02.04.2013 Views

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

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

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

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.

140<br />

EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST<br />

fact. According to Schuchert, North America has been sub-<br />

merged no less than seventeen times (gGgaiGoi). According<br />

to Humphreys, the sea has covered as much as 4,000,000<br />

square miles <strong>of</strong> North America at one time (231:613).<br />

Termier argued that the sedimentary beds composing the<br />

mountain ranges extending eastward from the Alps to Cen-<br />

tral Asia, which were laid down under the sea, would have<br />

required that the ancient Tethys Sea, in which they were laid<br />

down, should have been about 6,000 kilometers (or perhaps<br />

4,000 miles) across (419:221-22).<br />

Geophysicists tend to argue that such seas, which clearly<br />

did exist, were merely shallow affairs, invasions <strong>of</strong> the conti-<br />

nents <strong>by</strong> the ocean owing to some unknown cause. <strong>The</strong> positive<br />

evidence for this, based on the apparent absence from<br />

the sedimentary rocks <strong>of</strong> sediments formed in the very deep<br />

sea, has a fallacy in it, as will be made plain later. <strong>The</strong> positive<br />

evidence against the assumption that all these seas were<br />

shallow seas is, on the other hand, enormously strong. Umb-<br />

grove, for example, remarks:<br />

. . . Not only have parts <strong>of</strong> the continents foundered below sea-<br />

level since pre-Cambrian times but they have even done so until quite<br />

recently, and their subsidence occasionally attained great depths! <strong>The</strong><br />

present continents are but fragments <strong>of</strong> one-time larger<br />

(430- 3)-<br />

blocks. . . .<br />

A particularly important example <strong>of</strong> such foundering<br />

seems to have occurred in the North Atlantic, <strong>of</strong>f the north-<br />

eastern coast <strong>of</strong> the United States. It has been found that the<br />

sediments that compose the northeastern states were derived<br />

in ages past from a land mass to the eastward in the present<br />

North Atlantic. This could have been Brooks's continent <strong>of</strong><br />

North Atlantis.<br />

Some geologists, cowed <strong>by</strong> the geophysicists, have at-<br />

tempted to argue that these sediments might have been derived<br />

from a land mass situated on the present continental<br />

shelf, but the argument fails from every point <strong>of</strong> view. Brewster,<br />

for example, comments:

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!