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

THE GREAT EXTINCTIONS 255
following summer, because of the continuing effects
volcanic dust, it would scarcely melt at all.
of the
At this point many animals have been frozen into the
snowdrifts; moreover, except for some that may have been
dismembered by the force of the wind, they are intact. They
are frozen in the ice of a nascent icecap. Since the region
moves ever northward, the ice cover tends to remain over
most of the area; it does not quite melt away during the
summers, and it gets thicker and thicker as Siberia ap-
proaches the pole.
But here some impatient reader with some geological
knowledge will break in and say, "But there was no icecap
in Siberia! "
Quite so: no continental icecap finally devel-
oped; the icecap that began to grow never came to maturity.
Instead, it melted away.
One need not look far for the explanation of this. We have
noted that the region was uplifted during the displacement.
In the earlier stages, while the climate was still warm, the
uplift had been sufficient to open land communications with
the New Siberian Islands and Alaska. In climate, a slight in-
crease of elevation may be the equivalent
of hundreds of
miles of latitude. So, after a movement of the crust had progressed
to a certain distance, and the resulting increased
elevation of the land had brought lowered temperatures, a
thin icecap stretched over northern Siberia.
But when, after the end of the displacement, isostatic ad-
justment began to correct the elevation, and to bring the
area down, it also warmed the climate, and so the nascent
icecap melted away, and no doubt this development was
furthered by the Climatic Optimum. During this warm pe-
riod, the ice sheet in Siberia may have melted very rapidly,
and torrents of melt water may have borne the bodies of
the animals along, after they were disengaged from the ice,
and torn their bodies apart, and heaped them up in great
numbers as we find them, and buried them in vast seas of
freezing mud. In most cases, of course, only the bones remained.
Brooks cites a statement by Flint and Dorsey (160: