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

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EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST
of certain methods of deduction, to reach an educated guess
as to what area lay at the pole during the previous period.
The method of locating a previous polar position is simple
in principle, but very complicated in practice. The prin-
on a circle drawn about the last estab-
ciple is to find a point
lished polar position with a radius of the same order of
magnitude as the distance between the present pole and the
last position. The assumption underlying this is that while
one displacement may move the crust (and therefore shift the
poles) farther than another, the chances are against any very
great differences. It seems that the last displacement, which
brought Hudson Bay down from the pole, amounted to
about 2,000 miles on the meridian of maximum displacement.
We shall therefore start out with the idea that the
previous displacement may
have been of about the same
or twice
magnitude, but it can easily have been half as great
as great. This can later be checked with the field evidence.
Our first is step to draw a circle around the hypothetical
polar position in Hudson Bay, with a radius of 2,000 miles.
Now, with a very liberal margin of error, we can assume that
the previous pole lay somewhere near that circle. Our second
step is to check the field evidence for past climates for the
whole earth to see what position on or near that circle will
the most facts.
explain
The difficulties encountered in assembling the evidence
for a pole in Hudson Bay were very great, but they did not
a reasonable
compare with the difficulties of establishing
case for the position of the previous pole. For this earlier
period, embracing about 40,000 years, the evidence was much
scantier. The margins of error on all climatic determinations
had to be much greater. The numerous lines of evidence
had to be examined in the light of the conscious and uncon-
scious assumptions applied to them by previous workers,
whose objectives and methods had been influenced by an
entirely different set of ideas, and whose interpretations of
the evidence might therefore be very different from mine.