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

LIFE 331
could utilize it, but after two billion or more years of evolu-
tion, such primeval biological vacuums are few indeed. Life
niches have, in general, been very well occupied for a very
long time. Something is required, therefore, to empty them.
This is where our theory comes in. The effects of a dis-
placement can be visualized in two stages. In the first, a
movement of a large continental area through many degrees
of latitude might well cause a very general extermination
of the inhabitants. We have seen how, in several instances,
this occurred during the late Pleistocene (Chapter VIII).
The consequence of the extermination of many kinds of
plants and animals (which is not to say their extinction, for
would be to leave
many of them might survive in other areas)
their life niches empty.
The second stage, initiated by a new movement of the
crust, would be marked by the opening up of avenues for the
immigration
of life forms from other land areas. Life forms
entering the continent would now enjoy a field day. They
would multiply; they would occupy rapidly a tremendous
area and all manner of habitats; they would produce variant
forms, and the variant forms would occupy appropriate
niches. Thus explosive evolution would take place. The new
forms need not always be immigrants; they could equally
well be local survivors of the period of depopulation, of the
displacement, who had somehow managed to hold their own
under unfavorable conditions. It seems highly probable,
indeed, that displacements of the earth's crust are the ex-
planation of explosive evolution.
We have already made mention of the fact that an interrelationship
between the revolutionary periods in evolution and
the critical phases of change in other geological areas has
been noted by many observers. Lull, for example, says,
. . . There are times of quickening, the expression points of evo-
lution, which are almost invariably coincident with some great geological
change, and the correspondence is so exact and so frequent that
the laws of chance may not be invoked as an explanation (278:687).