WAS there a 'Great Ice Age', or several ice ages as many scientists claim? There seems little doubt that an Ice Age did occur, but the evidence for more than one is unconvincing, and many of the supposed evidences of earlier ice ages could have been produced either by the action of the great flood of Noah's time, or partial melting during temporary retreats and advances of the ice-sheets during the glacial period. How does the idea of an Ice Age fit into Biblical history, and what was its cause?

EVIDENCE CONVINCING

The vast majority of creation scientists accept that there was an Ice Age, since the evidence seems very convincing. This include drumlins, rounded hills carved by moving icesheets, dropstones, boulders that were carried along by the ice and left behind when it melted, and u-shaped valleys carved out by the glaciers. There are differences of opinion about the timing of the Ice Age, though all would agree that it followed the Flood.

Mainstream scientists have proposed at least 50 theories to explain the cause of the Ice Age, none of which are satisfactory. Can creationists come up with a better explanation? The problem facing all Ice Age theories is how to have severe cold and heavy snowfall at the same time — the snowfall being necessary to form vast ice sheets. Cold air is very dry. Siberia, one of earth's coldest spots, has no icecaps and snowfall is extremely light. To get an Ice Age started there needs to be lots of moisture and massive evaporation. It is a well known fact of physics that evaporation is a cooling process (modern refrigerators work on this principle). We sometimes feel this effect when we come out of the water after a swim. As the water on our body begins to evaporate, we feel cold, and may start to shiver.

Conditions following the flood would have been ideal for the start of an Ice Age. Genesis 8:1 records that at the end of the flood God sent a wind over the earth, which caused the water level to fall. Very warm oceans and rapidly cooling land would have produced extreme atmospheric convection. American meteorologist Michael Oard and fellow-scientist Dr. Larry Vardiman have proposed scientific models for the post-flood Ice Age which are much more satisfactory than all the evolutionary scenarios.¹ The Ice Age could have lasted several hundred years and was probably accompanied by local catastrophes, allowing sedimentation and limited fossilization. Fossil evidence shows that the present polar regions once enjoyed a temperate or even semi-tropical climate. Sudden cooling of parts of Alaska and Siberia — which were ice-free during the Ice Age — may explain the presence of numerous preserved mammoth carcasses.² Oard proposes that in 700 years the temperature of the polar oceans would have cooled from 30°C to today's average of 4°C.³

HEAVY SNOWFALLS

As the winds carried the moisture-laden air from the warm oceans towards the polar regions, the water vapour would have been precipitated as snow. Continuous heavy snowfalls would have packed down into ice sheets as summer temperatures remained too low for melting to occur — the start of the glacial period, during which ice is believed to have accumulated to a maximum depth of 800 metres. In addition, since there would have been much volcanic activity during the Flood and its aftermath, volcanic dust in the atmosphere would have reflected some of the sun's heat back into space, and the cold would have been further accentuated by masses of floating icebergs, deposited into the sea as chunks of ice broke off the advancing glaciers. This process would have continued until the evaporation rate has slowed down and the atmosphere become drier.

BIBLICAL REFERENCES

Is interesting to find references to severe cold, frost, snow and ice in the book of Job, considered by scholars to be the Bible's oldest book. Job is thought to have lived not long after the Tower of Babel incident. Though the ice-sheets did not reach as far as the Middle East, it does seem that frost, snow and ice were known to Job and his contemporaries, even though they do not usually occur in those latitudes today.. (See Job 37:9-10, 38:22-23, and 29-30). Although Job may not have actually seen the ice-sheets, he may well have heard about them from travelers who had been to Europe, and the climate of the Middle East would have been far colder than today.

LAND BRIDGES

During the Ice Age, with so much water locked up in vast ice sheets, sea levels would have been much lower than they today, and 'land bridges' probably linked all the main land masses. The most important link was the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska now divided by the Bering Strait. It is significant that there were no ice sheets covering Siberia and Alaska during the Ice Age, so there was ice-free route for humans and animals to pass from the Euro-Asian land mass to the Americas. A similar land bridge may have existed across the Timor Strait between South-east Asia and Australia. So the Ice Age could have been part of the divine plan for the repopulation of the world after the Flood, allowing humans to fulfill God's original mandate to fill the earth (Genesis 1:28).

DATING THE ICE AGE

Radiometric and fossil dating³ methods put the end of the last Ice Age at 8000 years ago, but there are good reasons to reject the date as too high. Ice Age deposits look much too fresh and uneroded to be that ancient. Also, Michael Oard has measured the erosion rate of the Niagara Falls — which must have started to flow after the retreat of the ice — and shown that they cannot have existed for more than 3000-4000 years.⁴ This fits the Biblical chronology quite reasonably.

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REFERENCES

1. M. J. Oard, An Ice Age Caused by Genesis Flood. Institute for Creation Research Technical Monograph, 1990.
2. L. Vardiman, Ice Cores and the Age of the Earth Institute for Creation Research Technical Monograph, 1993.
3. See Frozen Mammoths, CRT Factsheet No. 12.
4. See The Dating Game, CRT Factsheet No. 49.

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