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

EARLIER DISPLACEMENTS OF CRUST
the average length of the subdivisions of the cycle to periods
of the order of 75,000 to 250,000 years. But it must be remembered
that we have only averages; the cycles differ
greatly and their subdivisions also differ greatly in length.
When we consider the fact that the intervals and directions
of crust displacements are necessarily irregular, there appears
to be a very good agreement between our theory and the
facts of the Pennsylvanian cycles. At least, it will hardly be
denied that the theory offers the first possibility of under-
standing the cycles. Moreover, if our recent experience of the
shortening of our estimates of geological time in the Pleisto-
cene is a valid basis for extrapolating to earlier periods, it
may well be that geologists have exaggerated the length of
the Pennsylvanian Period, and that Weller has consequently
attributed too great an average duration to his cycles. It
appears, therefore, that crust displacements may have been
occurring through the whole of one of the major subdivisions
of the Paleozoic Era.
It is impossible, however, in the present state of the evi-
dence, to say that displacements of the crust have been going
on uninterruptedly all through geological history. It may be
that there have been times of quiet, when, for one reason or
another, great icecaps failed to develop. The important thing
at the moment is that investigators should be willing to undertake
further inquiry without preconceptions based on
outmoded ideas of gradual change. We may note a serious
warning against this bias uttered by no less an authority than
Sir Charles Lyell, the greatest geologist of the first half of the
nineteenth century, and the father of gradualism in geology.
In the course of a discussion of some evidence of recent fold-
ing of rock strata on the Danish island of Moen, he remarked:
It is impossible to behold such effects of reiterated earth move-
ments, all of post-Tertiary date, without reflecting that, but for the
accidental presence of the stratified drift, all of which might easily,
where there has been so much denudation, have been lacking, even
if it had once existed, we might have referred the verticality and
flexures and faults of the rocks to an ancient period, such as the era