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

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EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST
leading geophysicists today sustain Button's views (194:192),
the impression is still widespread, and not merely among lay-
men, that mountains are, more or less, understandable as
the consequence of the cooling of the earth. The cause of this
inertia is, very likely, the absence of any alternative, accept-
able theory of mountain building.
In recent years many geologists have agreed with Button
that the mountains were folded by some immense force oper-
ating horizontally on the earth's crust. Furthermore, they
have come to recognize that the force or forces involved in
mountain folding acted on the earth's crust as a whole and
at the same time. Thus, one of our leading geophysicists, Br.
Walter Bucher, of Columbia, remarked:
Taken in their entirety, the orogenic [mountainous] belts are the
result of world-wide stresses that have acted on the crust as a whole.
Certainly the pattern of these belts is not what one would expect
from wholly independent, purely local changes in the crust (58:144).
The same thing was pointed out by Br. Umbgrove:
. . . But the growing amount of stratigraphic studies make it in-
creasingly evident that the terrestrial crust was subjected to a periodically
alternating increase and decrease of compression. ... I feel
there is overwhelming evidence that the movements are the expression
of a common, world-wide, active, and deep-seated cause. . . . (430:31).
Br. Umbgrove was impressed by another characteristic of
this world-wide force. It did not act continuously. It was not
always acting to expand or squeeze sectors of the crust to fold
them into mountains. It acted only at certain times, and
then, for other periods, it was inactive. There was a sort of
periodicity to its operation. This periodicity
to other aspects of the earth's geological history:
extended also
The geologist comes across periodicity in many of the pages which
he is arduously decipheringin the sequence of the strata, for instance,
and their contents of former . . . organisms. He observes it
elsewhere, in the deep-seated forces that bring subsidence first in one
area and then in another ... in the intrusion of liquid melts or
"magma" rising from some deeper part of the earth's interior; in the