Category: Geological Myths

• The "Hidden" Island of California

  This theory revived the much older belief that California was an island, combining it with modern earthquake and plate-tectonic fears to claim that the state was drifting away from the continent and that officials were secretly “bolting” it down. It fused two separate historical traditions: the early modern cartographic myth of California as an island, and the modern misconception that California could simply break off and fall into the Pacific. In conspiracy form, the state’s geology becomes a concealed engineering problem rather than a matter of tectonic science.

• The "California" Sunken Continent

  This theory claims that California was once part of the lost continent of Lemuria and that the state, or large parts of it, would one day sink back beneath the Pacific. It fuses nineteenth-century lost-continent speculation with later esoteric traditions and modern earthquake fears, especially around the San Andreas Fault. The Lemuria component belongs to speculative and occult literature rather than geology, while modern scientific sources explicitly reject the idea that California is about to "fall into the ocean."