POSSIBLE FLOOD & ICE AGE MECHANISM

adapted from articles by

Grand A. Fisher

M.Ed.

Used with the kind permission of the Creation Science Movement, 50 Brecon Avenue, Cosham, Portsmouth, England, P06 2AW.

Since the days of Hutton and Lyell, it has been an axiom of historical geology that “the present is the key to the past.” Time scales for the past are inferred by extrapolating present-day rates of erosion and deposition, thereby giving the billions of years required by evolution theory to shape the Earth's physical features. Uniformitarian-based evolution science generally discounts the cataclysmic world-wide flood of several thousand years ago spoken of in the Bible and in a number of secular histories, even though it is entirely possible that a global flood could have been responsible for creating much of the geological column. Evidence from latter day catastrophes, such as the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, has shown that massive deposition and erosion can occur very quickly, and the phenomenon of rapid and massive sedimentation in water has been successfully modeled in laboratory experiments (Berthault, 1986 & 1988).

There is also geological evidence that suggests the Earth experienced at least one natural catastrophe after a world-wide flood. This evidence is sometimes overlooked by creationists, who are inclined to focus on evidence concerning the Flood. Bernard Northrup notes there has been a tendency to ignore the dehydrated dinosaur skeletons found in the windblown sands of so-called Mesozoic deposits, insect and plant fossils imbedded in the volcanic ash, Mesozoic dinosaur fossil beds containing creatures buried in an enormous volcanic ash-fall, as well as dinosaur eggs and skeletons found in a matrix of volcanic ash, muds, and sands borne by air and water.¹ It might be possible to explain a good deal of the upper part of the evolutionist's geological column by appealing to the hypothesis that an ice age followed the Flood, regardless of whether or not the two events were directly related.

To convince non-creationists that Biblical creationism is scientifically tenable, creationists need to propose mechanisms for the Flood and the ice age that are both consistent with Scripture and scientifically sound. This article considers the possibility that celestial bodies passing close to the Earth brought about both the Flood - spoken of in the Bible, but generally rejected by scientists who accept evolution - and the ice age - spoken of by scientists, but only hinted at in the Bible.

Close Encounters

The Bible says the reason for the Flood was that God saw “the wickedness of man was great on the earth” (Genesis 6:5). The physical events that brought the Flood about, we are told, were the fountains of the great deep breaking open and the opening of the windows of heaven, events which inundated the land with an unimaginable quantity of water. God then made the floodwaters depart from the land by causing a wind to pass over the Earth, the ocean basins to recede, and the mountains to grow.

What sort of mechanism might have brought these events about? One possible mechanism God could have used to achieve His purpose might have involved icy, moon-sized, comet-like bodies passing close to Earth. The approach of a large, cometary body could conceivably initiate a catastrophic event like the Flood. Massive crustal disturbances would be induced, possibly of a magnitude sufficient to cause the release of sub-crustal, juvenile water (water appearing at the surface for the first time) into the atmosphere, augmenting existing atmospheric water vapour. One might also expect copious amounts of magma to be released, producing volcanoes and vast lava plateaux, like the Deccan Plateau in India and the Columbia Plateau in North America. A close encounter with a colossal icy body could even result in its breaking up and depositing huge amounts of ice over the surface of the Earth.

Long Ago

Many scientists accept the idea that, in the past, large astral bodies have had close encounters with Earth of the catastrophic kind. Major astronomical events like these are generally placed far back on evolutionary time scale, but it is acknowledged that collisions with somewhat smaller bodies have occurred in more recent times: the impact of the huge meteorite in Tungusta, Siberia (June 30, 1908) is a case in point. Our moon plainly bears the scars of significant meteorite impacts; however, weathering has for the most part obscured similar meteorite strikes here on Earth.

Catastrophic Theory and the Solar System

The Tidal Wave Theory: The idea of a celestial body coming close to Earth in a singular event is decades old. In the 1940s and 1950s schools taught the Tidal Wave theory of solar system origin (see Figure 1). This was a serious attempt to explain why all of the planets rotate anticlockwise on virtually the same plane in a cigar-like configuration, with the largest planets in the centre of the “cigar.” It was postulated that a rogue star had passed close enough to the sun to draw off an immense filament of gas by means of gravitational attraction.

Shooting by too quickly to capture the filament for itself, it was postulated that the filament was given enough momentum around the Sun to form orbiting planets as the gas cooled down. Although this theory has fallen out of favour as an explanation for the origin of the solar system, it has not been rejected because the idea of a large celestial body nearly colliding with Earth is untenable - the near-miss idea remains viable.

The Other Planets: It appears as though something in the past has disturbed the orbits of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. The axis of Uranus is tilted through the 90? to the plane of the ecliptic (Earth is tilted just 23.5?), technically giving it a retrograde (clockwise) axial rotation. Triton, a moon of Neptune, also rotates in a retrograde fashion. And the accentric orbit of Pluto brings it close enough to the sun at perihelion that Neptune becomes the outermost planet for a while. How can these things be?

This is what the New Scientist (June 6, 1979, p.733) had to say: “[T]he suggestion, first made in 1936, [is] that Pluto was originally a satellite of Neptune. Some cataclysmic event in the distant past had ejected Pluto from its orbit about Neptune, [and] simultaneously reversed the motion of Triton.... But what caused Pluto's ejection? Harrington and van Flandern (of the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.) propose that the passage of a massive object through the Neptunian system caused the disruption.... They find that a mass two to five times as heavy as the Earth, passing slowly through the orbits of Neptune's moons, could have resulted in systems [like those of] ... present day Pluto and Neptune... All this proves nothing - but it does indicate what could have happened.” This scenario could have affected Uranus too, causing the planet's axis to assume the 98? tilt we see today.

Icy Satellites and Planetary Rings

The presence of icy moons in the solar system is well accepted. Europa and Ganymede, two of Jupiter's moons, are known to possess a great deal of ice; they may even be made entirely of ice. Pluto's moon, Charon, is mainly ice; and Haley's Comet has been discovered to be nothing more than a dirty snowball. Even the planetary rings of Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto are comprised of ice and dust. The rings are thought to be the fragmentary remains of satellites torn apart by gravitational forces.

The Roche Limit

There is a limit to how close heavenly bodies can approach one another without one of them breaking up due to the stresses induced by the gravitational pull of the other. This is known as the Roche Limit, and it applies to bodies measuring over 200 miles in diameter. Calculations show that when bodies of nearly equal density approach each other, the smaller mass will begin to disintegrate when it comes within a distance of 2.45 times the radius of the larger body.

Most people are aware that the gravitational pull of the Moon is responsible for the ocean tides, but it is less well known that the Moon generates tidal movement in rock, too. In Liverpool (U.K.), the ocean tide averages 28 feet, and there is a six-inch rock tide on a nearby peninsula. If the average distance from the Earth to the Moon shrank from its current 239,000 miles, these tides would increase in magnitude. If the Moon came within its Roche limit (about 11,500 miles), the surface rocks of Earth would be torn apart and huge tidal waves would inundate the land; the crustal tides on the Moon would cause it to disintegrate altogether. Fortunately, the Moon is slowly receding from us, not coming closer. But a satellite of the sun comprised chiefly of ice could get as close to Earth as 9,000 miles before breaking up, and would wreak about the same havoc as the Moon would at a distance of 11,500 miles.

The Flood

The Bible tells us that there were two phenomena associated with the Flood: “the fountains of the great deep burst open” and “the floodgates of the sky were opened,” causing rain to fall for “forty days and forty nights” (Genesis 7:11-12). In other words, there was a sudden release of water trapped beneath the surface of the Earth, and it was augmented by vast amounts of water falling from the sky.

Suppose an icy satellite of the sun entered the Earth-Moon system at an angle shallow enough (see Figure 2) that a portion of its tail melted as it passed through Earth's atmosphere. Water would fall from the sky as if pouring out of a vast celestial bucket. The gravitational pull of the intruder would induce such massive distortions in the Earth's crust that huge quantities of steam and juvenile water would issue from inside the Earth. Torrents of magma would spew onto the surface, producing volcanic domes and lava plateaux (see Figure 3), entombing large numbers of animals and huge quantities of plant life in the process.

Rocks would buckle and form mountains, such as the Caledonian and the Variscan formations (e.g., the Scottish Highlands and Appalachians, respectively), which likely predate the Alps and Rockies. Great tidal waves would repeatedly sweep around the globe, picking up and transporting still more animals and vegetation, plus rock fragments and minerals, redepositing them some distance from their source. The forces involved might even be so great as to tilt the axis of the Earth. This would cause a previously uniform, warm, world-wide climate to be supplanted by one characterized by seasonal weather changes over much of the globe. The rapid draining of water from land surfaces at the end the Flood would carve canyons and valleys out of the soft, unconsolidated sediments laid down during the Flood - the sort of thing witnessed following the eruption at Mount St. Helens, when mud flows caused by melting snow and ice cut huge gashes in the newly formed landscape.

The Ice Dump

Scripture refers to ice when God is chiding Job and his friends: “From whose womb has come the ice? And the frost of heaven, who has given it birth? Water becomes hard like stone, and the surface of the deep is imprisoned [frozen over]” (John 38:29-30, NASB). Although these words alone do not paint the picture of an ice age, the unusual number of references to cold, frost, snow, and ice in the book of Job are suggestive of a particularly cold climate in Job's day. Could it have been the local effect of an ongoing “ice age” to the north?

We have seen how the Flood could have been caused by the approach of an icy satellite. But a comet or comet-like body could also produce a massive ice dump over a large portion of the globe. For ice dump to occur, the approach would have to be within the Roche limit and steep enough to force the intruding icy mass to disintegrate and fall to the Earth (see Figure 4).

Upon becoming electrically charged, cometary fragments would deflect to the poles, where the magnetic forces are weakest and where there is the least resistance to ice particles being pulled to the surface of the Earth by gravity.

An ice dump would catch animals right in the middle of their normal activities, freezing them instantly, as seems to have been the case with a number of mammoths found remarkably well preserved in the northern parts of the globe. As in the Flood scenario, there would be major crustal disturbances. New mountain chains would form under the flight paths of the interloper's larger fragments. These mountains, such as the cordilleras of North and South America (the Rockies and Andes) and the fold mountain belts of Europe and Asia (the Alps and Himalayas), would be a little younger and somewhat higher than those that would have formed in association with the Flood. The forces involved may even have been enough to cause continental fragmentation.

Conclusion

The “close encounter” scenario seems consistent with both Biblical exegesis and scientific principles and observations. It provides a plausible catastrophic mechanism for the Flood, a brief ice age, and perhaps continental separation, as well. The concept also appears to fit with astronomical data concerning the solar system. But it is just one possible mechanism for singular, worldwide upheavals. There may well be other viable creationist explanations for such events, especially those that produced the upper portions of the evolutionist's geological column. Scientists persuaded of the truth of creation need to do more work in investigating possible mechanisms that could account for all of the features of the geological record.

1. Bernard E. Northrup, “Identifying the Noahic Flood in Historical Geology — Part 1,” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, Vol. 1 (Pittsburgh: Creation Science Fellowship Inc., 1990) p. 174.

The drawings in this tract are from Speak Through the Earthquake, Wind, and Fire, Graham A. Fisher, Countyvise Ltd., 1982.