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

THE GREAT EXTINCTIONS 269
be preserved at all. Bodies that die and lie on the surface soon disintegrate
and the bones are scattered. A volcanic eruption would explain
the end of the Alaskan animals all at one time, and in a manner
that would satisfy the evidences there as we know them. The herds
would be killed in their tracks either by the blanket of volcanic ash
covering them and causing death by heat or suffocation, or, indirectly,
by volcanic gases. Toxic clouds of gas from volcanic upheavals could
well cause death on a gigantic scale. . . .
the Alaskan mucks, too, there is evidence of atmos-
Throughout
pheric disturbances of unparalleled violence. Mammoth and bison
alike were torn and twisted as though by a cosmic hand in Godly
rage. In one place, we can find the foreleg and shoulder of a mam-
moth with portions of the flesh and the toenails and the hair still
clinging to the blackened bones. Close by
bison with the vertebrae clinging together with tendons and ligaments
and the chitinous covering of the horns intact. There is no
mark of a knife or cutting instrument. The animals were simply torn
is the neck and skull of a
apart and scattered over the landscape like things of straw and string,
even though some of them weighed several tons. Mixed with the piles
of bones are trees, also twisted and torn and piled in tangled groups;
and the whole is covered with fine sifting muck, then frozen solid.
Storms, too, accompany volcanic disturbances of the proportions
indicated here. Differences in temperature and the influence of the
cubic miles of ash and pumice thrown into the air by eruptions of
this sort might well produce winds and blasts of inconceivable vio-
lence. If this is the explanation of the end of all this animal life, the
Pleistocene period was terminated by a very exciting time indeed
(212:176-78).
In Chapters IV and VII we saw that volcanic eruptions,
possibly on a great scale, are a corollary of any displacement
of the crust; therefore, our theory strongly supports and reinforces
the suggestions advanced by Professor Hibben, and
at the same time his evidence strongly supports our theory.
But Professor Hibben points out certain consequences that
would flow from our theory, which I have not stressed. Wherever
volcanism is very intensive, toxic gases could locally be
very effective in destroying life. This is also true of violent
local windstorms. Massive volcanic eruptions might, of
course, occur anywhere on earth during a movement of the
crust, and we saw, in Chapter VII, that they apparently oc-