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

ANCIENT CLIMATES 6l
directions of ocean currents, changes in the intensity of solar
radiation, and the like. It is obvious, for instance, that no
hypothetical warm currents could make possible the existence
of warm climates in the center of the great Antarctic conti-
nent if that continent were at the pole, and if by some miracle
Antarctica did become warm, how possibly could forests have
flourished there deprived of sunlight for half the year?
2. Warm Ages in the North
The Arctic regions have been more accessible, and conse-
quently they have been more thoroughly explored,
than the
Antarctic. It was from them that the first evidence came
pointing unmistakably to shifts in the geographical positions
of the poles. Most of the theories developed by those defend-
ing the dogma of the permanence of the poles were specially
designed to explain these facts, or rather, as it now seems, to
explain them away.
One method of explaining away the evidence was to suggest
that the plants and animals of past geological eras, even
though they belonged to similar genera or families as living
plants, and closely resembled them in structure, may have
been adapted to very different climates. This argument often
had effect, for no one could exclude the possibility that, in a
long geological period, species might make successful adjustments
to different climatic conditions. Where single plants
were involved such a possibility could not be dismissed.
Where, however, whole groups of species, whole floras and
faunas, were involved, there was increased improbability that
they could all have been adjusted at any one time to a radically
different environment from that in which their descendants
live today. For this reason, and because the
structure of plants has a definite relationship to conditions
of sunlight, heat, and moisture, biologists have abandoned
this method of explaining the facts. Dr. Barghoorn, for ex-