Page 462 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

The hammer might be made to blow up a barrel of gunpowder, or turn on a
deluge of water and, by proper arrangement, the clock, instead of marking the
hours, might strike at all sorts of irregular intervals, never twice alike in the force
or number of its blows. Nevertheless, all these irregular and apparently lawless
catastrophes would be the result of an absolutely uniformitarian action, and we
might have two schools of clock theorists, one studying the hammer and the other
the pendulum.
26
Could continental drift be the pendulum?
Could earth-crust displacement be the hammer?

Mars and earth

Crustal displacements are thought to have taken place on other planets.
In the December 1985 issue of Scientific American, Peter H. Schultz drew
attention to meteorite impact craters visible on the Martian surface.
Craters in polar areas have a distinctive ‘signature’ because the
meteorites land amid the thick deposits of dust and ice that accumulate
there. Outside the present polar circles of Mars, Schultz found two other
such areas: ‘These zones are antipodal; they are on opposite faces of the
planet. The deposits show many of the processes and characteristics of
today’s poles, but they lie near the present-day equator ...’
What could have caused this effect? Judging from the evidence, Shultz
put forward the theory that the mechanism appeared to have been ‘the
movement of the entire lithosphere, the solid outer portion of the planet
as one plate ... [This movement seems to have taken place] in rapid
spurts followed by long pauses.’
27
If crustal displacements can happen on Mars, why not on earth? And if
they don’t happen on earth, how do we account for the otherwise
awkward fact that not a single one of the ice-caps built up around the
world during previous Ice Ages seems to have occurred at—or even
near—either of the present poles. On the contrary, land areas bearing
28
the marks of former glaciation are very widely distributed. If we cannot
assume crustal shifts, we must find some other way to explain why the
ice-caps appear to have reached sea level within the tropics on three
continents: Asia, Africa and Australia.
29
Charles Hapgood’s solution to this problem is simple, extremely
elegant and does not affront commonsense:

The only ice age that is adequately explained is the present ice age in Antarctica.
This is excellently explained. It exists, quite obviously, because Antarctica is at the
pole, and for no other reason. No variation of the sun’s heat, no galactic dust, no
volcanism, no subcrustal currents, and no arrangements of land elevations or sea

26 Thomas Huxley cited in Path of the Pole, p. 294.
Scientific American, December 1985.
27
28 Path of the Pole, pp. 47-9.
29 Ibid., p. 49.

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