“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. … 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 would have caused this effect? Judging from the evidence, Schultz 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.’
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 these 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 the marks of former glaciations 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.
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 adequately 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 currents account for the fact. We may conclude that the best theory to account for an ice age is that the area concerned was at the pole. We thus account for the Indian and African ice sheets, though the areas once occupied by them are now in the tropics. We account for all ice sheets of continental size in the same way.’
The logic is close to inescapable. Either we accept that the Antarctic ice cap is the first continent-sized ice sheet ever to have been situated at a pole – which seems improbable – or we are obliged to suppose that earth-crust displacement, or a similar mechanism, must have been at work.”
The above extracts are from Graham Hancock’s ‘Fingerprints of the gods: the quest continues.’