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

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EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST
ogist today considers it a satisfactory explanation. One objection
is that this process of folding is essentially locaL It
cannot explain the greatest mountain systems, spme of which
virtually span the globe. It cannot explain, for example, the
almost continuous line of mountain ranges that includes the
Rockies, the Andes, and the Antarctic Mountains, and which
extends for a total distance of almost half the circumference
of the earth. Neither can this theory explain the numerous
submarine mountain ranges that have, in recent years, been
discovered on the bottoms of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic
Oceans. Moreover, it has been pointed out that in many cases
folding of the crust has taken place without any deposition of
sediment, and therefore must have been due to other causes.
The geologist Henry Fielding Reid remarked:
. . . There are many deeps in the ocean, such as the Virgin Islands
Deep, the Tonga Deep, and others, which appear to have sunk with-
out any material deposit of sediments. . . . (354).
For these various reasons, then, geologists
have come to the
conclusion that erosion is only a secondary cause of mountain
building (345:382-84). We shall consider this again.
Another common impression, as already mentioned, is that
mountain formation has been due to the cooling and shrink-
ing of the earth. It was reasonable, perhaps, as long
as the
theory of the cooling of the earth was unquestioned, to try
to explain the origin of folded mountains in this way, for, of
course, if the earth shrank in size, even only slightly, as a re-
sult of cooling, some wrinkling of the crust must be the
result. The fact that the pattern of wrinkles that would be
produced in this way (and which could be deduced fairly
clearly) bore no resemblance whatever to the patterns of the
existing mountain ranges, did not greatly diminish the cur-
rency of this theory, though it did bring about a devastating
attack upon it by one competent geologist whose views we
shall discuss below.
We have seen that there is now an impressive body of evidence
and opinion against the theory of a molten origin for