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

138 * EARTH'S
SHIFTING CRUST
is evidence that points insistently to the former existence o
whole continents in what are now oceanic areas. Only re-
cently, for example, Dr. Albert C. Smith, of the Smithsonian
Institution, concluded, from a massive study of the plants of
the islands of the Southwestern Pacific, that the islands must
be merely the remnants of an ancient Melanesian continent
that broke up about 10,000,000 or 20,000,000 years ago (397).
We shall see that there is plenty of evidence, besides the evidence
of fossils, to support his conclusion.
From what has been said about mountain formation, I
think it is clear that the matter of the appearance and disap-
is accounted for at the same time that
pearance of land bridges
the mountain ranges are accounted for. A displacement of
the crust will lead to the uplift of long, narrow, folded tracts
on the sea bottom as well as on land. One of these, coming
into existence on the bottom of a shallow sea between two
major land masses, could connect such land masses and constitute
a land bridge. Its subsidence in a later movement of
the crust could separate the land masses, and the subsidence
could be partial, leaving islands, or total.
It is interesting to see that Umbgrove
found himself com-
pelled, because of a mass of geological evidence, to support
a theory of rapidly appearing and disappearing land bridges,
which was advanced by Willis and Nolke, though he ad-
mitted that *
'Their origin and submersion will probably remain
a mystery for some time to come. . . ." (430:238).
Land bridges have been very convenient for many sci-
entists seeking to avoid the horrid alternative of former
continents. According to the picture drawn by some writers,
these bridges were long snakelike arms, wriggling out this
way and that, which just happened to make the right connections
between the right continents at the right times for the
convenience of the right plants and animals. Often when the
threat of a former continent loomed so imminently that its
avoidance seemed hopeless, a land bridge would save the day.
Most paleontologists were satisfied with land bridges, and did
not insist on sunken continents, but some could not help