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

NORTH AMERICA AT THE POLE 1Q7
An eighth line of evidence is presented by the story of the
extinctions of many
kinds of animals at the end of the ice
age, and this is so important that it will require a chapter by
itself (Chapter VIII). Much additional evidence based on ma-
rine and land sediments will also be presented later (Chap-
ter IX).
2. The Displacement Caused by the Ice Sheet
It may be argued that convincing evidence of a displacement
of the crust by no means requires the further conclusion that
the movement at the end of the ice age was the result of the
centrifugal effects of the North American icecap. A dozen
other possibilities may be thought to exist. Several of them
may be worth considering. Why, then, must we jump to the
conclusion that the event was related causally to the icecap?
There have been several suggestions to account for shifts
of the crust by other agencies than icecaps. What is the common
element of these suggestions? It can easily be pointed
out. All of them involve long periods of time. Gold's sug-
gestion involves periods of the order of a million years.
Bain's involves periods of a great many million years be-
tween movements. Ma's involves long periods between
movements, terminated by cataclysms. Eddington's type of
displacement, if it could be made to work at all, would neces-
sarily be very slow. Besides their common inability to explain
the velocity of events revealed by the new methods of radio-
element dating, the suggestions are unsatisfactory also because
they are vague as regards the mechanism of displacement.
They can be grounded neither upon detailed observations
nor upon mathematical calculations. The mechanism developed
by Campbell, on the other hand, is quite definite and
precise (although it, too, necessarily must involve assump-
tions). Of special importance is the fact that Campbell's
mechanism is capable of being checked against geological
observations in some detail.