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

182 EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST
course the anomalies have enormous spans, on the order of
thousands of miles.
Despite their vastly greater magnitude, these triaxial protuberances
have one thing in common with those in India.
Just as Daly observed that the Indian anomalies must result
from sweeping undulations of the geoid at some depth in the
crust, underlying all the surface features, so do the triaxial
protuberances indicate distortion in depth rather than at the
surface. In India the surface features would be in fairly
undulations were
good isostatic adjustment if the deep-seated
disregarded, while the geodesist Heiskanen, according to
Daly, found that if he disregarded the triaxial protuberances
if he regarded the triaxial ellipsoid as the natural shape of
the earth all his anomalies were reduced to one half, both
in extent and in intensity (97:368).
It does not seem reasonable simply to disregard distortions
of the shape of the earth of this magnitude, unless we have an
an ex-
explanation of them that is convincing. Daly provided
but for a number of reasons it seems to me unsatis-
planation,b
factory.
It was plain to him that the strength of the crust could
not possibly support such enormous distortions over such
spans. Therefore he made one or two alternative suggestions,
advancing them as possibilities only. He suggested, first, that
assuming an original molten condition of the earth, it is
possible that the material in the liquid melt was not of uniform
density on opposite sides of the earth, and that there-
fore when the mesosphere (the inner solid shell underlying
the asthenosphere) solidified, it was heavier on one side than
on the other that is, lopsided and the resulting unevenness
of gravity at the surface influenced the equilibrium, that is,
the elevation from place to place, of the surface layers. This
is an ingenious suggestion, but it requires the assumption of
the cooling of the earth, which is itself doubtful. Thus this
particular explanation rests upon speculation, and upon
speculation that is not well supported.
The same is true of Professor Daly's second suggestion. He