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

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EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST
How can we reach a reasonable guess as to the number that
remain undiscovered?
The second reason for holding that the idea of rare moun-
even more
tain-building periods is quite illusory is perhaps
It seems that a remarkable error has vitiated the
persuasive.
interpretation of the evidence regarding these alleged periods.
The error has been exposed by the development of
nuclear methods of dating recent geological events, already
referred to, and to be discussed more fully later. These have
revealed an unexpectedly rapid rate of geological change.
The error, I think, consists in interpreting the geological
evidence on the assumption that conditions as revealed in a
particular deposit in one area necessarily determine worldwide
conditions. Thus, evidence of an ice age in a particular
deposit in one place has been interpreted as meaning a period
of lowered temperature for the whole world at that time. In
the same way, mountain-building revolutions were assumed
to affect all parts of the world at once. The idea that moun-
tain building might go on on one continent while another
went scot-free was not entertained.
The contemporaneousness of these events in different parts
of the world rested, as we shall see, upon a very vague idea of
geological time. The techniques for dating the older geological
formations never did, and do not now, allow reliable
conclusions regarding the contemporaneousness of moun-
tain building on different continents any more than they
permit such conclusions regarding climatic changes. Margins
of error amounting to millions of years must always be al-
lowed. Triassic folding in India need not be contemporary
with Triassic folding in North America, because the Triassic
Period is estimated to have lasted about 35,000,000 years!
Calculations of the rates at which the weather wears away
mountains have shown that mountain ranges may be worn
in much less time than that.
away
Thus, we cannot place reliance on the accepted notions of
the occurrence of mountain-building revolutions in time and
space, but must hold that the process was, in all probability,