Page 450 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

mystery.

Albert Einstein investigated the possibility that the weight of the ice-caps, which
are not symmetrically distributed about the pole, might cause such a
displacement. Einstein wrote: ‘The earth’s rotation acts on these unsymmetrically
deposited masses, and produces centrifugal momentum that is transmitted to the
rigid crust of the earth. The constantly increasing centrifugal momentum
produced this way will, when it reaches a certain point, produce a movement of
the earth’s crust over the earth’s body, and this will displace the polar regions
towards the equator.

When Einstein wrote these words [1953] the astronomical causes of ice ages were
not fully appreciated. When the shape of the earth’s orbit deviates from a perfect
circle by more than one per cent, the gravitational influence of the sun increases,
exercising more pull on the planet and its massive ice sheets. Their ponderous
weight pushes against the crust and this immense pressure, combined with the
greater incline in the earth’s tilt [another changing factor of the orbital geometry]
forces the crust to shift ...
The connection with the onset and decline of ice ages?
Very straightforward.
In a displacement, those parts of the earth’s crust which are situated at
the North and South Poles (and which are therefore as completely
glaciated as Antarctica is today) shift suddenly into warmer latitudes and
begin to melt with extraordinary rapidity. Conversely, land that has
hitherto been located at warmer latitudes is shifted equally suddenly into
the polar zones, suffers a devastating climate change, and begins to
vanish under a rapidly expanding ice-cap.
In other words, when huge parts of northern Europe and north America
were heavily glaciated in what we think of as the last Ice Age, it was not
because of some mysterious slow-acting climatic factor, but rather
because those areas of land were then situated much closer to the North
Pole than they are today. Similarly, when the Wisconsin and Wurm
glaciations described in Part IV began to go into their meltdown at
around 15,000 BC the trigger was not global climate change but a shift of
the ice-caps into warmer latitudes ...
In other words: there is an Ice Age going on right now—inside the
Arctic Circle and in Antarctica.

The lost continent

The second connection the Flem-Aths made followed logically from the
first: if there was such a recurrent, cyclical geological phenomenon as
earth-crust displacement, and if the last displacement had shifted the
enormous landmass we call Antarctica out of temperate latitudes and into
the Antarctic Circle, it was possible that the substantial remains of a lost
civilization of remote antiquity might today be lying under two miles of
ice at the South Pole.

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