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

THE GREAT EXTINCTIONS 237
it is not a question at all of whether the climate grew
colder, but merely a question of when the change oc-
curred. I have already discussed the evidence showing that
it occurred (for the last time, anyway)
when North Amer-
ica moved southward from the pole.
Campbell has contributed a suggestion with regard to
the alleged floating of hundreds of thousands of bodies
across the Nordenskjold Sea. He notes that bodies ordinarily
float because of gas produced by decomposition. Decomposition
is at a minimum in very cold water, and therefore bodies
ordinarily do not float in very cold water. As an example of
this he points to a peculiarity of Lake Superior. The waters
of this lake are very cold. This may be because they are supplied,
as some people think, by underground springs from
the Rocky Mountains, far away. And there is an old saying
in the lake region that "Lake Superior never gives up its
dead." But the Arctic Ocean is as cold as the springs fed by
the glaciers of the Rockies. The water of the Lena would
not be warm even in midsummer, but during the spring
floods when the Lena would be swollen with the melt water
of the winter snows the water at such times would be frigid,
and the bodies of animals drowned in it would not decom-
pose, nor would they float. They would tend to sink, instead,
into the nearest hole, and never come to the surface.
4. A Sudden Change of Climate?
We may reasonably
conclude that the climate of Siberia
changed at the end of the Pleistocene, and that it grew colder.
Our problem is to discover what process of change was in-
volved. On the one hand, our theory of displacement of the
crust involves a considerable period of time, and a gradual
movement; on the other hand, the discovery of complete
bodies of mammoths and other animals in Siberia, so well
preserved in the frozen ground
edible, seems to argue a cataclysmic change.
as to be in some cases still