Page 454 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

former civilization who had made it across the turbulent oceans in great
ships and settled themselves in faraway lands: in the Nile Valley, for
example (or perhaps, first, around Lake Tana at the headwaters of the
Blue Nile), and in the Valley of Mexico, and near Lake Titicaca in the
Andes—and no doubt in several other places as well ...
Here and there around the globe, in other words, the fingerprints of a
lost civilization remain faintly visible. The body is out of sight, buried
under two miles of Antarctic ice and almost as inaccessible to
archaeologists as if it were located on the dark side of the moon.
Fact?
Or fiction?
Possibility?
Or impossibility?
Is it a geophysical possibility or a geophysical impossibility that
Antarctica, the world’s fifth-largest continent (with a surface area of
almost six million square miles) could (a) previously have been located in
a more temperate zone and (b) have been shifted out of that zone and
into the Antarctic Circle within the last 20,000 years?
Is Antarctica movable?

A lifeless polar desert

‘Continental drift’ and/or ‘plate-tectonics’ are key terms used to describe
an important geological theory that has become increasingly well
understood by the general public since the 1950s. It is unnecessary to go
into the basic mechanisms here. But most of us are aware that the
continents in some way ‘float around’, relocate and change position on
the earth’s surface. Common sense confirms this: if you take a look at a
map of the west coast of Africa and the east coast of South America it’s
pretty obvious that these two landmasses were once joined. The time-
scale according to which continental drift operates is, however, immense:
continents can typically be expected to float apart (or together) at a rate
of no more than 2000 miles every 200 million years or so: in other words,
very, very slowly.
1
Plate-tectonics and Charles Hapgood’s earth-crust displacement theory
are by no means mutually contradictory. Hapgood envisaged that both
could occur: that the earth’s crust did indeed exhibit continental drift as
the geologists claimed—almost imperceptibly, over hundreds of millions
of years—but that it also occasionally experienced very rapid one-piece
displacements which had no effect on the relationships between
individual landmasses but which thrust entire continents (or parts of
them) into and out of the planet’s two fixed polar zones (the perennially
cold and icy regions surrounding the North and South Poles of the axis of

1 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 3:584.

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