A line that some critics of Worlds in Collision had been harping on was that if events as violent as those Velikovsky described had really happened in recent times, they would have left unmistakable signs all over the surface of the Earth. Either the critics hadn't heard of Cuvier, or they had forgotten him. In November 1955, Velikovsky obliged them with the publication of Earth in Upheaval, a testimony drawn not from myth or anything created by the minds of Man, but written into the rocks of the planet itself. In it, he examined the then-unquestioned principle of Lyellian gradualism, and contrasted its tenets with what is actually found the world over, testifying to immense cataclysms that changed the face of the Earth.
From Alaska to Florida, Europe to Far Eastern Asia, huge graveyards are found, containing the remains of millions of animals, many types abundant and well adapted until recent times, but now extinct. They didn't die out gradually but were overwhelmed suddenly and violently across whole regions, along with entire forests that were uprooted and splintered. The fast-frozen mammoths with pieces of their last meal still preserved between their teeth that most people today have heard about represent just a tiny part of the picture. Off the north coasts of Siberia are islands hundreds of feet high that consist of practically nothing but heaped up bones and tusks of mammoths, elephants, rhinoceroses, and smashed trees. Fissures, caves, and excavations across the British Isles, France, Switzerland, and Gibraltar yield elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, lions, tigers, bears, wolves, hyenas, and others that the perplexed archeologists of earlier times could only guess had been brought by the Romans. But the numbers were too vast for that to be credible. In many instances the types were already extinct by the time of the Romans; others were later found spread across parts of Europe that they were just as foreign to, but which the Romans had never occupied. Whales somehow found their way to lodgements 500 feet above sea level in Michigan, Vermont, and Quebec.
The scale and nature of the devastation is consistent with a gigantic tidal surge away from the equator, being stopped at barriers such as the Himalaya chain and the Alps, but elsewhere funneling through the northern Atlantic and Pacific inlets to the Arctic Basin and then rebounding in a backwash rolling southward across the Asian and North American continents. In many places the animal and plant debris are of all types from all regions, marine and land forms, from tropical and temperate climates, all jumbled and heaped up together. The Siwalik Hills on the southern edge of the Himalayas consist of sedimentary deposits 2,000 to 3,000 feet high and extending for several hundred miles, abounding with fossil beds of so many and so varied species that the animal world of today looks impoverished by comparison. Thirteen hundred miles away, in central Burma, the deposits cut by the Irrawaddy river reach 10,000 feet and contain a comparable variety, along with hundreds of thousands of entire trunks of silicified trees. Yet, as also happens in other places, the beds are separated by huge thicknesses of sediment4,000 feet in the case of the Irrawaddythat contain no fossils or trace of any organic material at all, suggesting the sudden halting of colossal volumes of water.
Rapidly moving water can move amazingly heavy objects. Erratic rocks and boulders found hundreds of miles from their places of origin have usually been attributed to transportation by glaciers or ice sheets. But they occur widely across parts of Siberia where there are no high grounds to impart motion to ice, and in places that were never covered by ice.
The evidence Velikovsky presents is of precisely the kind that the events proposed in Worlds in Collision would be expected to leave, such as of meteorite storms, pole shifts, abrupt climate changes, alterations of sea level, and increased tectonic activity. Mountain uplifts and other formations show indications of being younger than conventional geology maintains. The Columbia Plateau consists of solidified lava sheets covering two hundred thousand square miles of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The Snake River at Seven Devils Canyon has cut more than three thousand feet deep and not reached the bottom of them. Tens of thousands of elliptical craters, many now flooded to form lakes, occur all along the coastal areas from New Jersey to northeast Florida, but especially in the Carolinas. They all exhibit a parallel alignment from northwest to southeast, and many have raised rims at the southern end, suggestive of scars from an intense meteorite shower coming down at a grazing angle. Similar patterns occur at other parts of both hemispheres. Volcanic and earthquake activity has declined significantly even since Roman times. In the Andes, ruins of fishing villages and ports are found 12,000 feet above sea level. What were once cultivated agricultural terraces today disappear under the snow line.
Of course, much of this clashes with the orthodox dating system. In his usual fashion, Velikovsky cares little for theory and sides with the evidence, questioning the assumptions that the conventional dating system rests on. It was more a product of materialism's fight with religion than an empirical construct, he contends, manufactured to provide the long time scales that Lyell and Darwin needed. Paralleling much of what we said earlier in this book, he was skeptical that natural selection had the ability to do what was claimed of it and offered evidence that biological change occurred in sudden epochs of repopulation by radically new designs, triggered by the occurrence of global-scale catastrophes. Needless to say, this didn't earn him many friends in that department either.