The polar regions are now in a temperate climate where they begin to melt where temperate regions are in the polar regions where they freeze and build up ice. Charles H. Hapgood was a history professor who began, at the prompting of some students, to look into the search for the lost continent of Atlantis. Hapgood realized that the entire planet did not have to be repositioned around its axis. Only the outer crust need move, just as the loosely peeled skin of an orange could be slid around the unmoved inner slices. Hapgood ultimately revised key parts of his thinking because his calculations convinced him that the mass of the ice cap on Antartica could not destabilize the earth's rotation.
Continental drift is based on the idea that the continents move individually.
A few writers have suggested that perhaps continental drift causes polar wandering. This book advances the notion that polar wandering is primary and causes the displacement of continents. Hapgood goes on to mention to two areas where he finds much of his evidence, in data derived from studies of geomagnetism and from carbon 14 dating. Although he argued that such global disruptions happened repeatedly, Hapgood by then was rejecting the idea that such disruptions could happen quickly. Based primarily on that technical data, he argued that each shift took approximately five thousand years, followed by 20 to 30 thousand year periods with no polar movements.