Page:The origin of continents and oceans - Wegener, tr. Skerl - 1924.djvu/123

Rh contrary at many places the remains of tropical vegetation. It need scarcely be said that this result is absurd. This has already been emphasized by numerous authors, probably most clearly by Koken, to whom no other course seems to remain than to assume that all these masses of ice were formed at great heights above sea-level. But this hypothesis must appear just as impossible to the climatologists as that of F. v. Kerner, who states that it is a question of local anomalies of the distribution of heat caused by cold currents of the sea and such-like phenomena. It has therefore been urged by different authors, especially by A. Penck, that these facts render the assumption of displacements of the earth’s crust not improbable. Moreover the assumption that these traces were formed successively whilst the pole wandered or the earth’s crust was shifted beneath it, is wrecked, because no corresponding phenomena have been detected in the areas lying at the antipodes. If we allow the South Pole to wander from Brazil (of to-day) across Africa towards Australia, the velocity of this movement immediately excites well-founded distrust, and then the North Pole must trace a path from China to the east of Central America, where it must have left further traces behind. This is also in complete contradiction to the position of the Carboniferous and Permian equators and of the arid zones of those periods found by other means. The more exactly and completely we understand the whole evidence of the climates of those times, the more evident it becomes that, with the present positions of the continents, those climates cannot be adapted at all to any possible position of the poles and the climatic belts. It is not too much to say that this apparent inherent