The Earth's Shifting Crust by Charles Hapgood - wire of information

THE MOUNTAINS 107
displacement, and particularly one 300,000,000 years ago,
can be made to explain most of the earth's present topographic
features. Umbgrove was justified in rejecting the
Vening Meinesz theory, but he admitted that this left him
with no explanation at all. "... On the other hand, it means
that the origin of both lineament systems remains an un-
solved problem" (430:307).
Some writers have suggested that the two fracture systems
originated at different times, and this is a very important
point. Umbgrove says:
It is a rather widespread belief that the origin of faults with a cer-
tain strike dates from a special period, whereas faults with a markedly
different strike would date from another well-defined period. In cer-
tain areas this conviction is founded upon sound arguments. . . .
(430:298).
He continues:
Some authors, however, have doubtless overrated the relation be-
tween the direction and the time of origin of a fault system. As a
typical example, I may mention Philipp, who once advanced the
opinion that the direction of the principal fault lines of northwestern
Europe changed from W. and W.N.W. in the Upper Jurassic toward
N. or N.N.E. in the Oligocene, and thence E.N.E. in the upper
Tertiary and Pleistocene. He added the hypothesis that their rotation
could have been caused by a
large displacement of the poles. In the
meantime it has been shown that some faults with a meridional strike
and well-defined
date from much older periods. Moreover, large
faults with a N.N.W. direction dating at least from the Upper Paleo-
zoic appear to have been of paramount influence in the structural
history of the Netherlands. Therefore Philipp's hypothesis has to be
abandoned because it is inconsistent with well-established facts
(430:
298).
Abandoned much too soon! The reader can easily see that
the objections Umbgrove raises to Philipp's theory are removed
by the present theory of crust displacements. With
this assumption, it would be inevitable that, in the long his-
tory of the globe, the poles would often be found in about
the same situations. If the strikes of the fault systems are
related to the positions of the poles, those of later periods