THE ICE AGE and THE BIBLICAL TIME SCALE

Picture of an Iceberg

adapted from articles by

David Rosevear

Ph.D., C.Chem.

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

The time scale is perhaps the most obvious difference between the evolutionary and Biblical world views. The evolutionary time scale is immense. Evolutionists contend that the universe created itself about fifteen billion years ago and the solar system formed spontaneously some five billion years ago. They also say the first living cell arose by chance some three billion years ago, homo sapiens emerged from primates roughly two million years ago, and the last ice age occurred about twenty thousand years ago.

This scenario stands in marked contrast to the Biblical time scale derived from dates given in Scripture. According to the Bible, the earth, the stars, and all living things - including man - were created by God in six days, probably not more than ten thousand years ago.

The vast evolutionary time scale is needed to allow for the evolution of living forms, though some would say that no length of time is sufficient for an impossibility to occur. The theoretical basis for imputing many millions of years comes from the principle of uniformitarianism, which says things in nature changed in the past at the same steady rate at which they are changing today, unperturbed by any worldwide cataclysms, such as the Flood.

Dating Ice Ages by Uniformitarian Principles

Geologists using an evolutionary framework conclude that there were four main ice ages, each with a number of minor retreats and advances. We know from studying glaciers that large receding masses of ice drop their burden of clay, silt, sand, and boulders in deposits, known as “till.” Successive ice ages should have transported large amounts of material long distances. A problem for the multiple ice age model is that there is little geological evidence for more than one advance of the ice. The lack of good evidence for numerous advances is rationalized by saying that each successive advance removed the tell-tale signs of the previous advance by scraping the bedrock clean, redepositing the old till in entirely new locations; thus, only the latest advance would leave unambiguous evidence behind. But, except for a few very large boulders (“erratics”), most of the material in glacial till deposits does not appear to have been transported far from where it originated.

Moreover, deposits of till are generally of insufficient depth to support the uniformitarian's multiple ice age theory. The average depth of till over much of the north is about thirty metres. Yet scientists have noted that the Sefstrom Glacier in Spitsbergen (Norway) deposited this much till in only ten years. It is possible today's glaciers flow more quickly than did the advancing ice cap, but the uncertainty of the comparison means that present-day glacial deposits are of dubious use in enumerating the ice ages.

Different methods have been tried in attempting to date the ice ages, but each approach has met with serious problems. For instance, it was once thought that slight reductions in the amount of sunlight reaching the northern regions of the globe (caused mainly by minor cyclical changes in the eccentricity of earth's orbit brought about by the gravitational pull of other bodies in the solar system) may have been enough to trigger ice ages. This would mean there must have been a succession of ice ages throughout the history of the earth. But since there is no clear evidence for ice ages occurring prior to the so-called Quaternary geological period, it is unlikely this astronomical factor was the cause of ice ages. Also, it is now believed the temperature variations in this model would have been insufficient to initiate an ice age. Thus, uniformitarians today generally agree that ice ages were, in evolutionary terms, recent events.

There have been attempts to count the number of annual ice layers in present-day glaciers to see if they offered a clue as to the when the ice ages occurred. We know from modern-day glaciers that as more snow is added on top and the ice builds up, the accumulating weight of ice squeezes out entrained air and the ice becomes compacted, especially at lower levels. The layers of an ice core drilled in Greenland were some 35 centimetres (14 inches) thick near the surface, but less than 5 centimetres (2 inches) thick at a depth of one thousand metres (about 3,280 feet down).

Where annual precipitation is high, such as in Greenland, it has been possible to count snowfall layers and correlate them with the fallout from volcanic eruptions known to have occurred between A.D. 553 and 1972. However, these historical markers are less and less distinct the further down one goes. Beyond a few thousand years ago, there are no reliable historical markers to cross-check the dates obtained from the analyses of ice layers. The uncertainties associated with identifying annual layering deep in glacial ice, therefore, make it difficult to gauge the passage of time in the remote past.

In Antarctica, where only a couple of centimetres of snow falls each year, the layers are so thin at lower levels that they tend to flow into one another. Nevertheless, the age of the lowest levels of Antarctic ice (below 4,000 m, or 2.5 mi.) has been estimated to be well over 100,000 years old. However, this assumes that precipitation rates were the same during the ice age as they are today - something that may not be true.

The difficulties in positively dating existing ice sheets notwithstanding, it is possible to make an educated guess at the age of the Greenland ice sheet. Less than fifty years ago, eight U.S. military planes came down over Greenland. Today, they lie buried under about 76 metres (250 feet) of ice in an ice cap with an overall thickness of some 1,220 metres (4,000 feet). If one assumes the average thickness of annual ice layers to be roughly the mean between the annual layer thickness at the top and at the bottom of the ice mass (about 20 cm, or 8 in.), then one arrives at a figure of just 6,000 years for the age of the glacier.

A Biblical Framework

In the book of Genesis, we are told that on the second day of the Creation week God divided the waters above the “expanse” (the biosphere?) from the waters below. The waters below were gathered together into one place and called seas. We are also told that the antediluvian world had not yet experienced rainfall: and mist went up to water the ground. If we suppose that about half of today's oceanic water was once suspended in the atmosphere as a vapour canopy of superheated steam, it would have produced a greenhouse effect. Light from the sun would have been allowed through the paper shell, but heat radiated back from the earth would have been trapped in the atmosphere. This means the early earth could have had a uniformly warm, humid atmosphere, without the extremes of polar and equatorial climates that we know today. Interestingly, this accords with the fossil record of once ubiquitous giant and lush vegetation.

Also according to Genesis, the waters of the Flood falling from the heavens for forty days and nights were augmented by waters issuing from the “fountains of the deep.” The entire surface of the earth is reported to have been inundated for just over a year. The earth, therefore, must have been ravaged by massive erosion and volcanic activity before the cataclysm ended and land reappeared.

Following the Flood, the seas would have been warm from extensive submarine volcanism. Strong oceanic currents and hurricane force winds would have been set up by temperature differentials in the water and in the air. Indeed, it is at this point in Scripture that wind is spoken of for the first time. These disturbances would probably have persisted until the oceans had cooled somewhat.

For those who accept the Biblical account, it is probable that most of the ice of the ice “age” was laid down during the years immediately following the Flood. The land would have been cooled by strong winds, especially at the poles and at higher elevations. This cooling would have been accentuated by the immense clouds of volcanic dust that would have hung in the upper atmosphere. Snow would have begun falling. The accumulation of snow on high ground and at the poles would have lessened the absorption of solar rays, accelerating the cooling process. It possible that the deposits of till which cause evolutionists to speculate about multiple ice ages could have been the result of short-term retreats around the margins of the ice caps caused by the strong winds set up after the Flood. Creationists, therefore, treat uniformitarian time estimates based on ice thicknesses with caution. What are often assumed to be annual ice layers at the lowest levels of the ice caps might in fact be the deposits of individual snow storms following the Flood.

As the seas cooled down and the wind moderated, the amount of precipitation - especially at the perimeter of the ice - would have abated. The ice sheets would have begun to retreat as the rate at which they were melting overtook the rate at which snow was accumulating. The rapid decline in rainfall would have caused much of the vegetation that it sustained to die off. Large herbivores would have perished in great numbers due to an inadequate supply of food, their plight perhaps accentuated by a lack of water, too.

Men and the Ice Age

The book of John has more references to snow, ice, cold, and whirlwind than any other book of Scripture. Job lived about three hundred years after the Flood. In Job 24:19 we read, “Drought and heat consume the snow waters.” Could he have been witnessing the retreat of a ice sheet in the land of Uz?

In northern Europe, so-called Neanderthal man suffered from arthritis and rickets, medical conditions that enlarged his limb joints. He probably lived during the ice age, when a lack of sunshine would have produced endemic rickets due to a vitamin D deficiency. Far from being the grunting ape-man usually depicted, he had a brain larger than the average brain size of present-day man. His thick eyebrow ridges suggest only that he survived on a diet of coarse food requiring large facial muscles for chewing.

In contrast, Cro-Magnon man, farther south, was of upright stature and fine physique. Like his northern Neanderthal cousins, his brain was larger than those of many men today. The more congenial climate in his region would have produced foods that required less chewing; hence, the absence in Cro-Magnon man of eyebrow ridges to support the muscles for chewing.

In September, 1991, after an unusually warm summer season, the mummified body of a man was revealed by the melting ice high in the Alps on the Italian-Austrian border. For some 4,000 years he had lain buried under ice in a depression between two rock ridges at the head of a glacier. The glacier had flowed over his wind-dried body. The fact that his body had been mummified shows that weather conditions must have been very dry when he died, quite unlike the local weather today. His body had not been attacked by animals or insects, again not what one would expect to see assuming local environmental conditions have remained much the same for thousands of years. His teeth were very worn, probably due to a diet of coarse grain. His remaining provisions consisted of some cereal grains and a sloe berry.

Other items found in his possession included: a boot with a leather sole and upper, leather patchwork clothing, a cape of made of grass, and a bucket-shaped container of birch bark. He also carried a knife with a wooden handle and a crude flint blade, rope, a leather quiver with several arrows, a bow, and an axe with a copper head, similar in shape to those found in Bronze Age settlements.

At Carbon-14 analysis indicated the body was 5,300 years old, placing it in the Neolithic period. But this age may be somewhat overstated. A pre-Flood water vapour canopy would have inhibited the formation of Carbon-14 in the upper atmosphere.

Picture of the Iceman

It would have taken a long time for the formation and decay of Carbon-14 to have reached equilibrium after Flood, and equilibrium is an assumption of conventional radiometric dating methodology. Consequently, the remains of organic matter deposited shortly after the Flood could be expected to produce radiocarbon dates hundreds of years older than their true age.

We learn from the Bible that brass and iron were known to Tubal-cain, who lived prior to the Flood. But following the dispersion from the Tower of Babel, after the Flood, families would have wandered and been unable to establish settlements or engage in agriculture or mining for the duration of their migration. Instead of the metal implements used by their ancestors, they would have been forced to use simple stone tools. Copper is relatively easy to smelt, and so tools of copper would likely have come into use before those of harder metals, such as bronze (an alloy with tin). Uniformitarian dating methods suggest there is a gap of 600 years between the start of the Copper Age and the beginning of the Bronze, but this gap may be overstated, given the evidence of post-Flood artifacts.

Conclusion

C.K. Chesterton said that men will believe anything so long as it is not written in the Bible. A series of lengthy ice ages stretching back hundreds of thousands of years is required by the uniformitarian approach to archaeology. But uniformitarian principles are confounded by catastrophic events that are uniquely gigantic in scale, such as the Flood and the ice age that likely followed. An ice age of a few hundred years following a worldwide Flood approximately 4,300 years ago fits very comfortably with known scientific and historical facts.

Credits