Godzilla and King Kong's Hollow Earth Theory
Some take Hollow Earth theory really seriously.
Godzilla versus Kong was released in 2021 featuring two titans facing off somewhere on Earth, I think, I haven’t seen the movie. But I do know the Universe in which these two exist is called the Monsterverse and the Monsterverse relies on a Hollow Earth theory to explain how fast those two move across the planet.
By dipping into caverns miles under the crust, the monsters can traverse the Earth quickly popping out in various locations around the world.
Surprisingly the Hollow Earth theory is a real-life idea someone had in the 17th century that still persists in some circles today. But is the Hollow Earth a real thing?
No, of course not.
“If it’s not hollow, why are caves a thing?!”
Hollow Earth, Hollow Theory
The idea of another world or large caverns miles beneath the Earth is not a new one. The ancient Greeks believed the Underworld and Tartarus were essentially another world within ours where the dead and punished lived. We all know the story of Orpheus, the Greek mythology version of Taken, where Orpheus did all he could including traveling to the underworld via a cave when his wife was taken.
So the concept of some kind of ecosystem existing miles below our feet is not new to us. In 1692, English Astronomer Edmond Halley put forth this idea to explain why his compass kept giving him weird readings.
Edmond Halley was not just an astronomer, he was a geophysicist, mathematician, meteorologist, and physicist, which really just goes to show what you can accomplish without a television. You might know him more as the namesake of Halley’s Comet as he was able to figure out the timing of the comet. So he was a pretty big deal.
“T.V broke so I mastered quantum physics instead.”
Halley also had an interest in magnets and worked to figure out why compasses would give variations to where magnetic north lay compared to true north. See True North is the term for the most northern part of the Earth while Magnetic North is the term for the most northern part of the magnetic field generated by Earth, where compasses point toward.
The problem was magnetic north seemed to be unpredictable and no one really knew why. After years of research, Halley posited below the Earth’s crust were three rings or shells sort of like Russian nesting dolls. He believed each shell rotated independently and had misaligned magnetic poles which would disrupt Earth’s outer magnetic field causing the variations.
Halley also believed every planet contained life and thought each of the shells within Earth also held life. The way he saw it, Earth was just a building created by God with each shell a new floor.
And at the time it made sense. If I was alive back then I would have probably read the theory and thought, “Yea, obviously.” I mean this was around the time doctors believed blowing tobacco smoke up someone’s ass would revive drowning victims. That’s a real thing people believed, so a scientist telling us the Earth had multiple Earths inside of it, was probably the least of everyone’s worries.
This is real…
Therefore it wasn’t really surprising when people were just kinda “meh” about the whole thing especially since Halley didn’t really expand on it and at one point when asked how life could exist in each of the shells without light he stated, “... we have no sort of idea.” So people just shrugged and moved on.
Poking Holes in the Theory
While people moved on, scientists’ interests had been piqued. Interest in Earth science was increasing and almost a hundred years later the hollow earth theory would be debunked.
In 1774 mathematician Charles Hutton would determine the mean density of Earth while working on the Schiehallion experiment. He figured the Earth was between 4.5 and 5 times denser than water.
Here’s the thing, in order for the Earth to be this dense, it can’t be hollow, it would be impossible. Variations of the experiment were done over the next years and centuries eventually figuring out that the actual density was closer to 5.5 times that of water.
So that’s it, right? Hollow earth is effectively disproven, everyone knows it’s debunked and is now limited to only the fictional universes of giant lizards and apes who biologically speaking wouldn’t be able to support their own weight right?
Unfortunately no, because there will always be some people who push theories without any scientific evidence to back them up.
Flat Earthers are dumb, clearly it’s a square Earth…. Squearth!
A Different Hollow Theory
On April 10th, 1818, heads of states, colleges, scientists, and others received a letter entitled Circular No.1, written by Army Captain John Symmes Jr wherein he declared the Earth was hollow. The evidence he proposed was, let me see if I got this right… because he “declared” it. It’s not known whether he was influenced by Edmond Halley’s debunked theory but Symmes’ hollow earth theory was a bit different.
Symmes believed the Earth had 5 shells as opposed to Halley’s 3, although as time went on he would abandon that idea and just believed the earth was fully hollow. Symmes also believed the Earth had a 4 thousand-mile-wide opening at the north pole going directly through to the 6 thousand-mile-wide opening at the south pole. So basically like a thick donut.
Definitely thicker than a bowl of oatmeal
Not a lot of people took Symmes seriously because it was, you know, it was dumb. He wasn’t able to raise enough money for an expedition to the north pole but by touring across the US promoting his theory, he was able to get enough support to bring a vote to congress to consider funding the expedition. The vote didn’t pass.
Nowadays the north and south poles have had plenty of visitors and I’m pretty sure none have fallen to another level within the planet. But Symmes did inspire plenty of more research and his ideas in some way may have possibly influenced Jules Verne’s 1864 classic “A Journey to the Center of the Earth.”
Other Hollow Earth Theories
Since then the theories on what lives in the hollow areas of Earth have only become stranger, some say, other humans, like Nazis and Vikings, others say aliens or a humanoid species in a kingdom called Agartha. Others still, say large versions of animals like apes, insects, and even dinosaurs.
They don’t explain how these civilizations or animals would live there though, since it’s probably hot as hell down there. The deepest we have been able to drill into the earth was a little over 7 miles or 11.2 kilometers; temperatures there reached 356 degrees Fahrenheit or 180 degrees Celsius. Therefore it stands to reason even if the center of the earth was hollow and cooler, which it’s not, you would still need to pass miles and miles of increasing temperature.
It’s all become a conspiracy theory despite all the scientific evidence and the logical common sense that has to be ignored in order for any of it to make sense.
But it does make for some really good fiction. And since it is fiction it can be shaped in a way to allow Godzilla and various other monsters to quickly jump from one end of the world to the other in order to fight.
