Comments on prehistoric beach sand, and lack of expected sediment
on either side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in this extract from
The Great Pyramid Speaks by John Gagnon.
From
Earth in Upheaval by Immanuel Velikovsky
In the
fall of 1949, Professor M. Ewing of Columbia University published
a report on an expedition to the Atlantic Ocean. Explorations
were carried on especially in the region about the Mid-Atlantic
Ridge, the mountainous chain that runs from north to south,
following the general outlines of the ocean. The Ridge, as
well as the ocean bottom to the west and to the east, disclosed
to ~e expedition a series of facts that amount to new scientific
puzzles.
One was the discovery of prehistoric beach sand. . . brought
up in one case from a depth of two and the other nearly three
and one half miles, far from any place where beaches exist
today. One of these sand deposits was found twelve hundred
miles from land.
Sand is
produced from rocks by the eroding action of sea waves pounding
the coast, and by the action of rain and wind and the alternation
of heat and cold. On the bottom of the ocean the temperature
is constant; there are no currents; it is a region of motionless
stillness. Mid-ocean bottoms are covered with ooze made up
of silt so fine that its particles can be carried suspended
in ocean water for a long time before they sink to the bottom,
there to build sediment. The ooze contains skeletons of the
minute animals, foraminifera that live in the upper waters
of the ocean in vast numbers. But there should be no coarse
sand on the mid-ocean floor, because sand is native to land
areas and to the continental shelf.
This
is another one of the many facts discovered in recent times
that lead me to believe that the earth's land masses did recently
shift in all directions, leaving world wide evidence of an event
so powerful that it changed the face of the world as the survivors
had known it.
Yet
another clue that adds legitimacy to the possible of great earth
movements was the discovery that the Atlantic Ocean sea floor
had very little sediment cover.
From
Earth in Upheaval by Immanuel Velikovsky
But there
was another surprise in store for the expedition. The thickness
of the sediment on the ocean bottom was measured by the well-developed
method of sound echoes. An explosion is set off and the time
it takes for the echo to return from the sediment on the floor
of the ocean, is compared with the time required for a second
echo to return from the bottom of the sediment, or from the
bedrock, basalt or granite. These measurements clearly
indicate thousands of feet of sediments on the foothills of
the Ridge. Surprisingly, however, we have found that in the
great flat basins on either side of the Ridge, this sediment
appears to be less than 100 feet thick, a fact so startling.
. .
Actually,
the echoes arrived almost simultaneously, and the most that
could be attributed in such circumstances to the sediment,
was less than one hundred feet of thickness, or the margin
of error.
It
had always been thought that the sediment must be extremely
thick, since it had been accumulating for countless ages.
... But on the level basins that flank the Mid-Atlantic Ridge
our signals reflected from the bottom mud and from bedrock
came back too close together to measure the time between them.
. . They show the sediment in the basins is less than 100
feet thick.
The absence
of thick sediment on the level floor presents another of
many scientific riddles our expedition propounded.
It indicates
that the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean on both sides of the
Ridge was very recently formed.
It has since been shown that throughout the world's oceans
the expected amount of sediment does not exist.
The Great
Pyramid Speaks by John Gagnon.
Earth in Upheaval by Immanuel Velikovsky
