By this time, however, America had begun to separate from the single land mass, and the South Atlantic Ocean had made appearance. Gradually the rift widened, North America broke away from Europe, and only Greenland remained, as if loathe to part company from Scandinavia. As the rift extended, it permitted the deeper heated crustal material to rise to the surface, and the Iceland volcanoes were formed. In Eogene time the Mediterranean was the site of a shallow sea, where vast thicknesses of Tertiary strata accumulated.
The translation of the pole from the east of Alaska (in modern terms) to its location west of that region meant a movement of the land mass in the opposite direction to the amount of 30 degrees on a great circle. At this time the Mediterranean geosyncline lay at right angles across this direction, and the powerful pressure exerted by the movement folded the strata into the Alps and the Himalayan Mountains.
Then, at the beginning of Quaternary time the pole was translated to Baffin Land, an extent of 50 degrees on a great circle. This tore open the Mediterranean and Black Sea gashes, reised Italy and Greece from their former recumbent position on North Africa, and admitted the waters of the Allantic and the Red Sea to the tauli-gashed basin, while at the same time the volcanoes of the Mediterrancan came into existence.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.