PARADOX: Was Freezing or Flooding Last?
While compiling material for my previous page on The Younger Dryas Event at cataclysmicearthhistory.substack.com/p/younger-dryas-event, I noticed a paradox. There are lots of areas where frozen mammoths were found in yedomas/ice in Siberia (See the maps below). But the megafloods seem to have occurred after the mammoths were frozen in the ice. So it seems that the megafloods in Siberia should have washed away the frozen mammoths and the ice they were encased in. Either the megafloods were not as severe in Siberia, as in Canada and the U.S., or the mammoths froze after the megafloods. Here’s what it said.
There were also massive megafloods in Asia. Some of them were associated with big ice sheets that blocked the rivers that currently flow north from Russia into the Arctic Ocean.
The portion of Russia that’s in Asia is Siberia. It seems that the megafloods should have drowned all of the mammoths, so there should not have been any remaining to be frozen afterward, esp. since all of the vegetation was likely buried under thick sediment. All I can figure is that the remaining yedomas were on high ground that the megafloods didn’t reach.
Yedomas in Siberia, Alaska, and the Yukon
Yedomas are a special type of permafrost that contain a large amount of organic matter (about 2% carbon by mass) and from 50 to 80% ice by volume. The ice is in the form of large ice wedges and ice layers and lenses. Permafrost covers 23 million km2, or 24%, of land in the Northern Hemisphere. Yedomas cover substantially less—1,387,000 km2 in north-east Siberia, Alaska, and Yukon Territory of north-west Canada. They are often tens of metres thick with a maximum of about 50 m. Permafrost was 52% greater at the peak of the Ice Age than today, having expanded south of the boundaries of the ice sheets and subsequently melted back toward higher latitude. …
Because of subsequent thawing of yedomas, likely during the warming after the disappearance of the Cordilleran, Laurentide, and Scandinavian ice sheets, hollows formed on the yedoma surfaces leaving behind a hill and basin topography called thermokarst.... Sometimes mass wasting, the downslope spreading of sediments, occurs during melting. Yedomas contain most of the woolly mammoths and other animals entombed in the permafrost.
MAP OF YEDOMAS (& Permafrost)
Location of the study sites, overlain on the map showing the extent of Yedoma deposits on the Northern Hemisphere and the permafrost zonation.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27386-2
MAP OF FROZEN MAMMOTHS & RHINOS
It looks like the frozen mammoths were found in yedomas, as Oard said.
ELEVATION MAP OF NORTHERN EURASIA
Russland_topo.png (2000×1045) (wikimedia.org)
My ICE AGE paper at cataclysmicearthhistory.substack.com/publish/post/89058619 has a section called UNGLACIATED ARCTIC. There was no glaciation or ice sheets in most of Siberia, so I assume the megafloods were not as deep there and the yedomas were thus able to remain largely intact, if they are on higher ground.
Intriguing article and information. Personally, I have become convinced that the mammoths were flash frozen at the onset of Noah's deluge. If, as is postulated, the earth fauted down what are now the mid-oceanic trenches and huge plumes and geysers of water were ejected high into the stratosphere... upon reaching the cryosphere they would have frozen to hundreds of degrees below the freezing point of water, and caused catastrophic blizzards that would have rapidly entombed the animals. But then how did the ice survive the ensuing flooding and volcanism??? Probably by being quickly buried in ash.
My theory would be substantiated by drilling below the yedoma permafrost and examining the underlying strata. If it is mostly sediments, that would be puzzling. But if it were igneous or dolomites, that is what I would expect.