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

LIFE 323
to mean increased competition with other forms. Many
effects would depend upon whether the displacement carried
the area in question into the wet tropics or into the dry horse
latitudes, or merely from an arctic into a temperate climate.
Meanwhile, of course, in areas displaced poleward, opposite
trends would exist; here the forms of life would have to adapt
to diminishing light, to increased cold, to decreased food
supplies.
What is important is that these changes of climate would
apply over great areas of the earth. In one movement of the
crust, two opposite quarters of the earth's surface would be
moving equatorward while two others were moving poleward.
Thus the climatic changes would be in the same direc-
tion over very great areas: the entire distribution, perhaps,
of many plants and animals. Mass transformation of life
forms might therefore be expected to occur; not mass trans-
formations of all life forms, of course, but merely one or two
short steps in the mass transformation of one or a few kinds
of plants or animals. New varieties might be established in
great numbers, during a single movement of the crust; but
by this I do not mean to imply that many new "species"
would be. The latter may be the end results of a considerable
number of displacements of the crust. I hope that the reader
will not ask me to define "species." In this book I use the
term simply to denote forms of life that are reasonably dis-
tinct and relatively permanent.
We must remember that the different areas of the earth's
surface would be unequally shifted in a crust displacement.
I have explained (Introduction) that the amount of the dis-
placement would depend on whether an area was near to, or
distant from, the meridian of displacement. Selection pres-
sures would vary accordingly.
Since we consider displacements to have taken place in
short periods of the order of 10 or 20 thousand years, it seems
likely that most plants and animals in areas radically dis-
placed by a given movement would be unlikely to succeed
in adapting. Some would migrate into areas having climates