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

CONTINENTS AND OCEAN BASINS 137
deeply submerged at times. Later I shall show that the problem
cannot be solved by any theory that the melting of ice-
caps in "interglacial periods" periodically
raised the water
level.
One writer, who is considered a very special authority on
the climates of the past, Dr. C. E. P. Brooks, gave
a list of
continents that must have existed about 300,000,000 years
ago, if the distribution of plants and animals at that time is
to be explained. He even names them (52:247-51):
a. Nearctis, a "primitive North American continent/'
b. North Atlantis, including
rope.
Greenland and western Eu-
c. Angaraland, occupying part of the present Siberia.
d. Gondwanaland, a huge continent extending from South
America to India via South Africa.
He states, further, that the evidence shows that Nearctis
and North Atlantis were connected by a land bridge at about
Lat. 50 N., and that the first three continents were separated
from Gondwanaland by a great ocean, the Tethys Sea, which
extended from New Guinea to Central America. Another
authority, Beno Gutenberg, writes:
. . . Nearly all specialists on such problems conclude that during
certain pre-Tertiary periods land connections existed across sections
of the present Atlantic and Indian Oceans. . . . During certain geological
periods land life was able to roam from land to land; on the
other hand, such former connections of continental areas prevented
sea life from moving from one part of the Atlantic to another (194:
208-09).
Gutenberg
thus bears witness to the fact that the sea lif<
as well as the land life of the past supports the idea of im
portant changes in the positions of land masses.
We can see that the suggestions advanced are of two kinds:
sunken continents, and changing land bridges between conti-
nents. Land bridges, of course, are more easily explained
than sunken continents. However, we shall see that, for a
number of reasons, they will not suffice of themselves. There