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

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

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256<br />

EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST<br />

627) giving evidence <strong>of</strong> a recent "thin and inactive" ice<br />

sheet in Siberia, exactly as the hypothesis demands.<br />

It might frequently occur that an animal would escape<br />

It would seem that<br />

being washed out <strong>of</strong> the melting icecap.<br />

the Beresovka mammoth was one <strong>of</strong> these. He seems to have<br />

remained frozen in the attitude <strong>of</strong> his last struggle in the<br />

snowdrift. In a succession <strong>of</strong> thaws, however, the ice encasing<br />

his body was apparently washed away and replaced <strong>by</strong> freez-<br />

ing mud. <strong>The</strong> temperature <strong>of</strong> the carcass may have ap-<br />

proached the melting point at these times, but though this<br />

would have destroyed the edibility <strong>of</strong> the meat, it would not<br />

have disintegrated the body. It would even have been pos-<br />

sible for the outside <strong>of</strong> the body to have thawed briefly<br />

during its translation from the icecap to the permafrost with<br />

little or no decay, because <strong>of</strong> the absence <strong>of</strong> germs in the<br />

Arctic climate. It would seem that the Academicians who<br />

examined the mammoth in situ were not impressed with<br />

his edibility; they did not try any mammoth steaks.<br />

It appears that this assumption <strong>of</strong> a thin, temporary ice-<br />

cap in Siberia gradually transformed into permafrost solves<br />

most <strong>of</strong> the outstanding questions about the mammoths and<br />

the other animals whose remains are found in Siberia. It ex-<br />

plains, for example, why some <strong>of</strong> the mammoths have been<br />

found on the highest points <strong>of</strong> the tundra. It explains the<br />

configuration <strong>of</strong> the deposits in which they<br />

are found. It<br />

explains Tolmachev's remark that "mammoth-bearing drift<br />

deposits sometimes have a thickness <strong>of</strong> tens <strong>of</strong> feet, sometimes<br />

they are spread out in comparatively thin layers" (422:51).<br />

<strong>The</strong> "drift deposits" are water-formed; they can now be explained<br />

as the result <strong>of</strong> the melting <strong>of</strong> the thin icecap, which<br />

must have produced rapidly flowing rivers that picked up<br />

and deposited quantities <strong>of</strong> mud, thicker in some places than<br />

in others, and filled with bodies and parts <strong>of</strong> bodies dropped<br />

out <strong>of</strong> the icecap. <strong>The</strong> prompt refreezing <strong>of</strong> these seas <strong>of</strong><br />

mud, after the thaw, created the permafrost.<br />

But even if these assumptions seem to solve the problems,<br />

the reader may still say, "Wellvery good. But what if all

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