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

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EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST
between the chalk with flints and the Maestricht chalk, or to the
time of the latter formation, or to the Eocene, or Miocene or older
Pliocene eras. . . . Hence we may be permitted to suspect that in
some other regions, where we have no such means at our command
for testing the exact date of certain movements, the time of their oc-
currence may be far more modern than we usually suppose (281:
393-94)-
And let us also recall the following words of the greatest geologist
of the second half of the nineteenth century, Eduard
Suess:
The enthusiasm with which the little polyp building up the coral
reef, and the raindrop hollowing out the stone, have been contem-
plated, has, I fear, introduced into the consideration of important
questions concerning the history of the earth a certain element of
geological quietism derived from the peaceable commonplaceness of
everyday life an element which by no means contributes to a just
conception of those phenomena which have been and still are of the
first consequence in fashioning the face of the earth.
The convulsions which have affected certain parts of the earth's
crust, with a frequency far greater than was until recently supposed,
show clearly enough how one-sided this point of view is. The earth-
quakes of today are but faint reminiscences of those telluric movements
to which the structure of almost every mountain range bears
witness. Numerous examples of great mountain chains suggest by
their structure the possibility, and even in some cases the probability,
of the occasional intervention in the course of great geological eras
of processes of episodal disturbances of such indescribable and over-
whelming violence, that the imagination refuses to follow the understanding
and to complete the picture of which the outlines are
furnished by observations of fact (408:!, 17-18).
The great work from which the foregoing statement was
taken is entitled The Face of the Earth. The prospect that
unfolds before us, as we contemplate the possibility that total
displacements of the earth's crust have been a feature of geological
history since the formation of the crust itself, is noth-
ing less than the discovery of the formative force, of the
shaping factor, that has been responsible not only for ice
ages, not only for the mountain ranges, but even possibly for
the very history of the continents, and for all the funda-
mental features of the face of the earth.