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

CONCLUSION 383
the progressive weakening of the crust under the repeated
major shocks.
Some further confirmation of this suggestion may be found
in some specific features of the two greatest of the major
earthquakes, those of eastern India in 1897 and in 1950. The
earlier of these was a cataclysm that involved hundreds of
thousands of square miles. The later one was still more violent,
in line with the observation made by Benioff. The
reader may note, by glancing at the globe,
that the area in
which these two quakes occurred lies almost on the meridian
of 96 E. Long., which, it appears, is the meridian of direct
thrust of the Antarctic icecap. According to our theory, this
is the meridian along which the gradually increasing thrust
of the Antarctic icecap has been exerted for thousands of
years. Let us note the fact that Assam lies across the equator
from the South Pole, and that the thrust of the icecap would
tend to push the area toward the north, or poleward, so that,
because of the shape of the earth, the result would be com-
of the crust in that area. Now it is not unreasonable
pression
to suppose that during several millennia the pressure from
Antarctica may have resulted in some elastic yielding of the
crust along the meridian, with consequent concentration of
compressive stresses in that area.
I cannot say that the constant pressure of the Antarctic
icecap, operating on the crust in the same direction for ten
thousand years or more, and amounting to several times
a million times a million tons, definitely did cause some
yielding of the crust in that direction, because I do not know,
but I know what would have happened if there were some
yielding. Yielding, at the latitude of Assam, to a pressure
directed from the south would mean compression of the
crustal material between lateral pressures, because of the
lesser circumference of the globe as one goes north. If we
suppose only a very slight yielding of the crust along the
meridian (amounting to only a few feet) the pressures so
produced would be very great. An explosive situation would
exist because rock is not very compressible. The forces would