Ice Age Lake Agassiz & Megaflood c. Younger Dryas 2,600 BC
I previously posted Excerpts from Dwardu Cardona’s book Metamorphic Star about the Saturn Nova as the Cause of the Younger Dryas Event. Below I want to compare Cardona’s conclusions with Michael Oard’s articles about Extinctions and Megafloods in the Younger Dryas time period.
Biblical Ice Age solves uniformitarian global end-Pleistocene mass extinction debate https://dl0.creation.com/articles/p130/c13060/j33_2_57-60.pdf
Michael J. Oard
{BIASED UNIFORMITARIAN DEBATE.}
The global end-Pleistocene mass extinction has been a subject of debate for about 200 years, and there is no resolution in sight {for the mainstream}. .. A little less than 65% of the megafauna over 44 kg (100 lb) went extinct worldwide near the end of the ‘last’ uniformitarian ice age.... Different figures have been used by researchers in the past for Eurasia and Africa. {There were} fewer extinctions in northern Eurasia than previous statistics indicated {and it is admitted} little is known about extinctions in southern Eurasia (... probably a low percentage).2 Africa ... had a small percentage of extinctions. ... Two main {hypotheses} have long been competing: (1) overkill, where man is responsible for the mass extinction or (2) overchill, in which climate change caused the mass extinctions. {Both are incorrect.}
Post-Flood Ice Age solution.
{ONLY ONE ICE AGE.}
If they return to biblical earth history, they would discover there is a clear explanation for extinctions.17,18 The global Flood described in Genesis is the only viable explanation for an Ice Age. Since there was only one global Flood,19 there was only one Ice Age.20,21 Indeed, the fact that such a mass extinction occurred only after the ‘last’ ice age argues strongly against any previous ice ages. If there were many previous ice ages of comparable severity and duration, why is it that mass extinctions only occur at the end of the last ice age? This solves the issue of the lack of extinctions after their supposed earlier 49 ice ages.
{SURPRISING EQUABLE ICE AGE CLIMATE.}
The Ice Age after the Flood was much different than what uniformitarians propose. Instead of Ice Ages being bitterly cold in the uniformitarian model, winters were actually much warmer due to the warm oceans, while summers {were} much cooler, due to Flood volcanism and meteorite impacts and post-Flood volcanism. This equable, mild climate with little seasonal contrast occurred early in the Ice Age, contrary to uniformitarian expectations and climate simulations. The disharmonious associations of plants and animals early in the Ice Age, especially the warm-climate types so far north in the Northern Hemisphere, is evidence of such an equable climate, but strongly contrary to uniformitarianism.22 The animals thrived in this equable climate. The abundant moisture and mild temperature combined with rich virgin soil to provide perfect grazing over the middle and high latitudes. The diversity of mammal populations has been described as similar to the Serengeti of Africa.
{CHANGING ICE AGE CLIMATE.}
But the Ice Age was dynamic, changing all the time. By the end of the Ice Age, the climate was drastically different. Summers became warmer while the ice sheets melted. However, winters became even colder than today because of the existence of the ice sheets and the increased sea ice,23 resulting in a large seasonal contrast. Less-dense fresh water from melting ice caps in the mountains of the high and mid latitudes flooded over the top of salt water in high latitude oceans. This fresh water rapidly froze into sea ice. The greater amount of sea ice, colder sea surface temperatures, and the large ice sheets that formed after the Flood resulted in a drier atmosphere. Colder sea surface temperatures evaporate less water vapour into the atmosphere compared to today, while more sea ice restricts the oceanic evaporation in that area.
{SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE.}
Drought struck Australia and South America especially hard. The tropics and subtropics likely warmed to near their present temperatures once copious post-Flood volcanism had ended. The temperature difference between the low latitudes and the mid and high latitudes would be much stronger than today because of the existence of the ice sheets and the increased sea ice. The stronger the temperature difference, the stronger the jet stream by the thermal wind equation. Therefore, there would be much greater wind during deglaciation. This is supported by the abundant sand and loess (wind-blown silt), associated with the Ice Age.24 Fierce wind and drought would cause fires to rage across large areas of land.
{STRESSED ANIMALS.}
Most of the animals were not conditioned to cold winters as uniformitarian scientists think. When the winters became much colder, they were greatly stressed. Drought resulted in less food, which would have a greater impact on the larger and slower-reproducing animals. Rapid melting of ice and snow would occur in such a climate because of little winter snow. This resulted from less evaporation from a cooler ocean and warmer summer temperatures with much more solar radiation, due to the decrease in stratospheric aerosols. With less winter snow and warming summers, the winter snow easily melts early with most of the warm season dedicated to melting the ice sheet. Meltwater from the glaciers flooded the rivers and streams.
{Was there enough time for thick permafrost to form?}
{PERMAFROST & BOGS.}
The cold winters in non-glaciated areas at mid and high latitudes would create permafrost, which is known to have been significantly more extensive during deglaciation.25 Since the top of permafrost would melt during the summer and refreeze in the fall and winter, numerous summer bogs would occur south of the ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere and in non-glaciated areas of high latitude. Bog vegetation is often toxic to grazers, which most end-Pleistocene extinct animals were. Less forage, cold weather, drought, and winds combined to cause the mass extinctions.
{FREEZING CAUSED MOST EXTINCTIONS.}
Each continent experienced their own unique variations of these factors. The vast majority, if not all, of the mass extinctions were caused by overchill. There are very few associations between megafauna and man, and most of them are found at kill sites. There is no reason for other sites to disappear in the short time since the Ice Age, so overkill had little or nothing to do with the mass extinctions. Conclusion Going back in history in the CSM model and changing the wrong unblocking decisions provides a solution to this 200-year mystery. Specifically, reintroducing the biblical Flood and the biblical timeframe allows for a productive solution to this enigma.
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Two more late Ice Age megafloods discovered https://dl0.creation.com/articles/p077/c07781/j25_1_4-6.pdf
Michael J. Oard
{WHY THE YOUNGER DRYAS WAS COLDER.}
All these megafloods reinforce the idea that the Ice Age ice sheets melted catastrophically.23 Furthermore, the creationist Ice Age model has the potential to cause the Younger Dryas cold snap because there was very little sea ice, even in the Arctic Ocean, late in the Ice Age. (It is difficult to freeze the top of seawater, but a less dense cap of freshwater makes it much easier.) So pulses of freshwater floating over the saltwater from many megafloods and the catastrophic melting of the ice in general could have triggered the Younger Dryas.24 The effect would have been most dramatic over the Arctic Ocean. Of course, the Younger Dryas in the creationists scheme did not last on the order of a thousand years, as assumed by uniformitarian scientists, but would have been on the order of tens of years.
MY COMMENTS
POST-FLOOD CLIMATE CHANGE. Oard is a climatologist and he has some excellent insights into the likely climatic conditions during the Ice Age. He says the climate after the Great Flood started out very mild, but after c. 500 years, became severely cold at temperate and Arctic locations. And the cold killed off the megafauna over the next 200 years.
MEGAFLOODS. Oard acknowledges megafloods, but he doesn’t seem to have a good explanation for them. He talks about warm summers and severe winters, but it would take extremely warm summers to melt large parts of the ice sheet. I think he makes a good case for the megafloods being the cause of the cold spell during the Younger Dryas, i.e. by fresh water from the floods running into the oceans and floating on top of the sea water and, being easier to freeze, it lowered temperatures and caused drought due to less ocean evaporation.
IMPACTS. But the impacts on the Ice Sheet should be obvious. Oard acknowledges there were lots of impacts during the Great Flood, but he ignores impacts during the Younger Dryas events. The craters of the Carolina Bays and Nebraska basins, which were secondary impact sites from ice boulders that were ejected from impact craters on the Ice Sheet should be extremely obvious, but not to Oard. So those impacts are the most likely cause of the megafloods. By spreading the ice over more of North America, they may also have cooled the continent down more than it already was before that, thus accounting for the cooldown during the Younger Dryas.
CONFLAGRATION. Cardona favored the Saturn nova heat as the source of the Ice Sheet melting and the conflagrations. He pointed out that the conflagrations required something to burn, and that was widespread forests, which required a suitable prior climate to grow in. Oard’s explanation of drought, due to meltwater ice covering much of the oceans, preventing evaporation, would also likely have contributed to the conflagration by drying out many of the forests. Oard is satisfied that normal wildfires would have gotten out of hand due to the high winds, which in turn were due to the extreme difference in temperatures between the cold poles and the warm equator. Many impact theorists blame comet impacts for the conflagrations, although a supernova as the cause of a heat blast was also popular, as Cardona showed. Maybe a Saturn nova would be the more direct cause of the wildfires, along with the winds and drought that Oard explains. Cardona also followed Velikovsky in finding evidence that burning petroleum, according to some myths, apparently came from the sky. So he considers such petroleum to have contributed to conflagrations. I don’t know how much petroleum could have rained from the sky, but in my book, Cataclysmic Earth History, I found that most petroleum likely formed during the Great Flood from algal blooms or something like that.