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

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EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST
but there is really no good reason to adopt this assumption
unless a cause can be shown for a local deglaciation. 1
The importance of all this evidence is obvious when we
realize that, as late as 1 950, there appeared to be no question
but that the icecap in Antarctica was millions of years old.
According to Brooks, the geologists Wright and Priestly had
presented conclusive evidence of the beginning of the present
icecap as far back as the beginning of the Tertiary Period
(52:239), some 60 or 80 million years ago. Now we have evidence
of several periods of semiglacial or nonglacial condi-
tions in Antarctica in the Pleistocene Epoch alone. This is
sufficient to show us how little reliance can be placed upon the
estimated durations of hundreds of thousands or millions of
years for the glacial periods of the remote past.
We must realize, however, that the date found by Urry for
the beginning of the deposition of glacial sediment on the
1 An astonishing bit of evidence suggesting the idea of a temperate age in Ant-
arctica has been produced by Arlington H. Mallery, cartographer and archae-
ologist. Mr. Mallery solved the projection of an ancient map compiled in the
sixteenth century by the Turkish geographer Piri Reis, from maps one of which
is said to have been in the possession of Columbus, and the others of which
were said by Piri Reis to have been preserved in the East since the time of
Alexander the Great (who may have discovered them in Egypt). The projection
had long baffled scientists, including the explorer-scientist Nordenskjold, who
had spent seventeen years trying to solve it. When Mr. Mallery solved the pro-
jection he found that the map showed all the coasts of South America, a great
part of the coast of Antarctica, including Queen Maud Land and the Palmer
Peninsula, and Greenland and Alaska. It appeared that the mapping of Antarc-
tica had actually been done when the land was ice- free before the icecap appeared.
There was no indication as to what ancient people could have made
the map, but Mr. Mallery concluded that the information on the map was at
least five thousand years old, and perhaps much o^der. The topographic fea-
tures on the map of Queen Maud Land corresponded remarkably to the fea-
tures deduced from seismic profiles made during one of the recent Antarctic
expeditions of the Navy. Mr. Mallery's statements were confirmed and sup-
ported by Mr. M. I. Walters, who, as a member of the Hydrographic Office, had
checked the map in detail, and by Father Daniel Linehan, Director of the
Weston Observatory of Boston College, who checked the seismic profile made
by the Navy against the data on the map. Mr. Mallery's findings were presented
in a radio broadcast by the Georgetown University Forum, Washington, D.C.,
in August, 1956. A verbatim report of the broadcast, with reproductions of the
map, may be obtained from the Forum.