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

THE SHAPE OF THE EARTH 171
the flow-off of icebergs could not even be an important factor
in reducing the rate of the annual increment of ice on the
glacier (128). The general problem of the Antarctic icecap
may be summarized thus:
First, we know that there is never any considerable melting
of snow in Antarctica. We have radioelement evidence of an
enormous expansion of the icecap there in recent millennia.
We also have evidence that it is now accumulating. We can
add that studies carried out by Captain Charles W. Thomas,
of the United States Coast Guard, of the radiolaria (minute
organisms) contained in samples of bottom sediments from
the Antarctic have recently convinced him that *
'during the
last 5,000 years the waters surrounding this continent (Antarctica)
have been getting colder" (411) just as would have
to be expected with a growing icecap.
Secondly, if Antarctica has always been at the South Pole,
what conceivable factor could have operated to prevent the
formation of an icecap there until the comparatively recent
Eocene Period, only about 60,000,000 years ago? Once an
icecap had formed, what other factor could have interrupted
the glaciation, so as to bring about the growth of luxuriant
forests there in later periods? Since it has been shown that
climatic zones like the present have clearly existed during
the whole of geological history (Chapter III), would we not
be justified in expecting the icecap to have accumulated con-
tinuously in Antarctica at least since the first known pre-
Cambrian ice age, about two billion years ago?
Thirdly, Campbell has made the significant observation
that the Antarctic icecap never melts, yet we know that ice
sheets elsewhere on the globe have melted again and again.
It has proved impossible to account for the ice sheets that
once existed and melted away in areas now near the equator.
Campbell points out that even if the rate of snowfall in
Antarctica is low compared with the precipitation in warmer
climates, yet the icecap has, in the oceans, an unlimited supply.
It follows that, if the present icecap is not large enough