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

ANCIENT CLIMATES 75
tive tool with which to investigate the climates of the past. It
was possible now to arrive at a very good idea of the condi-
tions under which fossil corals grew. Professor Ma studied
hundreds of specimens of fossil corals from many of the geological
periods. He devoted entire separate volumes to each
of the Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Cretaceous, and Ter-
tiary Periods (285-289).
As Ma assembled the coral data for past periods, it became
plain to him that the total width of the coralline seas had
never varied noticeably from the beginning of the geological
record. Not only was the existence of seasons, of climatic
zones, in the oldest geological periods clearly indicated; it
was also indicated that the average temperatures of the re-
spective zones were about the same as at present.
The second result of Ma's studies was to establish that the
positions of the ancient coralline seas and, therefore, of the
ancient equators were not the same as at present. They
changed from one geological period to another. Ma first came
to the conclusion that this could be explained only by the
theory of drifting continents. Down to about 1949 he sought
to fit the evidence into that theory. By 1949, however, the
continuing accumulation of the evidence led him to adopt
the theory of total displacements of all the outer shells of the
earth over the liquid core. By some instinct of conservatism,
however, he did not abandon the theory of floating conti-
nents, but combined it with the new theory.
Ma's coralline seas ran in all directions; one of his equators
actually bisected the Arctic Ocean. But he had great difficulty
in matching up his equators on different continents.
If, for example, he traced an equator across North America,
he could not match it with an equator for the same period
on the other side of the earth, to make a complete circle of
the earth. He therefore supposed that the continents them-
selves had been shifting independently, and this had had the
effect of throwing the ancient equators out of line. He therefore
allowed, for each period, enough continental drift to
bring the equators into line, and it seemed, when he did