With Rose's help I wrote a paper incorporating my ideas and sent it to Charles Hapgood. Hapgood enthusiastically responded to our letter and told us that our work was "the first truly scientific exploration" of his work that had ever been done.  (see Hapgood's first letter to the Flem-Aths) Of course we were delighted but also astonished. Why had scientists ignored Hapgood's work? Afterall, Albert Einstein had written a glowing Foreword to the first edition of his book. So my amazement led me to read about the history, sociology and philosophy of science and I soon discovered that what was happening to Hapgood wasn't unusual at all. There is a vast difference between the sociology and logic of science. Logically, Hapgood's theory of earth crust displacement should not have been ignored but that's not the way science works. So let's consider his idea now.

Here's the inside of the Earth: the core, the mantle and the crust.

This is a blow-up of the area of the Earth near the surface and we have exaggerated the dimensions so that you can see the crust, which rests upon a mobile layer, the asthenosphere which in turn rests upon the solid mantle. An earth crust displacement is a movement of the entire crust (including the ocean basins) over the asthenosphere. Now keep in mind that the Earth's axis does NOT change. We still have the same tilt and the same seasons but the relationship of the crust to the climatic zones is changed. In other words, the climatic zones are stable: the crust moves.

To understand the ecological upheaval created by the Earth's shifting crust we need to compare its position to the climatic zones both before and after the displacement.

Here we have North America's position relative to the polar zone. The top circle represent today's Arctic Circle. The bottom circle shows the Arctic Circle before the earth's crust shifted. You'll notice that these two circles overlap on Greenland.  That explains why Greenland has most of the glaciation in the northern hemisphere. The ice never got a chance to melt.

The crust that used to be in the Arctic Circle includes the Great Lakes as well as Lake Winnipeg, Great Slave Lake and hundreds of thousands of other, smaller, lakes. North America is a water-rich continent because it used to be trapped in the polar zone.

The highlighted areas in the present Arctic Circle mark lands which were once temperate. In When The Sky Fell we show how Arctic Norway, northern Alaska, Beringia and Siberia were much warmer before 9,600 B.C. than they are today. They exhibit temperate conditions in a land that is now much too cold to support such animals as hyenas, sabertooth tigers, antelope and the whole menagerie of species that we associated with East African terrain.  Next