In 1985 the planetary scientist Peter Schultz published a paper documenting that Mars's geographic north pole had shifted in a past epoch. He had identified a series of ancient polar deposits — layered dust and ice — in places where today there is no longer any pole. The original pole, based on those deposits, was around 45 degrees north, 160 degrees west in current coordinates. That is, about 45 degrees of angular distance from the present pole.
Mars has a large, recent crater located in the northern hemisphere. It is called Lyot, about 236 km across, sitting at 50.5 degrees north, 29.3 degrees east. It is one of the youngest large craters on the planet (Amazonian epoch). Here I must be transparent: the link between Lyot and the polar shift is a working hypothesis of mine, not Carlotto's nor Schultz's, who document the shift but do not identify a causal crater. If Lyot were the cause, the shift direction computed from the ancient pole should point toward Lyot. The test is simple, direct, falsifiable: I ran the calculation, and the angle between the two directions is just a few degrees. In the ancient era Lyot would lie close to the Martian equator. It remains a hypothesis, though: the Amazonian dating is far later than the great Borealis impact (~4 billion years), the real candidate for the planet's decapitation. Lyot, if anything, would be a late and minor settling.
On the surface of Mars there are pyramid-symmetric formations — the most famous in the Elysium Planitia region, made famous by Carl Sagan. Here precision is needed: Carlotto classifies them as yardangs, wind-sculpted shapes, aligned yes, but by erosion, not by construction. The strong case for non-random geometry, according to Carlotto, is not Elysium but Cydonia: there the axes of the formations cluster around 33 degrees, and the Crater & McDaniel (1999) test finds an anomalous arrangement of the mounds with a probability of about 1 in 65,000 of being random. It must be said honestly — as the referee Peter Sturrock noted — that non-randomness does not mean artificiality: in nature there exist aligned and regular formations. I am not arguing that they are artifacts. I am arguing that the same method — measuring the structures relative to an ancient pole rather than the present one — returns an anomalous signature on both planets. Schultz's data have been published in Scientific American for forty years.
There is one point that changes the way we look at Mars. It is not a dead planet: it is a planet that is dying, and has been for a long time. Two clocks run on it at different speeds. The biological one stopped early, ~3.7 billion years ago, when the dynamo shut down and the solar wind began to strip away the atmosphere. But the geophysical one has never stopped: liquid water until less than a million years ago, volcanism along the Cerberus Fossae between 50,000 and 200,000 years ago, marsquakes recorded by InSight between 2018 and 2022, and impacts still today — hundreds of new craters a year. And at the origin of it all, perhaps, a single event: the great Borealis impact, whose scar covers 40% of the planet. A collision that would explain together the dichotomy, the birth of the two moons (accreted from a debris disk, like Earth's Moon), the shift of the axis and the beginning of the death of the magnetic field. The great blow did not shrink Mars: it stripped it to the bone, tore off a piece that became a moon, and took away its shield.
The physics of True Polar Wander, the crustal dichotomy, the Oceanus Borealis, the Cydonia debate, and what all this means for the framework of cycles — the article continues in Vol. 1, Chapter 3 (“The Red Twin”).