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

THE SHAPE OF THE EARTH l6l
to yield and sink, displacing soft rock from below as the ice-
cap grows in weight. At the same time I should like to present
a number of considerations indicating that there is, at
the present time, a massive departure from isostatic equilibrium
in Antarctica.
One of the most astonishing things revealed by the new
techniques of radioelement dating is, as we have seen, the
rapid rate of the growth both of the present ice sheet in
Antarctica and of the last great icecap
Even before the new knowledge was
in North America.
available, however,
various authorities had agreed that there must be a consid-
erable lag between the growth of an ice sheet and the adjustment
of the crust to it by subcrustal flow of the plastic rock
out from under the glaciated tract. The geologist Wilhelm
Ramsay, referring to this lag, said:
... As the icecaps grew bigger and thicker, they loaded more
and more the areas occupied by them. The crust of the earth gave
way, and began to sink, but not in the increased (352:246).
proportion that the loads
Ramsay pointed out that the "rebound" of the crust follow-
ing the removal of the ice still continues thousands of years
after the end of the ice age, showing how slowly the crust
adjusts. Daly also referred to this lag:
Owing to the stiffness of the earth's materials and the sluggishness
of their response to deforming forces, the basin [around the
Baltic] persisted long after the ice melted away. The lower parts of
Scandinavia and Finland were kept submerged under the sea. . . .
(97^90).
According to Daly, the present isostatic distortion in the
center of the area once occupied by the great Scandinavian
ice sheet is the equivalent of "a plate of granite with a
thickness of 160 to 270 meters of rock" (97:386-87). This
amounts to about three times as much ice. Thus it would
amount to an ice sheet between 1,500 and 2,500 feet thick,
and this in spite of the fact that isostatic adjustment has
theoretically been proceeding in that area for perhaps 15,000