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

THE GREAT EXTINCTIONS
standing. The tree was very perfectly preserved in the permafrost,
with its roots and seeds (113:151). Toll claimed that
green leaves and ripe fruit still clung to its branches. Yet, at
the present time, the only representative of tree vegetation
on the islands is a willow that grows one inch high.
Now let us return to the question of whether all these remains
were floated out to the islands on spring floods. Let us
begin with a backward view at the history of these islands.
Saks, Belov, and Lapina point to evidence that there were
luxuriant forests growing on the New Siberian Islands in
Miocene and perhaps Pliocene times (364). At the beginning
of the Pleistocene the islands were connected with the main-
land, and the mammoths ranged over them. In the opinion
of these writers the vast numbers of mammoth remains on
Great Lyakhov Island indicate that they took refuge on the
island when the land was sinking (364:4, note). There is no
evidence that they were washed across the intervening sea.
The improbabilities in this suggestion of transportation of
these hundreds of thousands of animal bodies across the
entire width of the Nordenskjold Sea, for a distance of more
than 200 miles from the mouth of the Lena River, are simply
out of all reason. Let us see exactly what is involved.
First, we should have to explain why the hundreds of thou-
sands of animals fell into the river. To be sure, they
fall in all at once; nevertheless, they
did not
must have had the habit
of falling into the river in very large numbers, because only
one body in a very great many could possibly float across 200
miles of ocean. Of those that floated at all only a few would
be likely to float in precisely the correct direction to reach
the islands. Islands, even large ones, are amazingly easy to
miss even in a boat equipped with a rudder and charts. The
Lena River has three mouths, one of which points in a direc-
tion away from the islands. The two other mouths face the
islands across these 200 miles of ocean. Occasionally, a piece
of driftwood might float across the intervening sea. Occasionally,
perhaps, an animal if for some reason it did not
happen to sink, if it were not eaten by fishes might be