In December
1985 I read an article in Scientific American which explained a
series of mysteries about the surface of Mars by assuming that the planet's
whole crust had once undergone an abrupt displacement. You can imagine
how excited I was. I only wished Hapgood had live to see his ideas being
applied to another planet. To support the idea of a crustal displacement
on Mars, Dr. Peter Schultz of Brown University examined the planet's craters.
Asteroids or comets that impact within the polar zones exhibit characteristic
crater signatures because they land on thick
deposits of dust and ice that accumulate only
at the poles. Schultz scanned Mars in
search of craters exhibiting these
polar
features
outside
the
polar zones. He found two such areas and wrote:
"These zones are antipodal: they are on the 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."Now if the antipodal argument is offered as evidence of crustal displacement on Mars then we should at least consider it here on Earth. So let's look at the former position of the Earth's crust in the southern hemisphere.
Here
we see the southern areas which are opposite or "antipodal" to those in
the north. The area in the southern Indian
Ocean is antipodal to the lakes that occupy
most of Canada. In this area lies the still ice-covered Heard Island. The
ice-sheet on Heard Island cannot be explained by current snowfall patterns.
Heard Island is antipodal to the Canadian province of Saskatchewan which
was under ice 12,000 years ago. Both areas exhibit polar features (ice
or melted ice in the form of lakes) in a temperate zone. This fits the
antipodal criteria used as evidence for a crustal shift on Mars.
Greater Antarctica has so much ice because it remained inside the Antarctic Circle both before and after the earth's crust shifted. And the area of thickest ice on Greater Antarctica is opposite to the ice sheet on central Greenland. Lesser Antarctica is antipodal to the areas in the north which were teeming with temperate adapted creatures such as those in Arctic Norway, Alaska, Siberia and Beringia. Next