astonishing conclusion is the following: The Earth has periodically expanded. During these periods of expansion, the North Pole has moved and the oceans have widened (the ocean floors are much younger than the land masses).

Needless to say, these expansion events must have been accompanied with enormous seismic activity, floods and other natural disasters.

The idea that the Earth has expanded is not new, but expansion has happened much more recently than the traditional expansionists believed, according to Mario Buildreps and his co-researchers. Mario is in a way building on, and enhancing, the theories of Charles Hapgood.

One strange feature about the last ice age is that the ice sheet was clearly off center. It covered large swaths of Europe and North America, almost down to subtropical latitudes, but it didn’t cover eastern Siberia. Assuming that the geographical North Pole was located further south than today when the last ice age began, over Greenland, would explain this eccentricity.

Oddly enough, the South Pole seems to have stayed put all along. In Mario’s model, the South Pole is the pivot point in the gradual expansion of the Earth.

Mario discovered the ”wandering” of the North Pole when he measured the orientation of hundreds of ancient megalithic sites around the world. The hypothesis is that people have always oriented important buildings cardinally. It turns out that a large proportion of the ancient sites are almost oriented to today’s true north, but not quite. Mario realized that clusters of ancient buildings that are ”wrongly” oriented have exactly the same degree of deviation from true north.

He eventually came to two conclusions: The North Pole has had five different positions along a longitude that stretches over Greenland during the last 450,000 years, and many ancient megalithic structures are much older than previously believed.

According to this dating method, the Cochasqui pyramids in Ecuador could be a stunning 400,000 years old, and Chichen Itzá in Mexico 250,000 years, whereas the pyramids of Giza are oriented towards the current North Pole, which means their foundations are at the most 26,000 years old.

Mario, or Maarten, is a former successful businessperson and an engineer. Math is second nature to him. His and his co-researchers’ calculations tell him that the likelihood that the different clusters of structures that have the exact same orientation ”fault” between them should be oriented to precisely the five locations of the North Pole concluded by Mario is pure chance is virtually zero.

Mario thinks humanity has gone through many cataclysms. He downplays the special importance many ascribe to the Younger Dryas period as a civilization-ending event.

Many scientific disciplines need to change their tenets when – if – Mario’s theory becomes mainstream and the paradigm shifts completely. Geology is one. Archaeology is another. Just consider this brilliant remark by Mario:

”Archaeological periods – Iron Age, Bronze Age, Stone Age – are named according to the corrosion rate of those materials.”

Indeed. Iron lasts a little over 3,000 years, bronze a little over 5,000 years, and before that, you only find stone, so you call it the Stone Age. But the truth is that only stone survives tens of thousands of years. Any material could have been used then.

Mario’s website