The entire mental of the Earth will be shifted in the matter of a day, perhaps hours changing the positions of south and north poles causing  worldwide disasters. Earthquakes would rock each and every continent. Massive tsunamis would cause destructions to coastal cities. It would be the ultimate planetary catastrophe.

Could a violent and sudden slippage of the Earth’s crust over its molten core spell doom for civilizations? Here are three early pole shift theories exactly how each proposed the world end.

In 1842, French mathematician Joseph Adhemar proposed that a melting and sudden collapse of the polar ice caps would destabilize Earth’s center of gravity, spawning a global tsunami.

In 1948, Electrical engineer Hugh Auchincloss Brown proposed that the increasing mass of the Antarctic ice-cap would suddenly and catastrophically tip Earth over like an unbalanced spinning top, causing global destruction.

In 1950s history professor Charles Hapgood theorized that a destabilizing build-up of the polar ice-caps would cause Earth’s crust to slip over its molten core, resulting in climate change as equatorial regions shift  towards the poles.

Back in 1934, the Kentucky-born "sleeping prophett" Edgar Cayce, whom his followers believe could place his mind in contact with the entirety of time and space while unconscious, awoke from one of his self-induced trances to describe a startling, horrific future vision.

"The earth will be broken up in the western portion of America," Cayce forecast. "The greater portion of Japan must go into the sea. The upper portion of Europe will be changed as in the twinkling of an eye. Land will appear off the east coast of America. There will be the upheavals in the Arctic and in the Antarctic that will make for the eruption of volcanoes in the torrid areas, and there will be the shifting then of the poles — so that where there has been those of a frigid or the semi-tropical will become the more tropical, and moss and fern will grow." In subsequent visions, Cayce predicted that the pole-shifting cataclysm would destroy the cities of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and that the process would begin in 2000 or 2001.

Skeptics, of course, question Cayce's powers — as magician and paranormal researcher James Randi's "An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural" notes, the slumbering oracle also famously predicted that the mythical lost continent of Atlantis would rise again from the sea in 1968 or 1969. Nevertheless, Cayce's notion of a 21st-Century pole-shifting disaster has persisted. Not only that, but it seems to have coalesced in the hive mind of pop-culture apocalyptic enthusiasts with other signs — ranging from the end of an ancient Maya calendar cycle to the cryptic verse of 16th Century French apothecary Nostradamus — to confirm the suspicion that the world as we know it will end in 2012.

But what may make Cayce's vision of a cataclysmic pole shift even more alluring is that it evokes — albeit, in hyperbolic fashion — a genuine geophysical controversy. Since at least the mid 19th century, a succession of scientific thinkers have raised the possibility that the Earth's mantle and crust might sometimes slip dramatically, which could leave a place like New York much closer to the North Pole than usual. Such a phenomenon, which scientists call true polar wander, has the potential to shift the Earth's face so radically that once-frigid Alaska could sit at the sweltering equator. The pole-shift hypothesis was popularized in the late 1950s by historian Charles Hapgood whose 1958 book on the subject, The Earth's Shifting Crust, featured a forward by Albert Einstein.

More recently, the pole shift idea got a boost from a research team led by Princeton University assistant professor of geosciences Adam Maloof, who examined ancient rocks in Norway and in 2006 published the first compelling evidence that such an event had occurred in the Earth's distant past, about 800 million years ago. Maloof and other scientists, though, believe the pole shift occurred over a muchlonger time scale — at least a million years or more — without the cataclysmic consequences envisioned by Cayce.

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courtesy:National Geographic, Shifting of the Poles