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

NORTH AMERICA AT THE POLE 22J
from a very small part of the earth's surface. Equally careful
measurements along all the coasts of all the continents would
be necessary to establish the fact of a general rise in sea level.
They could as easily establish that the sea level is falling.
Additional evidences of the fall of the sea level in postglacial
times are provided by Halle, for the Falkland Islands
(196), by Pollock, for Hawaii (34ga), and by Sayles, for Bermuda
(366a). Umbgrove, basing his statement on quite other
sources, concludes that "the sea-level has fallen over the
whole world in comparatively recent times*' (430:69).
A quite remarkable bit of evidence comes from Greenland.
There a whale was recently discovered well preserved in the
permafrost (the permanently frozen ground). It was dated by
radiocarbon, and found to be 8,500 years old. It was found
in beach deposits 43.6 feet above the present sea level. The
highest beach in the area was 1 30 feet above the present sea
level. It is hard to see how the elevation of this beach could
be ascribed to isostatic rebound of the crust since the ice age,
for there has been no lightening of the ice load on the crust
in Greenland. How, then, is this frozen whale to be inter-
evidence of a
preted? I think we can accept it as fairly good
general fall of sea level resulting from the withdrawal of
water from the oceans to feed the growing Antarctic icecap.
From the Philippines comes additional evidence that in
those areas where the sea level rose at the end of the North
American ice age, the rise was of a magnitude that cannot
be explained on the theory of glacial melt water, but, on the
contrary, requires the assumption that important changes
took place in the crust itself. Warren D. Smith has written:
It must be said that the geological history and structure of the
Philippines, as studied in recent years by both Dr. Dickerson and
myself, seem to indicate that the changes since the Pleistocene in
the Philippines have been profound enough to have caused the
disruption of land bridges and to have brought about the present
isolation of its masses by flooding. . .
We may
note that Smith makes no reference to a rise of
sea level because of the melting of glaciers. The subsidence