Where
Does the Ice Age Fit?
by Michael Oard
November 22, 2007
If you ask a
youngster the question, “Was there really an ice age?” they might say rather
quickly that there was. Then they may tell you that there were two of them. Of
course, if you listen much longer, they will tell you that they saw both of
those movies in the theater.
The ice age is a
popular topic that is often discussed in school, at home, or in Hollywood.
Sadly, most people hear the secular/uniformitarian view and don’t look at this
subject from a biblical perspective. This is where it gets interesting, though.
The secular view has no good mechanism to cause a single ice age, let alone the
many they propose. But the Bible does have a mechanism. Let’s
take a closer look.
Before I get too
deep, let me define a few words you’ll need to know to help clarify this
chapter:
Figures 1 and 2. The extent of
the Ice Age over North America and Eurasia.
Glacier: a large mass of ice that has
accumulated from snow over the years and is slowly moving from a higher place.
Moraines: stones, boulders, and debris that
have been carried and dropped by a glacier.
Uniformitarianism: the belief that rates today are
the same as they were in the past, without the possibility of major catastrophes
like worldwide floods.
Interglacial: a short period of warming between
glacier growth/movement that caused glaciers to melt away.
Ice
cores: cores of ice
that have been drilled down into a glacier.
Ice
Age: when seen in
capital letters, refers to the biblical post-Flood Ice Age.
An ice age is defined
as a time of extensive glacial activity in which substantially more of the land
is covered by ice. During the Ice Age that ended several thousand years ago, 30
percent of the land surface of the earth was covered by ice (Figures 1 and 2).
In North America an ice sheet covered almost all of Canada and the northern
United States.
We know the extent of
the Ice Age in the recent past because similar features, as observed around
glaciers today, are also found in formerly glaciated areas, such as lateral and
terminal moraines. A lateral moraine is a mound of rocks of
all sizes deposited on the side of a moving glacier, while a terminal,
or end, moraine is a mound of rocks bulldozed in
front of the glacier.
Figure 3. Horseshoe-shaped
lateral and end moraines plowed up by a glacier moving out of a valley in the
northern Wallowa Mountains of northeast Oregon. Beautiful Wallowa Lake fills the
depression within the moraines.
Figure 3 shows a
horseshoe-shaped moraine from a glacier that spread out from a valley in the
Wallowa Mountains of northeast Oregon. The two lateral moraines are 600 feet
(183 m) high, while the end moraine is 100 feet (30 m) high, enclosing
beautiful Wallowa Lake. Scratched bedrock and boulders are telltale signs of
previous glaciation (Figures 4 and 5), which are similar to such features found
around glaciers today (Figures 6 and 7).
Figures 4 and 5. Striated bedrock
and boulders from an ice cap in the northern Rocky Mountains that spread
through the Sun River Canyon out onto the high plains, west of Great Falls,
Montana.
Figures 6 and 7. Scratched
bedrock and boulder from the Athabasca Glacier in the Canadian Rocky Mountains.
Secular/Uniformitarian Belief
Figure 8. Display of four ice
ages at the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum at Price, Utah, taken in
2006.
Secular/uniformitarian
scientists used to believe that there were four ice ages during the past few
million years. However, the idea of four ice ages was rejected in the 1970s in
favor of thirty or more ice ages separated by interglacials.1 Such
a switch was forced by a paradigm change in glaciology toward belief in the
astronomical model of the ice ages (or “Milankovitch mechanism,” as it is
called). The idea of four ice ages still lingers in public museum displays,
though (Figure 8).
The astronomical
model postulates regularly repeating ice ages caused by the changing orbital
geometry of the earth. Secular glaciologists believe that over the past 800,000
years there were, allegedly, eight ice ages, each lasting about 100,000 years.2 The
glacial phase supposedly dominated for 90,000 years, while the interglacial
phase lasted only 10,000 years. Accordingly, the story continues that beyond
800,000 years, the ice ages are believed to have cycled every 40,000 years or
so.
The
secular/uniformitarian model now holds that the Antarctic Ice Sheet developed
around 40 million years ago and reached general equilibrium about 15 million
years ago.3 The
Greenland Ice Sheet, they say, is younger, having developed only a few million
years ago.
Uniformitarian
scientists further believe four “ancient ice ages” occurred during geological
time (Table 1). These ice ages supposedly occurred hundreds of millions to
several billion years ago, with each ice age lasting tens to hundreds of
millions of years. Ancient ice ages are deduced from features in the rock that
seem to indicate glaciation.
|
Geological Period
|
Secular Approximate Age Range
(million years ago)
|
|
Late Paleozoic
|
256–338
|
|
Late Ordovician
|
429–445
|
|
Late Proterozoic
|
520–950
|
|
Early Proterozoic
|
2200–2400
|
|
Table 1. The four main “ancient
ice ages” within the uniformitarian paradigm and their inferred age range in
millions of years before the present. The age ranges for the earliest “ice
ages” are admittedly rough estimates.4
|
|
Severe Difficulties with
Secular/Uniformitarian Beliefs
Secular/uniformitarian
scientists have great difficulty explaining any recent ice ages based on rates
they observe today. They have proposed dozens of hypotheses, but all have
serious flaws. One problem is that the summer temperatures in the northern United
States would have to cool more than 50°F (28°C) accompanied by a huge increase
in snow. What would trigger or sustain such a dramatic climate change that
would persist for thousands of years? David Alt of the University of Montana in
Missoula recently admitted, “Although theories abound, no one really knows what
causes ice ages.”5
Ancient ice ages have
been somewhat controversial over the years, but recently some uniformitarian
scientists have come out with the shocking belief that some Proterozoic ice
ages were global.6 This
belief is based on paleomagnetic data that supposedly shows certain rocks,
believed to be from ancient ice ages, were marine and equatorial. Because of
the reflection of sunlight from a white surface, it is likely that a glaciated
earth would never melt. However, advocates of “snowball earth” state not only
that such a glaciation completely melted but also that temperatures following
glaciation ended up much warmer than today. Such a “freeze-fry” hypothesis
indicates that the concept of ancient ice ages is unsound.
Did the Flood Trigger the Ice
Age?
If uniformitarian
scientists have severe difficulties accounting for ice ages, how would creationists
explain an ice age or multiple ice ages? Let’s start with the recent ice age.
When attempting to
account for ice ages, the uniformitarian scientists do not consider one key
element—the Genesis Flood. What if there truly were a
worldwide Flood? How would it have affected the climate? A worldwide Flood
would have caused major changes in the earth’s crust, as well as earth
movements and tremendous volcanism. It would have also greatly disturbed the
climate.
A shroud of volcanic
dust and aerosols (very small particles) would have been trapped in the
stratosphere for several years following the Flood. These volcanic effluents
would have then reflected some of the sunlight back to space and caused cooler
summers, mainly over large landmasses of the mid and high latitudes. Volcanoes
would have also been active during the Ice Age and gradually declined as the
earth settled down. Abundant evidence shows substantial Ice Age volcanism,
which would have replenished the dust and aerosols in the stratosphere.7 The
Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets also show abundant volcanic particles and
acids in the Ice Age portion of the ice cores.8
An ice age also
requires huge amounts of precipitation. The Genesis account records the “fountains
of the great deep” bursting forth during the Flood. Crustal movements would
have released hot water from the earth’s crust along with volcanism and large
underwater lava flows, which would have added heat to the ocean. Earth movement
and rapid Flood currents would have then mixed the warm water, so that after
the Flood the oceans would be warm from pole to pole. There would be no sea
ice. A warm ocean would have had much higher evaporation than the present cool
ocean surface. Most of this evaporation would have occurred at mid and high
latitudes, close to the developing ice sheets, dropping the moisture on the
cold continent. This is a recipe for powerful and continuous snowstorms that
can be estimated using basic meteorology.9 Therefore,
to cause an ice age, rare conditions are required—warm oceans for high
precipitation, and cool summers for lack of melting the snow. Only then can it
accumulate into an ice sheet.
The principles of
atmospheric science can also estimate areas of high oceanic evaporation, the
eventual depth of the ice, and even the timing of the Ice Age. Numerical
simulations of precipitation in the polar regions using conventional climate
models with warm sea surface temperatures have demonstrated that ice sheets
thousands of feet thick could have accumulated in less than 500 years.10
A Rapid Ice Age
Most creationists
agree that there was one major Ice Age following the Flood. The timing of the
Ice Age is quite significant, since uniformitarians claim that each ice age
over the past 800,000 years lasted about 100,000 years. To estimate the time
for a post-Flood Ice Age, we need to know how long the volcanism lasted and the
cooling time of the oceans. Once these two mechanisms for the Ice Age wane, the
ice sheets will reach a maximum and then begin to melt. So, an estimate of the
time for the Ice Age can be worked out based on the available moisture for snow
and the cooling time of the ocean (the primary mechanism) in a cool post-Flood
climate.
I used budget
equations for the cooling of the ocean and atmosphere, which are simply based
on heat inputs minus heat outputs—the difference causing the change in
temperatures. Since there is no way to be precise, I used minimums and maximums
for the variables in the equations in order to bracket the time. The best
estimate is about 500 years after the Flood to reach glacial maximum with an
average ice and snow depth of about 2,300 feet (700 m) in the Northern
Hemisphere and 4,000 feet (1,220 m) on Antarctica.11
Once the conditions
for the Ice Age ended, those ice sheets in unfavorable areas melted rapidly.
Antarctica and Greenland, possessing a favorable latitude and altitude, would
continue to grow during deglaciation and afterward. To calculate the melting
rate for the ice sheets over North America and Eurasia, I used the energy
balance over a snow cover, which gives a faster rate than the uniformitarians
propose based on their models.
An energy balance
equation is a straightforward and more physical method of calculating the melt
rate. Using maximum and minimum values for the variable in the melt equation, I
obtained a best estimate of the average melt rate along the periphery (a
400-mile [645-km] long strip) of the ice sheet in North America at about 33
feet/year (10 m/year). Such a melting rate compares favorably with current melt
rates for the melting zones of Alaskan, Icelandic, and Norwegian glaciers
today. At this rate, the periphery of the ice sheets melts in less than 100
years. Interior areas of ice sheets would melt more slowly, but the ice would
be gone in about 200 years. The ice sheets melt so fast, catastrophic flooding
would be expected, such as with the bursting of glacial Lake Missoula described
later in this chapter.
Therefore, the total
length of time for a post-Flood Ice Age is about 700 years. It was indeed a
rapid Ice Age. This is an example of bringing back the Flood into earth
history. As a result, processes that seem too slow at today’s rates were much
faster in the past. The Flood was never disproved; it was arbitrarily rejected in
the 1700s and 1800s by secular intellectuals in favor of slow processes over
millions of years.
How Many Ice Ages?
Still, there is the
claim of many ice ages. Most formerly glaciated areas show evidence for only
one ice age, and a substantial amount of information indicates only one ice
age.12 The
idea of multiple ice ages is essentially a uniformitarian assumption.
Today this idea is strongly based on oxygen isotope ratios from seafloor
sediments. The paleothermometers developed from these data assume highly
questionable statistical comparisons between peaks and valleys in temperature,
which are claimed to correspond to orbital changes in the heating of the earth.
In a provocative paper concluding that only one ice sheet covered southern and
central Alberta late in the uniformitarian timescale, Robert Young and others
stated: “Glacial reconstructions commonly assume a multiple-glaciation
hypothesis in all areas that contain a till cover.”13
Areas that appear to
have evidence of more than one ice age can be reinterpreted to be the deposits
from one ice sheet that advanced and retreated over a short period. The more
modern understanding of glacial activity indicates that ice sheets are very dynamic.
We do not need 100,000 years for each ice age or 2.5 million years for multiple
ice ages.
One of the key
assumptions in the multiple glaciation hypothesis is the astronomical model of
ice ages. This mechanism is based on cyclical past changes in the geometry of
the earth’s orbit. Uniformitarian scientists believe that a decrease in solar
radiation at about 60° N in summer, resulting from orbital changes, causes
repeating ice ages, either every 100,000 years or every 40,000 years. By
matching wiggles in variables taken from deep-sea cores, uniformitarian
scientists believe they have proven the astronomical mechanism of multiple ice
ages.14 There
are many problems with this model and relating deep-sea cores to it; mainly,
the decrease in sunshine is too small.15 Didier
Paillard stated,
Nevertheless, several problems in
classical astronomical theory of paleoclimate have indeed been identified: (1)
The main cyclicity in the paleoclimate record is close to 100,000 years, but
there is [sic] no significant orbitally induced changes in the radiative
[sunshine] forcing of the Earth in this frequency range (the “100-kyr
Problem”).16
Although the main
cycle in the astronomical model is 100,000 years, the change in sunshine at
high northern latitudes is insignificant for such a dramatic change as an ice
age.
Is the Ice Age Biblical?
Since the Flood
offers a viable explanation for the Ice Age, one could expect that the Ice Age
would be mentioned in the Bible. It is possible that the book of Job, written
about 500 years or so after the Flood, may include a reference to the Ice Age
in Job 38:29–30, which
says, “From whose womb comes the ice? And the frost of heaven, who gives it
birth? The waters harden like stone, and the surface of the deep is frozen.”
However, Job could have observed frost and lake ice during winter in Palestine,
especially if temperatures were colder because of the Ice Age. The reason the
Ice Age is not directly discussed in the Bible is probably because the
Scandinavian ice sheet and mountain ice caps were farther north than the region
where the Bible was written. Only an increase in the snow coverage of Mt.
Hermon and possibly more frequent snowfalls on the high areas of the Middle
East would have been evident to those living in Palestine.
How Are “Ancient Ice Ages”
Explained?
The evidence for
“ancient ice ages” is found in the hard rocks; these deposits are not on the
surface like the deposits from the post-Flood Ice Age. There are substantial
difficulties in interpreting these rocks as from ancient ice ages.17 An
alternative mechanism can easily explain these deposits within a biblical
framework. This mechanism is gigantic submarine landslides that
occurred during the Genesis Flood.
The Mystery of the Woolly
Mammoths
Millions of woolly mammoth bones, tusks, and a few
carcasses have been found frozen in the surface sediments of Siberia, Alaska,
and the Yukon Territory of Canada—a major mystery of uniformitarian paleoclimate.
The woolly mammoths were part of a Northern Hemisphere community of animals
that lived and died during the post-Flood Ice Age.18 Woolly
mammoths probably died after the Flood because there are thousands of carcasses
scattered across Alaska and Siberia resting above Flood deposits. And there
must have been sufficient time for the mammoths to have repopulated these
regions after the Flood. The post-Flood Ice Age provides an explanation for the
mystery of the woolly mammoths, as well as many other Ice Age mysteries.
Figure 9. Large dust drift to the
top of a house during the dust bowl era in the Midwest.
The mammoths spread
into these northern areas during early and middle Ice Age time because summers
were cooler and winters warmer. The areas were unglaciated (just the mountains
glaciated) and a rich grassland. However, late in the Ice Age, winter
temperatures turned colder and the climate drier with strong wind storms. The
mammoths died by the millions and were buried by dust, which later froze,
preserving the mammoths. Severe dust storms that produce tall dust drifts
(Figure 9) can also explain a number of the secondary mysteries, such as some
carcasses that show evidence of suffocation in a generally standing position,
and how they become entombed into rock-hard permafrost (for a more complete
treatment of this subject, please see my book, Frozen in Time).
Is Glacial Lake Missoula Related
to the Ice Age?
Figure 10. Map of ice sheet and
glacial Lake Missoula (drawn by Mark Wolfe)
At the peak of the
Ice Age, a finger of the ice sheet in western Canada and the northwest United
States filled up the valleys of northern Idaho. A huge lake 2,000 feet (610 m)
deep was formed in the valleys of western Montana. This was glacial Lake Missoula
(Figure 10). In the course of time, the lake burst and emptied in a few days,
causing an immense flood several hundred feet deep that carved out canyons and
produced many flood features from eastern Washington into northwest Oregon
(Figure 11).
This flood can help
us understand the global Flood. Interestingly, the Lake Missoula flood was
rejected for 40 years despite tremendous evidence because of the anti-biblical
bias in historical science.19
Now this flood is not
only accepted, but uniformitarian scientists now believe many more of them
occurred. They postulate 40 to 100 at the peak of their last ice age, with
perhaps hundreds more from previous ice ages. However, the evidence is
substantial that there was only one gigantic Lake Missoula flood, with possibly
several minor floods afterward.20
Figure 11. The Potholes, remnants
of a 400-foot (120 m) high waterfall. The lakes at the bottom are remnant
plunge pools.
What about Ice Cores?
Uniformitarian
scientists claim to be able to count annual layers in the Greenland ice sheet
to determine its age, in the same way people can count tree rings. In doing so,
they arrive at 110,000 years near the bottom of the Greenland ice sheet.
Similar claims for a much greater age are made for the Antarctica ice sheet.
These claims are equivocal and are essentially based on the uniformitarian
belief that the ice sheets are millions of years old. The data from ice cores
can be better explained within the post-Flood Ice Age model, which dramatically
reduces the calculated age to well within the biblical limit.21
Conclusion
Although a major
mystery of uniformitarian history, the Ice Age is readily explained by the
climatic consequences of the Genesis Flood—it was a short Ice Age of about 700
years, and there was only one Ice Age.22 We
do not need the hundred thousand years for one ice age, or the few million
years for multiple ice ages, as claimed by uniformitarian scientists.
Even their claim of
ancient ice ages in the hard rocks can be accounted for by gigantic submarine
landslides during the Flood. The post-Flood rapid Ice Age can also account for
a number of major mysteries and other interesting phenomena that occurred
during the Ice Age, such as the Lake Missoula flood and the life and death of
the woolly mammoths in Siberia and elsewhere. When we stick to the Genesis
account of the Flood and the short scriptural timescale, major
secular/uniformitarian mysteries are readily explained.23
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Footnotes
2. D. Paillard, Glacial cycles: toward a new paradigm, Reviews
of Geophysics, 39(3):325–346, 2001. Back
3. M.J. Oard, The Frozen Record: Examining the
Ice Core History of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets, Institute for
Creation Research, El Cajon, California, 2005, 31–34.Back
4. J.C. Crowell, Pre-Mesozoic Ice Ages: Their
Bearing on Understanding the Climate System, Geological Society of America
Memoir 192, Boulder, Colorado, 1999, 3. Back
5. D. Alt, Glacial Lake Missoula and its
Humongous Floods, Mountain Press Publishing Company, Missoula, Montana,
2001, 180. Back
6. M.J. Oard, Another tropical ice age? Journal
of Creation 11(3):259–261, 1997; M.J. Oard, Snowball Earth—a
problem for the supposed origin of multicellular animals, Journal ofCreation 16(1):6–9,
2002. Back
7. M.J. Oard, An Ice Age Caused by the Genesis
Flood, Institute for Creation Research, El Cajon, California, 1990, 33–38. Back
10. L. Vardiman, Climates before and after the
Genesis Flood: numerical models and their implications, Institute for
Creation Research, El Cajon, California, 2001. Back
13. R.R. Young et. al., A single, late Wisconsin,
Laurentide glaciation, Edmonton area and southwestern Alberta, Geology 22:683–686,
1994. Back
14. J.D. Hays, J. Imbrie, and N.J. Shackleton,
Variations in the earth’s orbit: pacemaker of the ice ages, Science 194:1121–1132,
1976. Back
17. M.J. Oard, Ancient Ice Ages or Gigantic
Submarine Landslides? Creation Research Society Monograph No. 6, Chino
Valley, Arizona, 1997. Back
18. M.J. Oard, Frozen In Time: The Woolly
Mammoths, the Ice Age, and the Bible, Master Books, Green Forest, Arkansas,
2004. Back
19. M.J. Oard, The Missoula Flood Controversy
and the Genesis Flood, Creation Research Society Monograph No. 13, Chino
Valley, AZ, 2004. Back
21. L. Vardiman, Ice cores and the Age of the
Earth, Institute for Creation Research, El Cajon, California, 1993; Oard,
The Frozen Record. Back
22. Oard, An Ice Age Caused by the Genesis
Flood; Oard, Ancient Ice Ages or Gigantic Submarine Landslides? M.J.
Oard and B. Oard, Life in the Great Ice Age, Master Books, Green
Forest, Arkansas, 1993. Back
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