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

NORTH AMERICA AT THE POLE 215
that a warm current like the Gulf Stream would have been
flowing at that time out of the Arctic and down the coast of
Greenland. Such a warm current might easily have deglaciated
the island (or rather, islands). It might, however, have
been deflected from Scandinavia and the British Isles by land
masses in the North Atlantic, to be discussed later on.
If this deglaciation, indeed, reflects what really happened
in Greenland, then there must have been a warm interval in
Europe between the period of massive glaciation, to be discussed
later, and the much less severe glaciation of late Wis-
consin time. The present glaciation of Greenland would have
been the consequence of the passage of the pole from the
Hudson Bay region to its present location, with the refrig-
eration of the Arctic Ocean. The final warming of the cli-
mate both in Europe and in America would have been the
consequence of the disappearance of the North American
icecap, and of the pattern of anticyclonic winds which it had
created.
So far as the glaciation of Alaska is concerned, again, the
climate there was colder than it is now because of the vast
refrigerating effect of the icecap that covered 4,000,000
square miles of the continent. Just as, at present, the Antarc-
tic icecap makes the South Polar region colder than the Arc-
tic (because it is a perfect reflector of the sun's radiant energy
back into space), so then the great Wisconsin icecap meant
that the prevailing temperatures at the center of the ice
sheet (presumably the pole) were much lower than the temperatures
prevailing now at the present North Pole, where
no great icecap exists. But, although the intensely cold anticyclonic
winds blowing off the Wisconsin icecap made Alaska
colder than it is now, and thereby produced larger glaciers
than exist at present, still these winds blew only over con-
tinuous land, and not over the sea, and so they could not
pick up the moisture required to produce a continuous ice
sheet. This explains why Alaska warmed up at the end of
the North American ice age, even though it actually may
have moved closer to the pole.