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

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EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST
have found an impressive mass of reliable direct field ob-
servation indicating that the original direction of the ice
invasion of the British Isles, in the earlier part of the ice age,
was from the northwest. In most areas the evidences of the
movement were later overlaid or destroyed by the Scandi-
navian ice sheet, or by local glaciers.
In reviewing the field reports, and later the general geological
works that used the reports as source material, I have
noticed a most interesting phenomenon. Field observers
quite often remarked on the northwest-southeast directions
of certain glacial striations, on associated glacial evidences
showing clearly that the ice moved from the northwest
toward the southeast, and on evidence that the ice sheet
swept over the tops of most of the mountains of Ireland,
Wales, and Scotland, often across the axes of the valleys, and
from the northwest. But as the discussion of the subject was
removed from direct contact with the field, and as the field
reports were condensed, abstracted, and interpreted, this evidence
of ice movement from the northwest became more and
more subordinated, and, finally, was lost to view. The reason
for this is quite simple. The geologists were firmly convinced
that the ice sheet could have come only from Scandinavia.
An ice center in the North Atlantic, involving former land
areas in that region, was quite unthinkable. This was a
natural consequence of the general acceptance of the theory
of the permanence of continents. Various ingenious solutions
of the problem were suggested. Charlesworth pointed out that
a westward-trending valley could turn an ice sheet descend-
ing from the British highlands westward, and it might fan
out on the coastal plain, so that its northern flank would actu-
ally be moving toward the northwest. Other geologists have
stressed glaciers expanding in all directions from elevated
areas in Britain. The awkward thing is that precisely what
these people assert happened probably did happen, but in
the later part of the ice age, when the North Atlantic ice
center was gone, the Scandinavian glacier lay along the east
coast of Britain, and local valley glaciers occupied the in-