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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.

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