THE ICE AGE
Came AFTER the GREAT FLOOD
Most of the material for this post comes from the following video by Michael Oard.
The Great Ice Age
_ICE AGE AFTER FLOOD. The author concluded that the Ice Age lasted only about 700 years and occurred after the Great Flood. This is reasonable because the remains of the Ice Age occur on top of sedimentary rock strata which were mostly deposited by the Great Flood. The author includes additional evidence below.
_ICE AGE FACTS. Geologists started believing in an Ice Age in 1840, which was an assault on uniformitarianism, because, if the present is the key to the past, there should not have been widespread glaciation in the past. So the Ice Age has been a major mystery ever since it was discovered. A special August 1997 issue of U.S. News and World Report was dedicated to mysteries of science, which included the cause of Ice Ages. So they don't know. An ice age is defined as a great increase in ice and snow. What's needed for an ice age is a lot cooler summers and a lot more moisture that persists for years. Presently 10% of Earth's land mass is covered by ice, mainly the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. But during the Ice Age 30% of the land mass was covered by ice, including much of Europe and North America, northern and western U.S., the Andes Mountains in South America and the mountains of Tasmania, an island south of Australia. The former ice coverage is known because present glaciers leave features that greatly resemble features in the formerly glaciated locations. One theory is that the glaciers expanded gradually from the north.
_UNGLACIATED ARCTIC. A subsidiary mystery of the Ice Age is that in Alaska and Siberia, only the mountains were glaciated, not the lowlands. Also, Ice Age fossils include both warm-loving and cold-loving animals. Mainstream science can't explain this, because they assume that the Ice Age was very cold. Hippos lived in large parts of northwest Europe during the Ice Age. Cold-tolerant animals lived and died with them in the same locations. In southern England are a hundred places where hippo fossils are found along with wooly mammoths, reindeer and musk ox. Another mystery is how animals thrived during the Ice Age. At the end of the Ice Age animals over 100 pounds and large birds went extinct. In North America 70% of these animals went extinct, i.e., e.g. sloths, saber-toothed tigers, wooly mammoths, American mastodons, dire wolves. About 70% also went extinct in Eurasia, 90% in Australia, where only tops of mountains were glaciated, and 60-70% in South America. Africa was an exception, with very few extinctions. Why would they go extinct at the end of the Ice Age when the ice sheet was melting, climate was warming and more land was becoming available.
_FORMERLY GREEN DESERTS. Another mystery is why arid and desert regions formerly had abundant rain, lakes, rivers and wildlife. The U.S. Southwest had dozens of lakes, some very large and hundreds of feet deep. These lakes grew during the Ice Age and some were glaciated. Distinct shorelines and raised deltas prove they existed. Australia and Africa also had a lot of lakes. The Dead Sea was also a very large lake. The Sahara Desert and Arabian Peninsula had lakes and big rivers. There are even fossils of hippos in the Sahara during the Ice Age. And there are petroglyphs there of abundant wildlife, which images were drawn by humans.
_ICE AGE LAKES. The warm oceans caused much more precipitation in areas that are now arid. Today, between 30 degrees north and south latitude, there is a belt of sinking air that is very dry, where major deserts are now located. During the Ice Age, those areas were much wetter. There were formerly many lakes in these areas that likely filled up from waters of the Great Flood. As continents rose up from Flood waters, some of the waters were trapped in lakes. Many of them continued to fill up during the first part of the Ice Age.
_ICE AGE REQUIREMENTS. An Ice Age needs cooling down to below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, because summer sun melts ice well below 32 degrees. On the coast of Antarctica, melting in sunshine occurs at 14 degrees, so an Ice Age would need temperatures below that. Computer simulations starting with an Ice Age ice sheet 30 feet thick showed that, instead of growing thicker, actually would almost completely melt in 5 years. The Milankovitch theory of Ice Age cooling due to gradual orbital change would have solar radiation changes too small, as meteorologists have explained for over 100 years. The Ice Age obviously followed the Great Flood because there are sharp moraines and scratched rocks with sharp unweathered edges. In fact, the Great Flood would have triggered the Ice Age. The 3 requirements for an Ice Age are much cooler summers, much more moisture, as from evaporation of the oceans, and these conditions need to persist for many years. The Ice Age was triggered by the Flood, because the latter was a tectonic and volcanic event. Volcanic ash and aerosols would have remained in the stratosphere after the Flood and would have reflected sunlight back into space, cooling the air and land surfaces, including in summer. Volcanism continued during the Ice Age, keeping aerosols in the stratosphere for many years. Stratovolcanoes in the Cascades are among hundreds of volcanoes that erupted during the Ice Age. The Flood events put Earth out of geological equilibrium. It took many centuries till today to return nearly to equilibrium.
_SOURCE AND EXTENT OF THE ICE. There was abundant moisture after the Flood because the oceans were very warm due to tectonics and volcanism [and impacts?]. [The molten Atlantic and Indian Ocean floors after the Pangaea breakup and rapid continental drift filled with Pacific Ocean water that evaporated for days or weeks.] Seven times more evaporation occurs in 86 degree water as in 32 degree water. The water vapor turned to snow in northern North America and northern Europe. Larry Vardiman found that the eastern Pacific Ocean would have produced 4 to 8 times as much snow (as now?) on the Sierras and Yellowstone Park area, which latter accumulated 3,000 feet of ice. This also produced warmer winters in both hemispheres, often below freezing, but warmer than today. So there was very little seasonal contrast when the Ice Age began. Many areas didn't glaciate till the middle or late Ice Age. The Seattle area and the British Isles probably didn't glaciate till midway through the Ice Age. The Arctic Ocean remained warm for a long time and kept Yukon, Alaska and Siberia unglaciated. Forests would have grown around the Arctic Ocean during the early Ice Age, but died out late in the Ice Age. If the Arctic Ocean was 86 degrees right after the Flood and cooled to 50 degrees when the Ice Age reached maximum depth and area, it would have taken 500 years to reach maximum coverage, and another 200 years to end the Ice Age. The average depth of the ice sheet in the northern hemisphere was about 2,100 feet. In the southern hemisphere, mainly on Antarctica, it averaged about 4,000 feet. It would take 70 to 200 years to melt the ice sheet after it reached maximum depth. [This assumes that the Younger Dryas impacts didn't melt the ice sheet.]
_ONLY ONE ICE AGE. At 50 minutes into the video is described some results of ice sheet meltwater flooding in Montana and Wyoming. 200 feet of gravel was deposited in valleys along with boulders, many probably carried by large ice rafts. Then the extent of the global ice sheet is described, which covered 30% of all land. After the Ice Age there have been several oscillations of climate with warmer and cooler periods, caused by variations in solar radiation and by occasional volcanism. About 50 oscillations in Oxygen-16 to Oxygen-18 ratios occur in ocean floor drill cores. However, many scientists are starting to conclude that there was only one Ice Age as in western Canada. South of the ice sheet are wind-blown loess deposits, which are dust. But no loess has been found from previous Ice Ages. Also, there are areas of the ice sheet that were never glaciated, such as in parts of Wisconsin, Montana and Saskatchewan. There was obviously only one Ice Age, the post-Flood Ice Age, and it ended with an extinction event.
_FLOOD LANDSLIDES, NOT ICE AGES. Mainstream scientists assume that Ice Ages occurred 5 times or so in the recent and distant past. One assumption is that some hard rock layers look like glacial till sequences, where many different sizes of rock are seen in a fine grain matrix. Other evidence is scratched rocks and bedrock and rocks in fine sediment, called dropstone bar bites. On top of the 9,500 foot high gravelly mountains of southwest Montana is sandstone bedrock with scratches from broken rock that slid down the slope. Along with supposed glacial sediment found in Colorado, it was initially concluded that these were remnants of a former Ice Age. But one occurred during a warm era, so that conclusion was changed to evidence of landslide. And the author thinks most of the other supposed Ice Ages were also just landslides. Some of the landslide material is well-rounded quartzite rocks, which outcrop about 100 miles west in central Idaho. So they were transported to the location in Montana. When Floodwaters were flowing off the continents, resistant rocks were carried along and rounded. Other less-resistant rocks were pulverized into sand and silt. That's the rocks within a fine matrix that were mistaken for glacial till. There were a lot of submarine landslides on the continents during the Great Flood. Landslides also explain the scratches, or striations, on rocks and bedrock. Landslides also occur during volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, such as at Mt. St. Helens in Oregon.
_ERRATICS. An erratic is a boulder that doesn't outcrop locally. Glacial Lake Missoula filled up 2,000 feet deep in western Montana, then it emptied into the Columbia River gorge 1,000 feet deep, then it spread out in the Portland and Vancouver area, and covered Portland 400 feet deep. Then it backwashed up Willamette Valley 400 feet deep, still carrying hundreds of erratic boulders on the ice, the largest being 90 tons of argillite (slightly metamorphic shale). On highland terrain, a planation surface (planed flat by flood sheet erosion), in northern Montana there is a large banded granite erratic boulder that came from 400 miles north in Canada from the former ice sheet. Was it carried on a moving glacier? A problem with that is that the ice sheet in northern Montana was very thin. The top of the nearby Flaxville Plateau to the east was sticking above the ice. And to the north is the Wood Mountain Plateau in Saskatchewan, also unglaciated. The western end of the nearby Cypress Hills to the west protruded 300 feet above the ice sheet. So the ice sheet was only about 700 feet thick locally into Canada. Glaciers can only move down slopes. If there's no slope they can't move. The tens of thousands of erratics like this must have drifted downstream on large ice rafts as the ice sheet was melting and flooding. Erratics show signs of water action.
_SOME MAMMOTH MYSTERIES. First, the extinction of wooly mammoths from North America and Siberia is explained. The wooly mammoth, about 11 feet tall, had 3 kinds of hair, the outer hair was 3 feet long. It had a hump on its head and back, smaller ears than elephants had, and a sloping back. The Columbian mammoth, which lived farther south, was about 14 feet tall. There are millions of fossils of wooly mammoths still buried in permafrost. How did they get into the permafrost? There are only a couple dozen nearly whole carcasses of wooly mammoths. The food in their stomachs was only half decayed. Why? Some carcasses were found in a standing position, as if trying to exit from bogs. But no bogs are found. Five of the animals found died by suffocation. Some of the carcasses also had broken bones. If there were warm interglacial periods during which the mammoths might have been able to survive in the north, the land would have been too boggy and bog vegetation is toxic to grazing animals. Initially, some thought that the half-decayed food in mammoth stomachs was due to quick-freezing.
_WARM-LOVING ANIMALS IN THE ICE AGE. Warm Arctic winters allowed warm- and cold-loving animals to associate in the northern regions, which were just as rich in grasses as the Serengeti in central Africa is today. Here's how hippos got to northwest Europe after the Flood. With warm oceans the west coasts of continents received warm onshore airflow. This kept northwest Europe warm and moist with probably four times today's precipitation. As time went on, the winters got increasingly colder, so the hippos got trapped in a cooling climate and died out. Then cold-tolerant animals like mammoths moved into the same areas, only to get similarly trapped late in the Ice Age as the ice reduced the food supply and they died out too.
_MIGRATIONS. The post-Flood rapid Ice Age solves mysteries, such as how animals and humans spread through the Americas. Mammoths spread from Siberia to Alaska and some followed an ice-free corridor through western Canada (along the east side of the Rockies) to the U.S. and Central and South America. Warm, dry southward moving Chinook winds kept the cordillera open till the late Ice Age. Humans and animals migrated through it. The corridor then filled in with ice and left fossils underneath. In southeast Asia when sea level was low there, animals and humans migrated to Australia. Early in the Ice Age animals multiplied rapidly in the ideal climate with heavy precipitation to grow abundant grasses and other vegetation. Late in the Ice Age, the warmer winters became colder and cool summers got warmer, so the ice sheet began to melt and the cold winters didn't add new snow. The animals became increasingly stressed. There are now millions of mammoth fossils in Siberia, buried in permafrost. The ivory is preserved because of it. Many fossils are found on top of glacial debris. Many mammoths ended up near the Arctic Ocean. Siberia and Alaska in the Arctic initially had mild winters and heavy precipitation, resulting in abundant plant and animal life. There would have been a lot of forests near the Arctic Ocean with extensive grasslands beyond. Initially, there was no permafrost and no summer bogs. Permafrost is caused by freezing air temperatures. Saiga antelopes with small hooves were abundant and they could not have negotiated permafrost. Burrowing animal fossils (from badgers and ferrets) also indicate there was initially no permafrost. There were also beavers which could likely not have been able to live with permafrost. The former extensive grasslands are called the mammoth steppe.
_RISING SEA LEVEL STRANDED MAMMOTHS ON ISLANDS. Sea level dropped as snow and ice piled up on land. The whole Bering shelf of the Arctic Ocean was exposed for hundreds of miles. Fossils are found on the shelf and on some Arctic islands hundreds of miles from the present coast. A short Ice Age of 700 years could have been long enough to account for 50 million mammoths in Siberia. Elephant populations can double in ten years, so mammoths which were similar would have reached 50 million in just 3 centuries. Great numbers of mammoth bones and tusks are found on the New Siberian Islands and other Arctic islands. The continental shelf extends about 300 miles from northern Siberia. During the Ice Age, when sea level was low because water was locked up in the ice sheet, what are now islands would have been highlands far out on the former coast. While sea level was low, mammoths would have been able to graze on the abundant plants growing on the continental shelf of Siberia and would have reproduced rapidly. As the ice sheet began to melt, the sea level rose, sometimes catastrophically from rapid melting or the release of large amounts of water from breached lakes, leaving many mammoths stranded on the highlands, which became islands. The islands didn't have enough food [or fresh water?] for so many mammoths, so they soon starved to death. Mammoth bones and tusks litter the islands and are also found on the continental shelf that's now inundated.
[The Ivory Islands
https://steemit.com/velikovsky/@harlotscurse/the-ivory-islands
_Having delved into the muck deposits of Alaska in the opening section of Earth in Upheaval, Velikovsky turns his attention in the same chapter to Siberia and the islands of the East Siberian Sea. For centuries this sparsely populated region has been a major source of ivory. Although the mammoth has been extinct for millennia, the remains of as many as ten million of these creatures are believed to lie buried in the Siberian permafrost (Lister & Bahn 115).]
_{This image shows mummified trees or driftwood on one of the islands.
https://steemitimages.com/640x0/http://i.imgur.com/RMBfLxv.png
_This shows the locations of mammoth fossils and their former territory, but the dates are exaggerated, though the last date is close to correct.
_LETHAL COLD DUST STORMS. Late in the Ice Age, melting fresh water floated on sea water and started freezing making sea ice in the Arctic. As the north became colder and drier, the temperature differences between the arctic and tropics drove strong dry storms with strong winds that picked up a lot of dust. The dust is silt, called loess, deposited in many parts of the northern hemisphere, like in central U.S., Europe, Siberia, Alaska, China. This helped cause many animal extinctions in the late Ice Age. Most of the extinct animals were buried in the wind-blown silt. What likely happened is that the strong stormy winds buried animals quickly. The permafrost was getting deeper as the cold increased. As dust was blowing over animals the permafrost caused it to freeze and to preserve the carcasses. Some of the dust storms could have been very severe, maybe even worse than the dust storms from the 1930s dust bowl, which covered up fences, machinery, and even buildings like barns. As mammoths were eating what they could find, as dust began to blow, they would turn their backs to the wind. The air would be cold and the dust would reduce visibility to zero, so they would not see where to go, so they would stand still. But the dust would quickly pile up over their back legs and then their front legs. [Maybe they would stand still too long because the pile of dust helped to block the wind to reduce the wind chill, so they would feel warmer by not moving much.] The dust would pile up like snow behind a snow fence and would pack hard like snow in a blizzard. They would then have difficulty trying to move to get unstuck. As the dust entombed the animals, they would breathe in too much dust and suffocate and they would stay standing because of the frozen dust holding them up. Some of their legs would have broken by trying to get unstuck from the loess. The loess would have soon become frozen and part of the permafrost. Permafrost can fault and shift several feet or more, especially on slopes, so broken pelvis and rib bones could have been caused by such shifting. The partial preservation of vegetation in the stomachs of some mammoths is not unusual. Similar preservation has occurred in other mastodons in bogs in the Northeast U.S., which would not have flash-frozen. Elephant digestion is like that of horses. It occurs in the intestine instead of in the stomach. So mammoths were likely similar. Temperatures could have fallen to about 50 degrees below zero pretty quickly, which would have been sufficient to preserve the stomach contents and some mammoth soft tissues.
_MEGAFAUNA TUNNELS FROM AFTER PANGAEA BREAKUP & GREAT FLOOD. A recent video, called "Mystery of the Erdstall Tunnels Solved (Thousands of Ancient Subterranean Passages Beneath Europe), at
shows that the large mammals called megafauna dug out many tunnels in Europe. At the 13 minute mark it says they lived before the Pangaea breakup when the climate was warm, but the present video is pretty convincing that the climate remained warm for about the first two thirds of the Ice Age.
_A good site about the Pangaea Breakup is http://newgeology.us/
_TIMELINE. The author thinks the Ice Age was caused by the conditions that were caused by events during the Great Flood. He thinks the volcanism and possibly meteor impacts and the Pangaea supercontinent breakup that occurred during the Flood warmed the oceans to about 30 degrees Celsius or 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Dust and smoke shaded the northern latitudes and caused cooling of the northernmost landmasses, except around the Arctic Ocean.
_See: Ocean Temperature info and map at:
https://icp.giss.nasa.gov/research/ppa/1997/oceanchars/lev_t.gif
https://icp.giss.nasa.gov/research/ppa/1997/oceanchars/temperature.html
_This shows that, from 50 degrees north to the north pole and 50 degrees south to the south pole (the COLD zone), ocean surface temperatures are below 10 degrees Celsius, or 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Between 50 north and 50 south (the WARM zone) the surface temperatures are above 10 Celsius or above 50 Fahrenheit.
_This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ocean_water says "Deep ocean water makes up about 90% of the volume of the oceans. Deep ocean water has a very uniform temperature, around 0 to 3°C".
_See also: https://icp.giss.nasa.gov/research/ppa/1997/oceanchars/lev_t_zon.gif
_Here's a suggested timeline.
0 year: 5,300 BC: GREAT FLOOD & PANGAEA BREAKUP
100 years: 5,200 BC: 85°F IN ARCTIC OCEAN. ICE AGE BEGINNING (Rockies, Andes, Alps, Himalayas, Greenland & Antarctica glaciate)
200 years: 5,100 BC: 75°. SEA LEVEL DROP (Arctic continental shelf becomes exposed; much of Canada glaciates)
300 years: 5,000 BC: 65°. MEGAFAUNA ETC, FORESTS, GRASSLANDS THRIVE (in northern Europe, Siberia, deserts etc)
400 years: 4,900 BC: 55°. CANADIAN CORRIDOR CLOSES, LOWEST SEA LEVEL IS REACHED, CATASTROPHIC MELTING BEGINS
500 years: 4,800 BC: 45°. SEA LEVEL RISES RAPIDLY, MAMMOTHS ARE STRANDED ON ISLANDS & STARVE
600 years: 4,700 BC: 35°. ARCTIC OCEAN FREEZES, MEGAFAUNA FREEZE IN PERMAFROST & ICE & DUST STORMS
700 years: 4,600 BC: 30°. ICE SHEET MELTS
_REMAINING QUESTIONS.
1. When did the Younger Dryas event occur? I think it occurred when the ice sheet began to melt severely.
2. How did plants and animals survive in the Arctic Circle during 6 months of darkness? If the Arctic Ocean was warm for a few centuries, maybe trees could grow for 6 months, then go dormant for 6 months. I'll try to see what Cardona says again.
3. How did the permafrost get so deep in part of Siberia? It may have been caused by a large comet impact that released some form of nitrogen during the Younger Dryas impacts event, as nitrogen can cause rapid severe freezing.