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

308
EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST
Camel North of the Arctic Circle/' The author, James Wil-
liam Gidley, described the discovery in Alaska not only of
the camel remains but also of the remains of elephant and
of other animals, including the horse and bison. He then
remarks that the discovery "adds proof in support of the supposition
that milder climatic conditions prevailed in Alaska
during probably the greater part of the Pleistocene period"
(173:1). We do not have to go all the way with Mr. Gidley.
But here indeed is evidence enough of the existence of
really temperate conditions very possibly in the very period
of time when the assumption of the Greenland pole calls for
them. A final consideration relating to the evidence for a
pole in Alaska is that this could have caused the Cordilleran
glaciation, which, according to Coleman, preceded the Labrador
and Keewatin ice sheets (87:10). It may be added also
that there is real support from fossil terrestrial magnetism
for the polar succession in Alaska and Greenland. The Japanese
geophysicist Akimoto and his colleagues have produced
magnetic evidence of the migration of the pole from north
of North Central Siberia, in the Arctic Ocean, across Alaska
to Greenland in the Pleistocene (418:11).
Thus the matter must be left, for the present. If it seems
to the reader that I have sometimes based too much on too
little data, and that I sometimes attribute too much significance
to isolated facts, I agree that I have probably committed
this error at times. On the other hand, there is sometimes
a tendency to postpone any thinking, in the hope that the
necessity of revising basic principles may be removed by
additional facts.
6. The Remoter Past
Since, as I have mentioned, with every step backward into
time the evidence becomes thinner, it is hardly worth while
to attempt, at present, to solve the problem of the earlier
positions of the poles that would be required to explain the