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

ANCIENT CLIMATES 67
in earlier ages the earth was hotter, the ocean water evaporated
much more rapidly, and it formed thick clouds that
reflected the sun's radiant energy back into space. The cloud
blanket shut out the sun's radiation but kept in the heat that
radiated from the earth itself, and this acted to distribute the
heat evenly over the globe. The cloud blanket must have
been thick enough to make the earth a dark, dank, and dismal
place. Since, as Dr. Colbert shows, fossils are found outside
the present zones appropriate to them even in recent geolog-
ical periods, such conditions must have obtained during
about 90 per cent of the earth's whole history, and most of
the evolution of living forms must have taken place in them.
For a number of reasons, including the difficulty
of ex-
plaining how plants can have evolved without sunlight, this
theory has been abandoned. We have also seen that the idea
that the earth was even hotter than now has recently been
undermined. This has destroyed the solidity of the theory's
basic assumption.
The fact that the theory never was reasonable is shown
from Coleman's arguments against it, advanced more than a
quarter of a century ago. He pointed out that not only are
ice ages known from the earliest periods (from the Pre-
Cambrian) but there is evidence that some of these very
ancient ice ages were even more intensely cold than the
recent ice age that came to an end 10,000 years ago (87:78).
No less than six ice ages are known from the Pre-Cambrian
(430:260). The evidence of one of these Pre-Cambrian or
Lower Cambrian ice ages is interestingly described by
Brews ter:
In China, in the latitude of northern Florida, there is a hundred
and seventy feet of obvious glacial till, scratched boulders and all,
and over it lie sea-floor muds containing lower Cambrian trilobites,
the whole now altered to hard rock (45:204).
It is obvious that such ice ages (and evidences of more of
them are frequently coming to light) are in conflict with the
theory of universal equable climates. Some of them are found