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

THE ICE AGES 51
The period 133,000-173,000 years ago is represented by fine-grained
sediment, approximately half of which is finely laminated. Isolated
pebbles occur at 140,000, 147,000 and 156,000 years. This zone is in-
which the sea at this station was
terpreted as recording a time during
ice free, except for a few stray bergs, when the three pebbles were
deposited. The laminated sediment may represent seasonal outwash
from glacial ice on the Antarctic continent.
Glacial marine sediment is present from 173,000 to 350,000 years
ago, with some variation in the texture. Laminated fine-grained sedi-
ment from 350,000 to 420,000 years ago may again represent rhythmic
deposition of outwash from Antarctica in an ice free sea. The bottom
part of the core contains glacial marine sediment dated from 420,000
to 460,000 years by extra-polation of the time scale from the younger
part of the core (225:257-59).
It should be realized that the Ross Sea, from which these
cores were taken, is a great triangular wedge driven right into
the heart of the continent of Antarctica, to within about
eight hundred miles of the pole. It follows that, when the
shores of the Ross Sea were free of ice, and if free-flowing
rivers were bringing down sediment from the interior, Ant-
arctica must have been very largely an ice-free continent.
Some of the fine sediment, it is true, does not indicate ice-free
conditions for the whole continent, but only for the sea itself.
The laminated sediment, consisting of distinct thin layers
each representing the deposition of one year, suggests the
results of a summer melting of an ice sheet not far from the
sea, with swollen streams of melt water carrying the sediment
to the sea. Such conditions do not suggest any wide
deglaciation of Antarctica, though they do suggest conditions
very different from those prevailing now. On the other hand,
unlaminated deposits of fine sediment are consistent with a
general and even with a total deglaciation
of Antarctica. So
far as we can see, such sediment can only have been brought
down to the sea by rivers flowing from the interior of the
continent. The very existence of such unfrozen rivers re-
of the continent. One is free
quires the deglaciation of a part
to assume that the deglaciation applied to only a small area,