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

ANCIENT CLIMATES 59
can, however, be no dispute whatever about the more distant
past climates of Antarctica. Those who may be inclined to
disbelieve that Antarctica could have possessed a temperate
climate 10,000 years ago must be reminded of the evidence
that Antarctica has many times possessed such a climate.
So far as we know at present, the very first evidence of an
ice age in Antarctica comes from the Eocene Epoch (52:244).
This was barely 60,000,000 years ago. Before that, for some
billion and a half years, there is no suggestion of polar condi-
tions, though very many earlier ice ages existed in other parts
of the earth. Henry, in The White Continent, cites evidence
of the passing of long temperate ages in Antarctica. He describes
the Edsel Ford Mountains, discovered by Admiral
Byrd in 1929. These mountains are of nonvolcanic, folded
sedimentary rocks, the layers adding up to 15,000 feet in
thickness. Henry suggests that they indicate long periods of
temperate climate in Antarctica:
The greater part of the erosion probably took place when Antarctica
was essentially free of ice, since the structure of the rocks indicates
strongly that the original sediment from which they were formed was
carried by water. Such an accumulation calls for an immensely long
period of tepid peace in the life of the rampaging planet (206:113).
Most sedimentary rocks are laid down in the sea, formed
of sediment brought down by rivers from near-by lands. The
lands from which the Antarctic sediments were brought seem
to have disappeared without a trace, but of the sea that once
existed where there is now land we have plenty of evidence.
Brooks remarks:
... In the Cambrian we have evidence of a moderately warm sea
stretching nearly or right across Antarctica, in the form of thick limestones
very rich in reef-building Archaeocyathidae (52:245).
Millions of years later, when these marine formations had
appeared above the sea, warm climates brought forth a luxuriant
vegetation in Antarctica. Thus, Sir Ernest Shackleton
is said to have found coal beds within 200 miles of the South
Pole (71:80), and later, during the Byrd expedition of 1935,