The Next End of the World The Rebirth of Catastrophism
The Next End of the World: The Rebirth of Catastrophism by Ben Davidson collects decades of suppressed geophysics, classified expedition records, and modern satellite data into a single argument that Earth runs on a catastrophe cycle, and that the next reset approaches within the lifetime of readers now alive. Davidson, who produces the daily Suspicious0bservers program and co-authored the textbook Weatherman's Guide to the Sun, traces this cycle from nineteenth-century naturalists through a Pentagon cover-up to the recurring solar micronova he names as the engine driving global disaster.
A Field That Researchers Kept Alive
Davidson opens by recovering the lineage of catastrophism. W.B. Walker wrote Cyclical Deluges in 1871, building on Georges Cuvier, who founded comparative anatomy and confirmed extinctions as real natural events, drawing in turn on Dolomieu and DeLuc from the 1700s. Cuvier and Walker laid groundwork that Immanuel Velikovsky carried into the 1900s, a version David Talbott and members of The Thunderbolts Project still defend today. Frank Hibben used modern evidence inside these models and repeatedly issued the challenge that organizes the whole book: explain all the evidence. Davidson treats that demand as a structural test, and he spends the book meeting it piece by piece.
What evidence does Hibben's challenge cover? Davidson lists surge deposits packed with the bones of thousands of animals, mammoths frozen so fast that food remained undigested in their stomachs, shells and boulders carried to great elevations from Wales to the Jura mountains, granite blocks resting atop mountains near Death Valley, the Pampean mud deposit, and deep-sea canyons running off continental shelves that turbidity currents fail to explain. Myth carries the same record: Peruvian stories of the sun standing still, Malaysian and Sumatran accounts of a long night, Egyptian and biblical descriptions of a black sun.
The CIA Hat Trick
The book's most provocative chapter charts how three moves crushed catastrophism as a respectable science. In the late 1940s, Major Maynard E. White led an expedition to map the Arctic under threat of Soviet attack, and his team discovered alternating tropical and polar sediment layers separated by roughly 10,000 to 12,000 years, each carrying a magnetic excursion, evidence that Earth's crust shifts rapidly and repeatedly. White preserved the records and the Pentagon meeting documents, handing them to his son Ken White, who published them in 1994 as World in Peril. The Office of Strategic Services, soon to become the CIA, sat in on those meetings, and Charles Hapgood sat on the roster.
Davidson argues that Hapgood, who held the real Pentagon conclusions, then paraded a scientifically weaker version of crustal displacement to the public, the version Einstein endorsed in a famous foreword. When mainstream geologists debunked Hapgood's timelines and pole positions, that defeat dragged the entire field down with it, and Carl Sagan soon dispatched Velikovsky. A 2013 Freedom of Information Act request surfaced the third figure: Chan Thomas, whose 1960s book The Adam and Eve Story appeared in a declassified CIA file marked with the unusual classification code "K" for unknown origin. Davidson received a copy in autumn 2018, found almost nothing about Thomas online, and released a December 2018 video, "The Next End of the World | CIA Classified," that reached millions and revived the field within days.
Davidson adds a fourth element to this account: the National Science Foundation shielding the safe paradigm. Douglas Vogt traced NSF grant money through a forensic accounting effort, and Davidson notes that the most-cited paper debunking Hapgood carries a correction placing past polar positions on opposite sides of the globe, a correction that researchers have cited only a handful of times.
The Solar Micronova Answers Hibben
The mechanism Davidson proposes unifies the scattered evidence. Stars in three categories erupt: supernovae destroy themselves, while classical and recurrent novae survive to erupt again. Davidson places the sun among recurrent novae on a roughly 10,000 to 15,000-year cycle. Dust, gas, and plasma accumulate in the solar atmosphere, dimming the sun to red and then near-black until internal pressure blasts off the outer shell. The eruption sends a flash of UV and x-ray light, then hours of proton and electron bombardment, then a plasma shockwave that destroys power grids and induces arc discharge from sky to ground, then dust carrying heavy nova isotopes, and finally silicate impactors flung from the expanding shell.
That sequence explains the three hardest pieces of Hibben's challenge at once. Impactors arrive as fragments of the micronova shell. Transuranic isotopes like Aluminum-26 and Iron-60, found in surge-deposit bones and microtektites with half-lives too short to predate the solar system and too short to survive transit from a distant nova, point to a recent nearby source, and 2020 modeling showed nova dust stays trapped in the remnant, demanding a very close producer. The sun fits. The great waves follow from a crustal shift: the low velocity zone, a thermo-electric plasticity layer locking crust to mantle, unlocks under electromagnetic and thermal stress, and the crust slides ninety degrees while the core keeps spinning.
Davidson grounds this in modern observation. Length-of-day glitches correlate with geomagnetic jerks from the core and with strong solar storms, both touching the low velocity zone. Billy Yelverton, working in Davidson's plasma lab near Albany, Georgia, charged olivine crystals and watched them fly on discharge, and pushed mantle water upward against gravity in under a quarter second. Anthony Peratt of Los Alamos National Laboratory, who once ran the entire U.S. nuclear energy program, holds that the sun triggers disasters every 10 to 15 thousand years. Dr. August Dunning, formerly of NASA/JPL and CalTech, maps flood myths across Sumerian, Hindu, Incan, Chinese, and Native American sources onto the same event. Dr. Robert Schoch found the lightning strike point behind the Sphinx and vitrified rocks nearby.
The Galactic Current Sheet Pulls the Trigger
Why would the sun erupt on a cycle at all? Davidson points to the galactic current sheet, the wavy magnetic instability first described by Parker in the mid-1900s. Earth crosses the sun's current sheet roughly weekly, taking geomagnetic storms each time. The solar system crosses the galaxy's sheet on the same principle, a passage Davidson dates to a few centuries inside a roughly 12,000-year cycle. The galactic sheet sweeps charged dust and gas like a duster, supplying both the accretion material to choke the sun and the electromagnetic disruption to stall its solar wind. Astronomers have begun imaging this sheet over the past few years, and in October 2020 Dr. Bennet and Dr. Bovy of the University of Toronto confirmed a wave-like density structure among local stars.
The Next Cycle Is Already Underway
Davidson stacks present-day signals to argue the reset has begun. Earth's magnetic field peaked 3,000 to 5,000 years ago, then in 1859, the year of the great Carrington solar storm, the north magnetic pole took off, now racing dozens of kilometers per year toward Siberia on a collision course with the south pole. A NASA and World Center for Geomagnetism team measured a 10% field loss since the mid-1800s, the European Space Agency's SWARM mission raised that to 15% by 2010, and the SWARM manager reported the loss rate climbing from 5% per century to 5% per decade. Davidson forecasts grid trouble by 2030 to 2040 and a reversal moment around 2040 to 2060.
The neighboring planets corroborate the picture. Venus shows winds 33% faster than normal and fresh phosphine signatures, Mars warms and shakes with unexplained InSight seismicity, Jupiter's Red Spot changes while its radiation belts emit strange radio signals, Saturn's 30-year superstorm arrived early at perihelion, and Pluto's atmosphere, expected to thin after 1989, instead built pressure until it dropped 20% by 2019. Pluto sits directly in line with the galactic center, deepest into the sheet. Among nearby stars in that same direction, Barnard's Star roared to life in the 1990s after decades of quiet, Proxima Centauri produced a record super-flare in 2012, and AD Leonis flared in 2020, falling in the order the sheet predicts.
Judging the Timeline and Surviving It
Davidson closes with monitoring and preparation. He tracks lightning return strokes, which spiked across the 2020 northern summer and the Arctic as the weakening field admits more cosmic rays, alongside space weather, seismic activity at 50 to 200 kilometer depth, and changes in the sun's visible structure. His Big 5 Land Checklist names rural location, mountainous terrain, caves or mines, a reliable water source, and freedom from volcanos and faults. He explains the great wave as a fluid-dynamic super-high-tide that rises a foot a minute for a day, judges mountain safety by surrounding terrain, and recommends a hard-plastic-and-wood flotation craft. He estimates human losses of 75 to 95%, places the micronova, excursion, and waves within 10 to 40 years, and supports the Chan Thomas tilt scenario placing new poles at the Bay of Bengal and Ecuador. Davidson frames the proper response as mindful preparation, since humans descend from survivors of every prior cycle.
