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

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EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST
considering, because after all it at least makes sense of the
radiocarbon datings and the Atlantic marine cores. But this
Alaskan proposition is, he may think, going altogether too
far. Where will we end? Is the whole history of the earth
to be considered in terms of this hop, skip, and jump of the
poles? And is it conceivable that this sort of thing
could have
kept up for two billion years?
If the reader is having this sort of crisis of belief, I suggest
that he consider the matter in this light: one shift of the
crust, at the end of the ice age, has been pretty well demon-
strated. Another one, at the beginning of the ice age, is necessarily
and logically implied. The interval between them
seems to have been about 40,000 years. Now if we accept one
such unit, why not accept the previous ones also? After all,
the laws of nature work continuously: that was the principle
laid down by Sir Charles Lyell over a century ago. It is ob-
viously
sensible to work from the known to the unknown:
if we are fairly sure that the crust did move once or twice,
and at a certain rate, then it is but a jump to accepting with-
out a qualm a thousand such movements in the long history
of the globe.
The further advantages inherent in the assumption of the
Alaskan pole, and the general evidence for it, may be briefly
summarized. It explains the cause of the warm Interglacial
Period in Europe, when lions and hippopotamuses and ele-
phants romped around in Britain and on the Continent (to
which Britain was then probably joined). It allows for the
Sangamon Interglacial in the eastern parts of the United
States and Canada. As between the two polar positions, in
Greenland and Alaska, we have an explanation of the length
of the Sangamon Interglacial. We may visualize it as a warm
and ended at different times in different
period that began
parts of North America, and that was warmer in given areas
at certain times than at others. The speed of climatic changes
was slow enough to permit the gradual migration and adaptation
of species, and yet there were also abrupt, disastrous
changes due to the effects of volcanism, which, as we have