Archaeological evidence of continental upheavals in the second millennium having been presented in detail by Schaeffer, the evidence of geology and paleontology called for elucidation. To this I have dedicated a special work, now close to completion, and since it will be published before very long, I shall refer here only briefly to some of this material.
A little over a decade ago it was observed that the gold-digging hydraulic giants in the Fairbanks District in Alaska, sluicing out miles-long cuts, opened great hecatombs of animals. "Their numbers are appalling. They
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…Bronze Age may have been well on its way in the centers of ancient civilization.
Palms were found to have grown in northern Greenland, where now for half a year there is darkness and it is permanently cold. At some time in the remote past corals grew in Spitsbergen, and sequoia forests in Alaska; and it was early understood that the terrestrial axis must have changed its position. Airy, Lord Kelvin, George Darwin, and many others, including Schiaparelli and Simon Newcomb, participated in a long debate on the astronomical and geological possibility of a sudden change in the direction of the terrestrial axis, a debate that was erroneously thought to have been started as a
consequence of Worlds in Collision. It was understood that such a change must have taken place unless the strange finds are to be left without explanation. The theory of drifting continents, offered as a substitute, was rejected for many reasons. Jeffreys showed that the mobile force invoked by Wegener is one hundred billion times too small to move the continents. Eddington thought that possibly only the crust, in its entirety, moved, and the axis of the core was left unchanged in direction. But the mobile force he invoked - the tidal inequalities of lunar origin - would not have moved the latitudes out of their places, the directional pull being east-west.
W. B. Wright, in his The Quaternary Ice Age (2nd ed., 1937), says that during geological history there occurred many changes in the position of the climatic zones on the surface of the earth which cannot be explained except by a shifting of the axis or a displacement of the pole from its present position.
But what could have brought about a change in the inclination of the terrestrial axis to the plane of the ecliptic? I discussed this question in the closing pages of Worlds in Collision and suggested the
entrance of the earth into a strong magnetic field.
The newly developed science of paleomagnetism brought, and daily continues to bring, confirmation of the fact that lavas and igneous rocks in all parts of the world are reversely magnetized. But what is even more startling is to find that the reversely magnetized rocks are a hundred times more strongly
magnetized than the earth's magnetic field could have caused them to be. H. Manley, in his review, writes:
"It may seem strange that a rock which is made magnetic by the earth's field" should become so
strongly magnetized "compared with the generating force. This is one of the most astonishing problems of paleomagnetism."4
Manley also refers to the tests made years ago by G. Folgheraiter and P. L. Mercanton on the clay of ancient Etruscan vases. They were found to have been fired when the vases were closer to the south magnetic pole; their position during the firing is known, because of the flow of the glaze; and the magnetic dip or inclination of the clay is found. Manley writes: "This implies that in the sixth century B.C. the earth's magnetic field was reversed in the Central Mediterranean area." He speaks also of a general "reversal in historical times, 2500 years ago," that must be cleared up by additional research. Knowing from my study of ancient literary sources the proper time of exogenous disturbances in terrestrial rotation, I suspected an inaccuracy in the last sentence of an otherwise well-written article by Manley: the reversal must have occurred in the eighth century and again in the beginning of the seventh century ( -687). I was gratified to find, in the original publication of Professor Mercanton, to whom I directed my inquiry, that the vases with reversed polarity date from the eighth century.5
I expect that, should the research be extended to vases dating from the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt (circa 3500 years ago), other periods of "unnatural" polarity would be determined in Egypt and elsewhere.
Professor R. Daly of Harvard University found that 3500 years ago all over the world the level of the oceans suddenly dropped. He thought it might be due to a sudden sinking of the crust. And in an authoritative work, Marine Geology (1950), Professor P. H. Kuenen of the Netherlands finds that "this recent shift is now well established" on observations in many places of the world, and he, too, assigns this catastrophic drop of the ocean level to 3500 years ago.
The recent expedition of the Oceanographic Institute at Goteborg, under H. Pettersson, which covered the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, found, according to its leader, "evidences of great catastrophes that have altered the face of the earth." He speaks of "climatic catastrophes," and of "tectonic
catastrophes [that] raised or lowered the ocean bottom hundreds and even thousands of feet, spreading huge tidal waves which destroyed plant and animal life on the coastal plains." At many places "a lava bed of geologically recent origin [was] covered only by a thin veneer of sediment." He discovered that the Pacific and Indian ocean beds consist "largely of volcanic ash that had settled on the bottom after great volcanic explosions." He also found a large nickel content in the clay of the ocean bottoms, and decided that this abysmal nickel must have been of meteoric origin. Consequently, he concludes, there
were "very heavy showers of meteors." "The principal difficulty of this explanation is that it requires a rate of accretion of meteoric dust several hundred times greater than that which astronomers ... are presently prepared to admit." 6
Professor Ewing of Columbia University carried on his investigation in the Atlantic. In 1949 he published his results, and, like Pettersson, he found that lava spread only recently on the bottom of the ocean. He also came upon signs of land deep on the bottom of the ocean and concluded: "Either the land must have sunk two to three miles, or the sea once must have been two or three miles lower than now. Either conclusion is startling."
The pollen analysis, made by various scientists, of the bottom of the North Sea, between Germany, England, Scotland, and Norway, convinced researchers that this sea in its present shape originated only very recently - in the Subboreal, the date of 1500 before the present era often being selected. At that time there occurred a Klimasturz. Once there had been a sea; then it was covered by debris carried from the mountains of Norway; later, in a catastrophic advance, the North Sea was formed once more. Human artifacts have been found from the time when the North Sea was land.
The investigation of the delta formation of the Bear River (on the Alaskan border), very carefully made by Hanson, showed that "at the present rate of sedimentation the delta is estimated to be only 3600 years old." A. de Lapparent, the leading French geologist of the beginning of the century, calculated that, since the time the Rhone glacier started to melt, less than 3000 years have passed. Modern research confirms that many of the alpine glaciers are less than 4000 years old. Professor Flint of Yale refers to the redetermination of the age of the Upper Great Gorge of Niagara Falls and writes (1947): "The age of the Upper Great Gorge is calculated as somewhat more than four thousand years - and to obtain even this [low] figure we have to assume that the rate of recession has been constant, although we know that discharge has in fact varied greatly during postglacial times."7
Sernander and others demonstrated that in -1500 and again after -800 there occurred climatic
catastrophes of global dimensions. These researches, unknown to me when I wrote Worlds in Collision, coincide completely with my conclusions and their dating.
In both these periods the lake dwellings in Switzerland, Germany, northern Italy, and also in
Scandinavia were overwhelmed by "high water catastrophes" and abandoned, the first time for four centuries, the second time never to be rebuilt.
H. Gams and R. Nordhagen showed, with very extensive documentation, that at these two time dates the lakes of Europe were tilted, and many of them, like Esssee and Federsee, were emptied of all their water. The Isartal in the Bavarian Alps was "violently torn out" and this "in very recent times"; and in the Inntal in the Tyrol the "many changes of river beds are indicative of ground movements on a great scale."8
H. de Terra of the Carnegie Institute and Peterson of Harvard came to the conclusion that the
Himalayas, in violent upheavals, reached their present form and height in the age of man, partly even in the time of advanced man. The same conclusion is made concerning the Andes, where, too, the
upheaval must have been catastrophic. In the age of man the Andes rose many thousands of feet amid volcanic activity.
In the hills of Montreal and New Hampshire and in Michigan, five and six hundred feet above sea level, bones of whales have been found. In many places on the earth - on all continents - bones of sea animals and polar land animals and tropical animals have been found in great melees; so also in the Cumberland Cave in Maryland and in the Choukoutien fissure in China, and in Germany and Denmark. Hippopotami and ostriches were found together with seals and reindeer. Wherever we turn our interest - from the Arctic to the Antarctic and from sunrise to sunset, in the high mountains and in the deep seas - we find innumerable signs of great upheavals, ancient and recent.
A circular meteoric crater (Chubb crater) was discovered in the summer of 1950 in northern Labrador; it covers an area of four square miles. It is much larger than the Arizona crater, which is four fifths of a mile in diameter (two thirds of a square mile in area); whereas the Arizona crater could accommodate
two million people in its amphitheater, the Chubb crater could accommodate twelve million people. It must have been created by the impact of an asteroid. According to the published opinion of geological authorities, the asteroid must have fallen about four thousand years ago.
Following, or shortly preceding, the discovery of the Chubb crater, several other large meteoric craters were discovered in Australia, Arabia, and Mexico. The tens of thousands of oval formations on the Atlantic coast of the United States, especially in the Carolinas, some of them attaining a length of a few miles each, were conclusively identified, in a monograph by W. F. Prouty (1952), as having been caused by the fall of large meteorites.9 And finally, the largest of crater formations, situated in Quebec
north of Sept lies, in Canada, and occupying an area of 680 square miles, is under investigation as to its meteoric origin by a group of Mines Department scientists led by Dr. M. J. S. Innes.
Of the many other new developments in the field of geology, I would stress some of the results
obtained by the radiocarbon method. The time of the Ice Age is moved much closer to our time. Instead of 25,000 years as the terminal date of the last glacial period, it is shown that 10,000 or 11,000 years ago the ice was still advancing; and even with this low dating there remain "puzzling exceptions,"10
among them the finding of mastodons and mammoths in strata only 3500 years old. [Moreover, organic vestiges in the drift of the last glaciation have been found to be of a radiocarbon age pointing to a time 3500 years ago.11]
Radiocarbon analysis of oil has also shown that in the deposits of the Gulf of Mexico the age of oil is measured in thousands of years, not millions.12 This destroys the main argument the geologists have
raised against the theory of the exogenous origin of some deposits of oil (Worlds in Collision, pp. 53- 58, 369).
Hydrocarbons have been identified in cometary tails by spectral analysis; also carbohydrates (edible products).13 But here we are already outside the domain of geology and in the realm of astronomy.
_________________________________ 4 "Paleomagnetism," Science News, July 1949.
5 P. L. Mercanton, in Archives des sciences physiques et naturelles (Quatrième Période, Tome XXIII, Geneva, 1907). 6 H Pettersson: "Exploring the Ocean Floor," Scientific American, August 1950.
7 R. F. Flint: Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch (1947), p.382.
8 H. Gams and R. Nordhagen: "Postglaziale Klimaänderungen und Erdkrustenbewegungen in Mitteleuropa," Mitteilungen
der Geographlschen Gesellschaft in München (1923), pp. 13-336.
9 Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, LXIII (1952).
10 Frederick Johnson (chairman of the Committee on Carbon 14 for the selection of samples for analysis), "The Signific- ance of the Dates for Archaeology and Geology," in Radiocarbon Dating, ed. W. F. Libby (1952), p. 97.
11 Suess: Science, September 24, 1954. 12 P. V. Smith: Science, October 24, 1952.
13 N. T. Bobrovnikoff (director of Perkins Observatory), "Comets," in Astrophysics, ed. J. A. Hynek (1951), p. 342. _________________________________