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I think you’ll find your answer here: “Velikovsky’s 1955 book Earth In Upheaval strove to do for geology what Worlds in Collision had done for astronomy. Attempting to collect the ‘physical evidence’ for the planetary billiards described in the former, the book espoused an extreme form of geological catastrophism (i.e. that the majority of the Earth’s geological features had been formed within timescales of hours, days or weeks, rather than gradually over “millions of years”). Volcanism, pole shifts, mass extinctions, orogeny were all grist to the mill. Velikovsky did say that he was not questioning the conventional view of the age of the Earth, nor did he question evolution. Subsequent decades have seen catastrophist ideas gain some acceptance amongst the scientific community (such as a possible meteoric impact event at the Cretaceous-Tertary boundary causing extinction of the dinosaurs), and there may even be a little bit of similarity between Velilovsky’s claims about “catastrophic evolution” and recent theories of “punctuated equilibrium”. However the timescales and causes proposed by Velikovsky (near collisions with Venus and Mars in 1500 and 747 BC) continue to be regarded as ludicrous nonsense by the mainstream. Velikovsky spent a significant part of Earth in Upheaval pooh-poohing the then relatively new theory of continental drift, which he realised that if true could explain some of the geological phenomena he put down to catastrophes. As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in his essay Velikovsky in Collision, Velikovsy’s objections were shared at the time by some orthodox geologists, i.e. that there was no mechanism to explain continental drift, but this problem has now been resolved.”