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

254
EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST
are cold. The forest still has a summer look. It is still possible
to swim in the lake, and then come out and stretch in the sun
to get dry and warm. But suddenly, without transition, in
the course of a few hours, the northwest wind brings winter.
The lake freezes up, and the very next day, as far as the eye
can see, there is nothing but ice and snow.
Things moved faster, or at least more drastically, in the
grassy meadow. The storm came down early in August, perhaps
first with rain, and terrific wind. Humphreys has
pointed out that the effect of a large quantity
of volcanic
dust in the atmosphere must be to increase the temperature
gradient between the poles and the equator, resulting in
more rapid circulation of the air, in winds of greater velocity.
I shall present additional evidence of this in the following
pages. Since winds occasionally attain a velocity of 150 miles
an hour or more even today, we may conservatively suppose
that the storm could have hit the grassy meadow at that
speed. At the beginning of the disturbance, the mammoth
would have stopped eatingwithout even bothering to swal-
low the last few beans in his mouth. He would have left the
meadow and, accompanied by his friends, sought shelter in
the nearest forest, as, no doubt, he had often done before
during storms. Here, in the confusion of the storm, perhaps
because of the force of the wind itself, he may have fallen
over the cliff at the bottom of which his body was found. He
was not killed, but a leg bone and his pelvic bone were
broken. He couldn't walk, so he lay there, while the wild
hurricane in a very few hours brought down subzero air
masses from the polar zone, and the rain turned to snow, and
piled up around him. He lifted the fore part of his body as
far as he could above the snow, but it piled up, in the lee of
the cliff over which he had fallen, until it was above his head.
By this time, however, he might already have frozen to death
in his half-standing posture. A similar fate would have engulfed
millions of animals. During the ensuing months of
winter the snow mantle would still thicken, and during the