What exactly happens in a polar shift?

[Arob]

I have always wondered about this science 'hypothesis'

What would happen if the north pole were to suddenly shift to say... California?

And the south pole to wherever it would end up...

What would happen to all us humans on earth ? Could we survive?

[Heru_ur]

The pole shift hypotheses that I am familiar with account for the shifting of the poles to correspond to the shifting of the axis on which the Earth rotates. Some even think that the Earth sometimes shifts to a point where the poles are shifted to the equatorial region as happens to Mars. Our moon, however, stabilizes Earth on it's axis of rotation and prevents that.

[webtaz99]

I read an article in Scientific American (way back in 1986 or so) about this. The prevailing theory was that the field would gradually loose strength (it is doing this now) over many decades. At some point, pockets of "south" in the north or "north" in the south would form, then wander around, and over time collide and grow. Eventually more "south" would be in the North, and more "north" would be in the south. Then the pockets would break up, and the poles would be reversed, and the field would gain strength (but in reverse of what we have now).

All this would take hundreds of years.