Page 461 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

square miles, and is presently covered by something in excess of seven
million cubic miles of ice weighing an estimated 19 quadrillion tons (19
followed by 15 zeros). What worries the theorists of earth-crust
20
displacement is that this vast ice-cap is remorselessly increasing in size
and weight: ‘at the rate of 293 cubic miles of ice each year—almost as
much as if Lake Ontario were frozen solid annually and added to it.’
21
The fear is that when it is coupled with the effects of precession,
obliquity, orbital eccentricity, the earth’s own centrifugal motion, and the
gravitational tug of the sun, moon and planets, Antarctica’s huge, ever-
expanding burden of glaciation could provide the final trigger-factor for a
massive displacement of the crust:
The growing South Pole ice-cap [wrote Hugh Auchincloss Brown, somewhat
colourfully, in 1967] has become a stealthy, silent and relentless force of nature—
a result of the energy created by its eccentric rotation. The ice-cap is the creeping
peril, the deadly menace and the executioner of our civilization.
22
Did this ‘executioner’ cause the end of the last Ice Age in the northern
hemisphere by setting in motion a 7000-year shift of the crust between
15,000 BC and 8000 BC—a shift that was perhaps at its most rapid, and
would have had its most devastating effects, between 14,500 BC and
10,000 BC? Or were the sudden and dramatic climate changes
23
experienced in the northern hemisphere during this period the result of
some other catastrophic agency simultaneously capable of melting
millions of cubic miles of ice and of sparking off the worldwide increase
in volcanism that accompanied the melt-down?
24
Modern geologists are opposed to catastrophes, or rather to
catastrophism, preferring to follow the ‘uniformitarian’ doctrine: ‘that
existing processes, acting as at present, are sufficient to account for all
geological changes’. Catastrophism, on the other hand, holds that
‘changes in the earth’s crust have generally been effected suddenly by
physical forces.’ Is it possible, however, that the mechanism responsible
25
for the traumatic earth changes which took place at the end of the last Ice
Age could have been a geological event both catastrophic and uniform?
The great biologist Sir Thomas Huxley remarked in the nineteenth
century:
To my mind there appears to be no sort of theoretical antagonism between
Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism; on the contrary, it is very conceivable that
catastrophes may be part and parcel of uniformity. Let me illustrate my case by
analogy. The working of a clock is a model of uniform action. Good timekeeping
means uniformity of action. But the striking of a clock is essentially a catastrophe.

20 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 1:440; John White, Pole Shift, A.R.E. Press, Virginia
Beach, 1994, p. 65.
21 Pole Shift, p. 77: Twenty billion tons of ice are added each year at Antarctica.
22 H. A. Brown, Cataclysms of the Earth, pp. 10-11.
See Part IV.
23
24 Ibid.
25 Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 228.

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