Earth in Upheaval Page 2

  I present here some pages from the book of nature. I have excluded from them all references to ancient literature, traditions, and folklore; and this I have done with intent, so that careless critics cannot decry the entire work as “tales and legends.” Stones and bones are the only witnesses. Mute as they are, they will testify clearly and unequivocally. Yet dull ears and dimmed eyes will deny this evidence, and the dimmer the vision, the louder and more insistent will be the voices of protestation. This book was not written for those who swear by the verba magistri – the holiness of their school wisdom; and they may debate it without reading it, as well.

  The Author (1955)

  Chapter 1

  In the North

  In Alaska

  In Alaska, to the north of Mount McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America, the Tanana River joins the Yukon. From the Tanana Valley and the valleys of its tributaries gold is mined out of gravel and “muck.” This muck is a frozen mass of animals and trees.

  F. Rainey of the University of Alaska described the scene:1 “Wide cuts, often several miles in length and sometimes as much as 140 feet in depth, are now being sluiced out along stream valleys tributary to the Tanana in the Fairbanks District. In order to reach gold-bearing gravel beds an overburden of frozen silt or ‘muck’ is removed with hydraulic giants. This ‘muck’ contains enormous numbers of frozen bones of extinct animals such as the mammoth, mastodon, super-bison and horse.”2

  These animals perished in rather recent times; present estimates place their extinction at the end of the Ice Age or in early post-glacial times. The soil of Alaska covered their bodies together with those of animals of species still surviving.

  Under what conditions did this great slaughter take place, in which millions upon millions of animals were torn limb from limb and mingled with uprooted trees?

  F. C. Hibben of the University of New Mexico writes: “Although the formation of the deposits of muck is not clear, there is ample evidence that at least portions of this material were deposited under catastrophic conditions. Mammal remains are for the most part dismembered and disarticulated, even though some fragments yet retain, in their frozen state, portions of ligaments, skin, hair, and flesh. Twisted and torn trees are piled in splintered masses ... . At least four considerable layers of volcanic ash may be traced in these deposits, although they are extremely warped and distorted ... .”3

  Could it be that a volcanic eruption killed the animal population of Alaska, the streams carrying down into the valleys the bodies of the slaughtered animals? A volcanic eruption would have charred the trees but would not have uprooted and splintered them; if it killed animals, it would not have dismembered them. The presence of volcanic ash indicates that a volcanic eruption did take place, and repeatedly, in four consecutive stages of the same epoch; but it is also apparent that the trees could have been uprooted and splintered only by hurricane or flood or a combination of both agencies. The animals could have been dismembered only by a stupendous wave that lifted and carried and smashed and tore and buried millions of bodies and millions of trees. Also, the area of the catastrophe was much greater than the action of a few volcanoes could have covered.

  Muck deposits like those of the Tanana River Valley are found in the lower reaches of the Yukon in the western part of the peninsula, on the Koyukuk River that flows into the Yukon from the north, on the Kuskokwim River that empties its waters into Bering Sea, and at several places along the Arctic coast, and so “may be considered to extend in greater or lesser thickness over all unglaciated areas of the northern peninsula.”4

  What could have caused the Arctic Sea and the Pacific Ocean to irrupt and wash away forests with all their animal population and throw the entire mingled mass in great heaps scattered all over Alaska, the coast of which is longer than the Atlantic seaboard from Newfoundland to Florida? Was it not a tectonic revolution in the earth’s crust, that also caused the volcanoes to erupt and to cover the peninsula with ashes?

  In various levels of the muck, stone artifacts were found “frozen in situ at great depths and in apparent association” with the Ice Age fauna, which implies that “men were contemporary with extinct animals in Alaska.”5 Worked flints, characteristically shaped, called Yuma points, were repeatedly found in the Alaskan muck, one hundred and more feet below the surface. One such spear point was found there between a lion’s jaw and a mammoth’s tusk.6 Similar weapons were used only a few generations ago by the Indians of the Athapascan tribe, who camped in the upper Tanana Valley.7 “It has also been suggested that even modern Eskimo points are remarkably Yuma-like,”8 all of which indicates that the multitudes of torn animals and splintered forests date from a time not many thousand years ago.

  The Ivory Islands

  The arctic coast of Siberia is cold, bleak, inhospitable. The sea is passable for ships maneuvering between floating ice for two months of the year; from September to the middle of July the ocean north of Siberia is fettered, an unbroken desert of ice. Polar winds sweep over the frozen tundras of Siberia, where no tree grows and the soil is never tilled. In his exploratory voyage on the ship Vega in 1878, Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskjöld, the first to traverse this northern seaway from one end to the other, traveled for weeks along the coast from Novaya Zemlya to Cape Shelagskoi (170° 30’ East) on the eastern extremity of Siberia without seeing a single human being on the shore.

  Fossil tusks of the mammoth – an extinct elephant – were found in northern Siberia and brought southward to markets at a very early time, possibly in the days of Pliny in the first century of the present era. The Chinese excelled in working delicate designs in the ivory, much of which they obtained from the north. And from the days of the conquest of Siberia (1582) by the Cossack Yermak under Ivan the Terrible, until our own times, trade in mammoths’ tusks has gone on. Northern Siberia provided more than half the world’s supply of ivory, many piano keys and many billiard balls being made from the fossil tusks of these mammoths.

  In 1797 the body of a mammoth, with flesh, skin, and hair, was found in northeastern Siberia, and since then bodies of other mammoths have been unearthed from the frozen ground in various parts of that region. The flesh had the appearance of freshly frozen beef; it was edible, and wolves and sledge dogs fed on it without harm.9

  The ground must have been frozen ever since the day of their entombment; had it not been frozen, the bodies of the mammoths would have putrefied in a single summer, but they remained unspoiled for some thousands of years. “It is therefore absolutely necessary to believe that the bodies were frozen up immediately after the animals died, and were never once thawed, until the day of their discovery.”10

  High in the north above Siberia, six hundred miles inside the Polar Circle, in the Arctic Ocean, lie the Liakhov Islands. Liakhov was a hunter who, in the days of Catherine II, ventured to these islands and brought back the report that they abounded in mammoths’ bones. “Such was the enormous quantity of mammoths’ remains that it seemed ... that the island was actually composed of the bones and tusks of elephants, cemented together by icy sand.”11

  The New Siberian Islands, discovered in 1805 and 1806, as well as the islands of Stolbovoi and Belkov to the west, present the same picture. “The soil of these desolate islands is absolutely packed full of the bones of elephants and rhinoceroses in astonishing numbers.”12

  “These islands were full of mammoth bones, and the quantity of tusks and teeth of elephants and rhinoceroses, found in the newly discovered island of New Siberia, was perfectly amazing, and surpassed anything which had as yet been discovered.”13

  Did the animals come there over the ice, and for what purpose? On what food could they have lived? Not on the lichens of the Siberian tundras, covered by deep snow most of the year, and still less on the moss of the polar islands, which are frozen ten months in the year: mammoths, members of the voracious elephant family, required huge quantities of vegetable food every day in the year. How could large herds of them have existed in a country like
northeast Siberia, which is regarded as the coldest place in the world, and where there was no food for them?

  Mammoth tusks have been dredged in nets from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean; and after arctic gales the shores of the islands are strewn with tusks cast up by the billows. This is regarded as an indication that the bottom of the Arctic Ocean between the islands and the mainland was dry land in the days when mammoths roamed there.

  Georges Cuvier, the great French paleontologist (1769 – 1832), thought that in a vast catastrophe of continental dimensions the sea overwhelmed the land, the herds of mammoths perished, and in a second spasmodic movement the sea rushed away, leaving the carcasses behind. This catastrophe must have been accompanied by a precipitous drop in temperature; the frost seized the dead bodies and saved them from decomposition.14 In some mammoths, when discovered, even the eyeballs were still preserved.

  Charles Darwin, who denied the occurrence of continental catastrophes in the past, in a letter to Sir Henry Howorth admitted that the extinction of mammoths in Siberia was for him an insoluble problem.15 J. D. Dana, the leading American geologist of the second half of the last century, wrote: “The encasing in ice of huge elephants, and the perfect preservation of the flesh, shows that the cold finally became suddenly extreme, as of a single winter’s night, and knew no relenting afterward.”16

  In the stomachs and between the teeth of the mammoths were found plants and grasses that do not grow now in northern Siberia. “The contents of the stomachs have been carefully examined; they showed the undigested food, leaves of trees now found in Southern Siberia, but a long way from the existing deposits of ivory. Microscopic examination of the skin showed red blood corpuscles, which was a proof not only of a sudden death, but that the death was due to suffocation either by gases or water, evidently the latter in this case. But the puzzle remained to account for the sudden freezing up of this large mass of flesh so as to preserve it for future ages.”17

  What could have caused a sudden change in the temperature of the region? Today the country does not provide food for large quadrupeds, the soil is barren and produces only moss and fungi a few months in the year; at that time the animals fed on plants. And not only mammoths pastured in northern Siberia and on the islands of the Arctic Ocean. On Kotelnoi Island “neither trees, nor shrubs, nor bushes, exist ... and yet the bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, buffaloes, and horses are found in this icy wilderness in numbers which defy all calculation.”18

  When Hedenström and Sannikov discovered the New Siberian Islands in 1806, they found in the “desolate wilderness” of polar sea the remains of “enormous petrified forests.” These forests could be seen tens of miles away. “The trunks of the trees in these ruins of ancient forests were partly standing upright and partly lying horizontally buried in the frozen soil. Their extent was very great.19 Hedenstrom described them as follows: “On the southern coast of New Siberia are found the remarkable wood hills [piles of trunks]. They are 30 fathoms [180 feet] high, and consist of horizontal strata of sand-stone, alternating with strata of bituminous beams or trunks of trees. On ascending these hills, fossilized charcoal is everywhere met with, covered apparently with ashes; but, on closer examination, this ash is also found to be a petrifaction, and so hard that it can scarcely be scraped off with a knife.”20 Some trunks are fixed perpendicular in the sandstone, with broken ends.

  In 1829 the German scientist G. A. Erman went to the Liakhov and the New Siberian islands to measure there the magnetic field of the earth. He described the soil as full of the bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, and buffaloes. Of the piles of wood he wrote: “In New Siberia [Island], on the declivities facing the south, lie hills 250 or 300 feet high, formed of driftwood, the ancient origin of which, as well as of the fossil wood in the tundras, anterior to the history of the Earth in its present state, strikes at once even the most uneducated hunters ... . Other hills on the same island, and on Kotelnoi, which lies further to the west, are heaped up to an equal height with skeletons of pachyderms [elephants, rhinoceroses], bisons, etc., which are cemented together by frozen sand as well as by strata and veins of ice ... . On the summit of the hills they [the trunks of trees] lie flung upon one another in the wildest disorder, forced upright in spite of gravitation, and with their tops broken off or crushed, as if they had been thrown with great violence from the south on a bank, and there heaped up.”21

  Eduard von Toll repeatedly visited the New Siberian Islands from 1885 to 1902, when he perished in the Arctic Ocean. He examined the “wood hills” and “found them to consist of carbonized trunks of trees, with impressions of leaves and fruits.”22 On Maloi, one of the group of Liakhov Islands, Toll found bones of mammoths and other animals together with the trunks of fossil trees, with leaves and cones. “This striking discovery proves that in the days when the mammoths and rhinoceroses lived in northern Siberia, these desolate islands were covered with great forests, and bore a luxuriant vegetation.”23

  A hurricane, apparently, uprooted the trees of Siberia and flung them to the extreme north; mountainous waves of the ocean piled them in huge hills, and some agent of a bituminous nature transformed them into charcoal, either before or after they were deposited and cemented in drifted masses of sand that became baked into sandstone.

  These petrified forests were swept from northern Siberia into the ocean, and together with bones of animals and drifted sand built the islands. It may be that not all the charred trees and the mammoths and other animals were destroyed and swept away in a single catastrophe. It is more probable that one huge cemetery of animals and trees came flying through the air on the crest of a retreating tidal wave to settle astride another, older, cemetery, deep in the Polar Circle.

  The scientists who explored the “muck” beds of Alaska have not reflected upon the similarity in appearance of animal remains there and in the polar regions of Siberia and on arctic islands, and have therefore not discussed a common cause. The exploration of the New Siberian Islands, one thousand miles away from Alaska, was the work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century academicians who followed the hunters of fossil ivory; the exploration of Alaskan soil was the work of twentieth-century scientists who followed the gold-digging machines.

  These two observations – one old, one new – came from the north. Before presenting many more from all parts of the world, I shall review a few dominant theories on the history of our earth and its animal kingdom. We shall read in brief, in the original statements of the authors, how the earlier naturalists explained the phenomena; how, subsequently, the same phenomena were interpreted in terms of slow evolution; and how in the last fourscore years more and more facts have presented themselves that do not square with the picture of a peaceful world molded in a slow and uneventful process.

  Chapter 2

  Revolution

  The Erratic Boulders

  The waters of the ocean in which our mountains had been formed still covered a part of these Alps when a violent paroxysm of the globe suddenly opened great cavities ... and ruptured many rocks. …

  “The waters were carried toward these abysses with extreme violence, falling from the height they were before; they crossed deep valleys and dragged immense quantities of earth, sand, and debris of all kinds of rocks. This mass, shoved along by the onrush of great waters, was left spread up the slopes where we still see many scattered fragments.”1

  Thus did Horace Bénédict de Saussure, foremost Swiss naturalist of the end of the eighteenth century, explain the presence of stones broken off from the Alps and carried to the Jura Mountains to the west; so also did he explain the marine remains found in alpine ridges, and the sand, gravel, and clay that fill the valleys of the Alps and the plains beyond them.

  The loose rocks lying on the Jura Mountains were torn from the Alps; in their mineral composition they differ from the rock formations of the Jura, showing their alpine origin. Rocks that differ from the formations on which they lie are called “erratic boulders.”

  These stone b
locks lie on the Jura Mountains at an elevation of 2000 feet above Lake Geneva. Some of them are thousands of cubic feet in size, and Pierre à Martin is over 10,000 cubic feet. They must have been carried across the space now occupied by the lake and lifted to the height where they are found.