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Know_files/FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS.pdf - D Ank Unlimited

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Graham Hancock – <strong>FINGERPRINTS</strong> <strong>OF</strong> <strong>THE</strong> <strong>GODS</strong><br />

The hammer might be made to blow up a barrel of gunpowder, or turn on a<br />

deluge of water and, by proper arrangement, the clock, instead of marking the<br />

hours, might strike at all sorts of irregular intervals, never twice alike in the force<br />

or number of its blows. Nevertheless, all these irregular and apparently lawless<br />

catastrophes would be the result of an absolutely uniformitarian action, and we<br />

might have two schools of clock theorists, one studying the hammer and the other<br />

the pendulum. 26<br />

Could continental drift be the pendulum?<br />

Could earth-crust displacement be the hammer?<br />

Mars and earth<br />

Crustal displacements are thought to have taken place on other planets.<br />

In the December 1985 issue of Scientific American, Peter H. Schultz drew<br />

attention to meteorite impact craters visible on the Martian surface.<br />

Craters in polar areas have a distinctive ‘signature’ because the<br />

meteorites land amid the thick deposits of dust and ice that accumulate<br />

there. Outside the present polar circles of Mars, Schultz found two other<br />

such areas: ‘These zones are antipodal; they are on opposite faces of the<br />

planet. The deposits show many of the processes and characteristics of<br />

today’s poles, but they lie near the present-day equator ...’<br />

What could have caused this effect? Judging from the evidence, Shultz<br />

put forward the theory that the mechanism appeared to have been ‘the<br />

movement of the entire lithosphere, the solid outer portion of the planet<br />

as one plate ... [This movement seems to have taken place] in rapid<br />

spurts followed by long pauses.’ 27<br />

If crustal displacements can happen on Mars, why not on earth? And if<br />

they don’t happen on earth, how do we account for the otherwise<br />

awkward fact that not a single one of the ice-caps built up around the<br />

world during previous Ice Ages seems to have occurred at—or even<br />

near—either of the present poles. 28 On the contrary, land areas bearing<br />

the marks of former glaciation are very widely distributed. If we cannot<br />

assume crustal shifts, we must find some other way to explain why the<br />

ice-caps appear to have reached sea level within the tropics on three<br />

continents: Asia, Africa and Australia. 29<br />

Charles Hapgood’s solution to this problem is simple, extremely<br />

elegant and does not affront commonsense:<br />

The only ice age that is adequately explained is the present ice age in Antarctica.<br />

This is excellently explained. It exists, quite obviously, because Antarctica is at the<br />

pole, and for no other reason. No variation of the sun’s heat, no galactic dust, no<br />

volcanism, no subcrustal currents, and no arrangements of land elevations or sea<br />

26 Thomas Huxley cited in Path of the Pole, p. 294.<br />

27 Scientific American, December 1985.<br />

28 Path of the Pole, pp. 47-9.<br />

29 Ibid., p. 49.<br />

460

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