In this lesson, Pastor Dave Capoccia discusses the Ice Age. The Bible never specifically addresses any ice age, but there is evidence of a past ice age all over our world today. How does the Ice Age connect with what the Bible reveals about Noah’s flood? How does a biblically informed model of the flood explain the precise extent of glacial advance, the migration of humanity to all the continents, and the mass extinction of creatures like the woolly mammoth? And how is the biblical explanation of the Ice Age superior to the theories offered by Bible-disbelieving scientists? Pastor Dave considers these questions and more as he seeks to show how a biblical worldview helps us better understand our world and its history.
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we’re going to get started good morning welcome to Sunday school let’s begin with a word of prayer Lord God I pray that you would bless this time and give us greater understanding for understanding your world from a Biblical world view give us confidence in your scriptures and give us awe Lord at who you are and what you’ve done in the past in Jesus name amen well today in our last lesson on the flood we’re actually going to talk about the Ice Age now you may wonder what does the Ice Age have to do with the flood or even the Bible for that matter it’s true the Bible doesn’t talk specifically about the ice age or an ice age but as we’ve seen over the last three or four lessons the Bible clearly does describe a historical worldwide flood and we’re going to see today how the Ice Age and the flood are intimately connected format of today’s class is going to be a little different than usual going to be mostly listening to a lecture from Michael oard Michael oard is a retired meteorologist who has worked with Answers in Genesis since 2001 and the lecture it’s a series of excerpts from a lecture but in the lecture that we’re going to watch Ard articulates why creationist scientists do believe in an ice age and how the Ice Age ties in to The Genesis Flood now I hope you’ve had your coffee this morning or an equivalent to it because as we look at this lecture the information comes kind of fast he also uses oard uses a fair bit of scientific terminology but don’t worry at the end of our listening to the lecture I will streamline and recap the information that award presents understand that the goal of today’s class is not to answer every scientific question related to the Ice Age rather the goal is to give us all a basic understanding of the Ice Age and how it ties into the Bible and we’ll see the ice age to is part of the common history that all of us as humans share also remember that what we’re talking about today is Theory it comes from a fallible interpretation of data fallible meaning not necessarily error free so do not treate do not treat these creationist scientific theories as scripture they are not these theories are not inherent these models of the is age and of the flood they have been revised since they were created and these models will continue to be revised or even exchanged altogether for other models as more scientific discoveries are made that being said these biblically based models are useful for investigating various scientific questions that people have today including why are there ancient Rock paintings of fish in the Sahara Desert how did man and animals get from the Middle East to North America After the flood in Babel and why did animals like the woolly mammoth and the saber-tooth tiger disappear furthermore even though many of us are not scientists we nevertheless continually encounter scientific claims from our media and from our education system today scientists claimed that there were multiple ice ages in our prehistoric past that lasted for thousands of years what are we to make of that we want to be able to skillfully assess such scientific claims and determine whether these claims are empty or well-founded therefore today’s lesson on the ice H should prove useful to you and here is our outline for today’s lesson first we’ll listen to the video presentation second we’ll review the arguments presented by Michael oard in that presentation and then third we’ll briefly compare ard’s arguments with current secular thought regarding the Ice Age but before we go into the video we should actually Define what an ice age is what is an ice age can anyone tell me Magna perod exe a period of extreme cold okay any other answers or guesses a body of water formed together okay body of water Frozen together in one place Mark you’re going to say something I I think it’s when maybe the majority or of the Earth is covered with I majority or much of the Earth is covered with ice I’m I’m glad you gave me these answers because when you hear the term Ice Age it sounds like it’s really dramatic like this is a crazy extreme thing perhaps a completely frozen planet or a blizzard all over the Earth but an Ice Age need not be that drastic actually an ice age is simply a period of time with extensive glaciation that is substantially more land covered by Ice than normal and Ice AG to say that again it’s just a period of time with substantially more land covered by Ice than normal now today there are a few places that you can go where you can see land that is permanently covered by ice places in the Arctic places in the Antarctic so Greenland Antarctica there’s permanent ice there about 12% of the earth’s land mass today is permanently covered by Ice an Ice Age then represents a time where ice coverage is substantially more than 12% so the question is was there an ice age in our past how bad was it can we explain how it happened what EV what evidence is there to support such an explanation this is where we now want to listen to our video so we’re hearing now from retired meteorologist Michael Ard this series of excerpts from one of his lectures it’s about 28 minutes as you listen don’t worry so much about the technical details focus more on the broad Concepts and like I said I will recap the information afterwards all right we are ready to play our video give your attention ice AG well when you examine the surficial sediments the sediments that are on the surface of the Earth in presently glaciated areas you see a number of features now this is the beautiful Athabasca Glacier in the Canadian Rockies that has been receding this sign right there that’s where it was in 1890 and yet it has been receding and when it leaves behind you can examine what an ice does it leaves behind rocks of all sizes within usually sand and silt kind of in a finer grain Matrix it leaves behind inm Marines and lateral Marines inm Marines and lateral Marines are formed when the glacier pushes out material ahead of it and as it’s along the side it’s called a lateral Marine when it’s in the front it’s called a terminal inm Marine speaking of this I can’t help but make a comment on global warming yes all glaciers of the world have been receding or mostly all and yes it is true there has been global warming and I believe it is true that man has been a cause of it but I believe that nature is part of it too because between 1350 and 1850 we had the little ice age where all the glaciers in the world Advanced now the we’re in the opposite fluctuation where they’re receding so I think this is partly due to a little effects of the sunshine and less volcanic ash in the stratosphere why we’re getting some of the global warming there’s a beautiful inm Marine very sharp looking made not too long ago probably made about 18 1990 another feature You observe around glaciated areas is scratch Bedrock as the glacier moves over Bedrock it has rocks in the bottom of it and those rocks on the bottom scratch the Bedrock so it’s typical to see stri stried uh B Bedrock or pavement as they call this also some of the Rocks themselves get scratched and a lot of times they get scratched in different directions here’s a one set going that way and there’s another set going this way like this and it’s probably because the rock turn a little bit in the ice ice is more plastic and malleable so that’s probably why you have striations in different directions on rocks so those are some of the features we see in currently glaciated areas so let’s extend those to Features where it’s claimed to have been glaciated here’s one area where I nearly uh live used to live west of Great Falls Montana near Augusta Montana these this is the Rocky Mountain front the Rocky Mountains were glaciated during the Ice Age and the ice came about 10 miles out on the high plane and formed this inm Marine just typically is what you see at the aabas glacier I’m taking a picture of U of this from this part of the in Marine right here it was breached right in here probably when the glacier melted it breached through the inm Marine right here so that’s why there’s a gap there when you look at the material in the inm Marine it’s very similar to Glaciers you see today it’s rocks of all sizes in a finer grain Matrix surrounding the Rocks typically they call that glacial till also as you go when you go up into the Rocky Mountains you see scratched Bedrock going east in fact there’s an 800t Cliff right along here the glacier came up out of this Valley scratched the Bedrock and went down over an 800t Cliff also you find in um in the Marine that I showed you previously you find rocks that are scratched in several different directions typical what you see in glaciated areas and this is in an area that gets up in the 80s for high temperatures in the summertime also as you tour around the West you see that out of some of the mountain valleys of the western us you see Marines just like you see at um Athabasca Glacier this is probably one of the best marines that I I’ve ever seen before this is the horseshoe shaped lateral inm Marines around a beautiful walawa Lake in Northeast Oregon that about it moved out onto the Enterprise plane in Northeast Oregon about 4,000 ft altitude where it gets probably a high temperature of 90 as the average in July there’s a lateral Marine in Marine and lateral Marine they’re fairly sharp looking indicating that the Ice Age ended not that long ago furthermore a feature like this could not uh form during the flood this feature has to form by other mechanisms and it’s on top of flood sediments so the Ice Age occurred after the flood and here’s this uh another picture of that lateral Marine you can see the trees for scale this lateral Marine is 600 ft tall and here’s uh what you see within the lateral Marine glacial till rocks of all sizes and a finer grain Matrix and you see these uh around the Sierra mountains and Other M Wind River mountains of the western United States also you see these erratic boulders here and there most of them I see are kind of subrounded or rounded I think that a lot of erratics were were transported by water this one is very angular this is the famous okao eratic Southwest of Calgary Alberta this forms a line of artics from Jasper Alberta down into Northern Montana just kind of a line and very angular which means they didn’t roll down there probably they formed they were deposited by icebergs as ice was melting here’s a here’s another famous erratic called The Bell erratic now this erratic is uh now erratic Boulder is is a boulder that rock that doesn’t outcrop in the local area it’s been transported somehow that’s what they mean by an erratic Boulder or exotic Boulder is another name this one is found Southwest of Portland Oregon in the wamit valley it’s uh composed of arite which is a slightly metamorphose shell and the nearest outcrop of that is in northern Idaho and it’s well south of the ice where the I the boundary of the Ice by the way how did it get down there and it’s very angular the only way you can think about it is is an iceberg and how would an iceberg take it down there well when glacial Lake missula broke it spread through Eastern Washington through the Columbia Gorge and spread over Portland Oregon 400t deep and up into the wamed valley so if there was a glacial Lake Missoula and a lake Missoula flood there had to be a a thick ice dam in northern Idaho to block up the the water in the Clark Fork Valley indicating again that the Ice Age was a real event so when you sum it all up this is the big picture right here ice covered practically all of Canada just a little bit in the Yukon Territory was unglaciated it came down in the northern United States to around they claim Northern Missouri and I’m not quite sure of that um I’m that’s a subject to research but it got pretty far south of the Great Lakes and um it covered some of the mountain areas as ice caps but interesting enough in Alaska the Brooks range and Alaska range uh they were glaciated but the lowlands of Alaska were not glaciated and that’s where you find all those woolly mammoths bison and uh horses and lots of animals in ice AG permer Frost in those areas when you go to Europe and Asia this is a General feature where the ice was it covered much of England and and Northern Germany and Poland and clear out in Northwest Siberia now there’s a little question on the boundary right in here and some people think that the ice covered uh the barren Sea north of Norway there so there’s still some controversy over the exact uh distribution of the ice but when you add it all up ice covered 30% of the Continental areas the closest ice to this area would have been up in Pennsylvania can we explain it well I believe we can first of all we can tell from the clues that it’s post flood it’s on the surface of flood sediments and we definitely don’t have it today in the present climate the the ice sheets in Canada are gone so it must have happened in a transitional climate from the flood to the present climate well that means the flood could have caused the ice age well indeed I believe that’s that is the case so let’s see how The Genesis Flood fulfills the requirements for an ice age well the the flood was a giant volcanic tectonic event tectonic is crestal uh Earth movements but uh at the end of the flood you have a huge shroud of volcanic dust and aerosols aerosols are fine particles about a micron in diameter they would be floating on the stratosphere what they do what we know from Modern volcanic eruptions they cause cooler temperatures especially in summer and over the large land masses so after the flood you’d have so much volcanic ash and Aerosoles that you’d cause a pretty good cooling right off the bat also The Fountains of the great deep and volcanism cause a warm ocean there’s lots of ways to cause a warm ocean in uh in any flood model but The Fountains of the great deep imply that there was a water trapped in the crust and it came up and at the end of the flood uh that warm water coming from the crust would have been added to the current oceans result in a warm ocean from top to bottom and pole to pole you could probably swim in the Arctic Ocean right after the flood it was so warm there’d be no sea ice anyway the significance of the warm water is that the warmer the water the more the evaporation in fact at 86° fahren you would have seven times the amount of evaporation of of water then at 0° Centigrade or 32° fah huge amount of evaporation with with warmer water also the mechanism is going to persist but it’s going to WAN with time as the volcanic ash uh settles out and the Earth settles down to equilibrium and the oceans cool particularly the oceans cooling is the key for the waning of the Ice Age here’s kind of a schematic of how this would work uh the volcanic dust and Aerosoles would reflect some of the sunlight back to space cooling the surface of the Earth mainly the the land masses at bidden high latitudes now volcanic ash and Aerosoles filtered out of the atmosphere sink out of the atmosphere in about 1 to three years so you have to keep replenishing the stratosphere um after the the the the flood and indeed there’s a tremendous amount of Ice Age volcanism in Ice Age sediments indicating we had tremendous vulcanism for quite a while after the flood now they notice they know that uniformitarians notice that they know volcanism causes cooling but you know when they stretch out the Ice Age into a 2 million year period it’s nothing but when we telescope it into a short time scale it become very very significant now with basic meteorology you can guesstimate that’s a that’s mological jargon the storm tracks during the Ice Age storm tracks would be in areas where you have strong horizontal temperature differences and where would they be they would generally be between the cold cool land and the warm ocean so you’d have a storm track parallel with the East Coast also another storm track would be cold ice ice sheet and uh a little bit warmer land here so you’d have a storm track just south of the ice sheet and storms would generally follow the now these are General storm tracks in meteorology chaos usually rules so these are just these are just general and most of the time precipitation in wintertime storms falls on the north side of the storm so it fall right in there where the ice was building up in this schematic the this is uh where the ice is still building up also you can figure out where the main evaporation areas are generally with West East flow you have fairly drier cooler air from the continent going out over the warmer ocean that’s produces strong evaporation on the East coasts of continents and of course uh in an an Arctic Ocean close to the land you’d have strong evaporation those are close to the areas at the mid high latitudes where you want it to evaporate it’s close to where the building ice sheets developed in Canada and the northern United States and and of course Scandinavia now I’m going to go on to support for the model there’s lots of evidence for wet deserts and I’m going to show you a few diagram and a picture coming up but the evidence shows that the dry areas about 30° north like like the Southwest United States the Dead Sea area Australia lots of places were once much wetter here’s a plot of the what’s called plal lakes in the Southwest United States right in this area now this is just in the Great Basin there was Lakes down in here Death Valley had a lake about 600 ft deep this is Lake bonnaville uh which is uh Great Salt Lake about 6 to eight times as large 800 ft deep Deeper by the way the average the salt Great Salt lake lake now today is only 15 ft deep it was 800 ft deeper during the Ice Age Now uniformitarians how are they going to get a climate change to to fill these things up in those areas it is very difficult but like I said there in our model we fill them up first as the flood drains off it’ll fill up Pockets or basins uh in the land at the end of the flood and by the way if you’ve ever been to these areas there’s beautiful large Shoreline features along this Lake bonnaville here shorelines and high Deltas if you land at Salt Lake airport look out the window along the Foothills and you see the shorelines there’s two distinct shorelines in fact I found shorelines around this this Lake it’s called Lake lonton uh it’s today you just have a few shriveled remnants of that Lake these Lakes right here they get up to almost 100 degrees now in the summer um I’ve I’ve taken pictures around there there Mono Lake there glacial Lake Mono Lake and then Death Valley there’s shorelines around Death Valley quite a different climate during the Ice Age lot wetter now it’s interesting that the Sahara Desert was much wetter man lived in the Sarah desert by the thousands and he has all kinds of rock art this is a picture of a giraffe on a rock in the Sahara Desert and I’m going to just summarize u a quote from the book The Great Sahara the Sahara is a veritable art gallery of prehistoric paintings the evidence is enough to show that the Sahara was once a well populated area of the prehistoric world yet there is man’s work in the most inaccessible corners of the desert literally thousands of figures of tropical and Aquatic animals yes aquatic animals enormous herds of cattle Hunters armed with bows and boomerangs and even domestic scenes of women and children in the circular Huts in which they lived why would the Sahara be much wetter during the Ice Age well because you had a huge amount of evaporation right after the flood the lowlands of Alaska and the Yukon were unglaciated and this is a mystery and here’s a plot of uh the mountains being glaciated and the lowlands which are are in yellow there are unglaciated by the way most models of the Ice Age have extreme difficulty forming the Ice Age extreme difficulty now some will produce it but a lot of times it’s because those models are tweaked to produce it anyway Phillips and held said in the Journal of climate Siberia and alas well they said we now have glaciation they did produce glaciation but unfortunately it was outside the areas where it existed during the last Heist age and that included the lowlands of of Alaska Siberia and the Yukon in other words those lowlands like to glaciate why weren’t they glaciated in our model it’s because of all the warm onshore flow mainly it was the onshore flow that kept it uh ice free now the mammoths in Siberia what were millions of mammoths doing in Siberia where they couldn’t live today mainly because it’s boggy they can’t get around and the bog ve vegetation is toxic to to them because they’re they ate grass Not only was the woolly mammoths in Siberia you had woly rhosus horse bison a lot of different animals that lived in Siberia during the Ice Age so what’s going on why why these sorts of things well first of all you got to determine whether the mammoth Di during the flood or during the Ice Age I think from what I’ve seen that from studyed it’s overwhelmingly they died at the end of the Ice Age one of the main evidence is in Northwest Siberia you find woolly mammoth skeletons on top of glacial till which means that as the glaciers receded from Northwest Siberia the mammoths came up in that area and then they died on top so they died at the end of the Ice Age that’s the distribution right there all across the northern hemisphere in fact you don’t find them in areas where the the ice lasted the longest which is much of Canada and Northern and Central Scandinavia which is what you’d expect during an ice age and during the Ice Age uh they would be able to migrate over a bearing land bridge now as the snow piles on land it evaporates from the ocean the original water and the sea level drops and the bearing land bridge is very shallow so man and animals could easily migrate uh into the United States and down through an ice free Corridor they came down here and spread through into the Southern United States Central and South America now a good indication that the climate was quite different during the Ice Age is the distribution of the S Saga analou the solid line there represents the current distribution of The Saga antalope and the and the dash line is the historical their their range is shrinking but those dots represent Ice Age distributions you can see them up in Northern Siberia what’s so significant about that well the Saga antalope has thin hoodes and it likes Wide Open Spaces PLS and can’t negotiate permafrost very and swamps very well indicating that this area was totally different uh ecologically during the Ice Age than it is there today during the Summers it’s a it’s quite a swamp land because of the melting of Perma Frost permafrost melts that much and it has nowhere to go and so it ponds and then you get all these plants growing in there and it becomes a bog land and it’s hardly any animals can live there today in those those those areas this is indication that we very likely had no permafrost during the Ice Age Now the uniformitarians I think have not really faced this this problem because they grudgingly might say well maybe it was a little warmer climate but but some say hey it was during the Ice Age it had to be a lot colder in Siberia and they say oh that would solve the problem of those bogs it freeze the bogs well if it freezes the bogs what are they going to eat and here’s a woolly mammoth timeline whether you start with two elephants that leave the ark at the end of the ice age or two Wily mammoths I believe it was two elephants and the macadons and mammoths are part of the elephant kind but regardless they’re going to grow slowly they grow slowly and then finally when they’re going their population’s going to mushroom by by geometric progression yes you have plenty of time for millions of mammoths in a 700-year ice age finally towards the end of the Ice Age the climate changes it’s a dynamic climate it becomes colder drier and windy and they go extinct at the end of the Ice Age this is the famous baras saaka Mammoth that was uh towed out of uh Northeast Siberia and that’s generally the position they found them it’s in the St Peter Peter B Museum in St Petersburg and it had a broken for leg it had broken ribs broken pelvis and it was in a general standing position the question is that really plagues most people is how did these animals die well I believe the solution is found in the deposits surrounding the mammoths let’s take a look at what they were they’re buried in are they buried in uh bog with bog material River material some are on those I think but the Mass majority of them are in windblown Silt this is a recent quote from a book called mammoths and the mammoth FAA a particular interest for Paleo olist is What’s called the odama the Adamas are Hills of per of that are formed after permafrost melts around it and leaves some per Frost as Hills this is actually a lus layer that is windblown silt as a rule containing the largest amounts of remains of late pene animals they’re buried in windblown silk so what’s the picture here well I believe they died in in in large dust storms sort of like what happened in the dust bow ERA this is a picture from the Dust Bowl era that if you were in a dust storm you would see just a cloud of this dust uh coming and the visibility would go down to zero there might not be any wind right before it it’d be like with a cold front sometimes there’s no wind ahead of a cold front suddenly the winds just really pick up and and it just the visibility drops to zero and dust drift talk about dust dri during the dust bow eras dust drifts covered up fences Machinery up this one is up to the tops of a house and by the way I believe that the amount of windbone silt in in those areas of Siberia some in place some places is over 100 ft thick so I believe you had worse dust storms up there in Siberia than you did in the dust bow area they might ask well why are we going to have late uh Ice Age dust storms well because of Colder Winters colder oceans which means more sea ice which also means a drier atmosphere and stronger north south temperature differences all resulting in lot stronger winds and dry cold fronts lot drier cold cold fronts so here’s the big picture woolly mammoth peacefully eating grass and buttercups yes buttercups the reason we have those is because um uh they were in his mouth and in its stomach uh half decayed the digestion of a woolly doesn’t occur in the stomach it occurs in the after the stomach by the way I think that’s a key to why we we the the vegetation only half decayed but anyway the winds come up uh-oh he’s going to ride it out guess what he ends up like a snow fence and what happens to snow fences the snow piles up around it the dust would pile up he’s starting to suffocate and he’s in a standing position he tries to get out and he breaks his uh right arm leg bone cuz it appears that he was alive when that front leg uh broke and by the way there’s an analog for this in Hot Springs South Dakota where some of the mammoth that fell into that sinkhole they’ve excavated 52 mammoths in Hot Springs South Dakota in a sinkhole some of them have broken four limbs also that the researcher there thinks it was because they’re trying to get out of the mud in this case uh the dust packing up would be almost like concrete finally other dust storms totally cover him up and he ends up in a standing position in the dust and the per how do you get them in the per Frost this has always been a major question one person said do you jam him into the per Frost no the permer frost in this case will come up to meet him and by the way permer Frost also shifts and faults once you get it up there and the falting can break the pelvis of the Baraka Mammoth and Its Ribs so in a nutshell that’s the story of how I believe they went extinct also something called disharmonious Association they find as a rule you have animals that love the Heat and love the cold that were buried in Ice Age deposits together in the book quary extinctions a prehistoric Revolution it said the late pene communities that’s Ice Age communities were characterized by the coexistence of species that today are allopatric translated not climatically associated and presumably ecologically incompatible disharmonious associations have been documented for late Pine Ice Age floras that’s your plants terrestrial invertebr lower invertebr birds and mammals in fact it was common and that’s exactly what you expect because this distribution would occur with cool Summers and Mild Winters while in the uniformitarian model you have cold Winters period you shouldn’t expect that one of the most outrageous instances is in England where you have 100 associations of hippos with musk ox and reindeers in the same stratagraph layer how do how do hippos get up there during the Ice Age well because I believe Britain was warm with a lot of warm onshore flow for quite a while and very wet very heavy precipitation so the hippo after the the flood and leaving the the ark would uh find it congenial up in there and finally as but as the temperatures cool off he W he found himself in the wrong environment and he was being populated by reindeer and muscs and woolly mammoths and finally they all died and were were were buried in what it says here in this quote in stratagraph context it seemed to indicate contemporar in other words they died at the same time also they found out that when things were supposed to get better at the end of the Ice Age it was warming up the ice was melting suddenly all these large animals disappeared on whole continents or went extinct all over the world indise age extinctions 100 species of large animals in North America stat 70% died at the end of the Ice Age including the horse and the camel Europe and Asia lost 75% at the end of the Ice Age Australia lost 90% at the end of the Ice Age why well I think it’s the same reason they Lo they were lost in Siberia uh it was colder drier and windier I think the dust storms which is lots of evidence was a prime factor in the extinctions at the end of the Ice Age here’s a quote from a recent book after many decades of debate the North American inosine megaphon mass extinction remains a lightning rod of controversy the extraordinary Divergent opinions expressed in this volume show that no resolution is in sight I would say it can readily be explained in the post flood Ice Age model all right now that was a lot of information I know probably like my head’s still spinning but don’t worry like I said we are going to recap this information break it down a little bit let’s review and summarize what meteorologist Michael Ard just presented his presentation breaks down into three main parts first part deals with the question of was there really an ice age and as we said at the beginning what’s an ice age it’s a period of substantially increased ice coverage on the world’s land masses was there an ice age well to determine that we must compare the features of Glacier covered land day to the features that we find in other places that perhaps once had glaciers and o o describes two features for this comparison the first are Marines both lateral and N Marines what is a marine he said the definition a couple different times it’s a collection of various siiz rocks and a finer grain Matrix he said what basically it’s a collection of mixed Rocky debris all shoved together so just think a whole bunch of different sides rocks and what looks like sand or something like that that’s that’s aine he also gave Marines another name did you catch what that name was ertic oh we’ll get to erratic in just a second he called it uh similar he talks about wind blown silt at the end of the presentation but another name for Marines is glacial till so it’s soil that’s formed by glaciers glacial till so you have Marines or glacial till they’re formed when glaciers move or expand now Glaciers are just another way to refer to giant ice sheets so these powerful this powerful moving ICE as precipitation builds up on it and it expands it pushes with great pressure on the rocks and soil in its path it either shoves them to the side which is what forms a lateral marine or it shoves it to the front which is what forms an end marine or a a terminal marine and these marines are very distinctive if you find marines that collection of VAR sized rocks and a finer grain Matrix then you know there is a glacier nearby or there was a glacier nearby because that’s how these things form and we do see evidence like this especially across North America now what what was another main sign of ice coverage that people can see on the area’s rocks scratched bedrock striated Criss Crossing scratches on rocks and this is again as glaciers expand they sometimes carry rocks they many times carry rocks and the moving of rock and ice across Bedrock that doesn’t move it lays deep scratches into the Rock and if there are any rocks being carried by the glaciers well the Bedrock leaves scratches on those rocks and those rocks being carried by the glaciers being pushed by the glaciers they sometimes turn and so you get scratches going in different directions so scratch Bedrock station on rocks is another Telltale sign of glaciation there is or there once was Ice coverage in the area now as oart explains we find Marines we find scratched Bedrock all over areas of the northern hemisphere even that don’t have glaciers nearby today and we also find someone used the term before erratics erratic Boulders what are erratic boulders there Steve exactly they’re Boulders that seem alien to the landscape they’re not like the other rocks in the area they just seem like they appeared out of nowhere also called exotic Boulders they don’t match the rocks in the environment and they couldn’t just roll there or at least many of them didn’t because these rocks these erratic Boulders many times have sharp unworn sides so it’s like they were carried there they didn’t have their edges worn off or broken off something must have brought these alien rocks to the location what is it that can carry giant rocks and deposit them far from where they originally come from Ice glaciers and we also find erratic Boulders in various places in the northern hemisphere so then because these land features show up in a lot of places other than where Glaciers are today what is the conclusion what must have existed in these areas in the past ice there must have been massive ice sheets glaciers here in the past there was a lot of ice coverage here in the past and if there was as we see all over in the northern hemisphere substantially more ice coverage then than there was now then what can we infer previously existed in the world an Ice Age there once was an Ice Age these places must have once been covered by ice sheets there must have been an Ice Age on on the earth now this is not a crazy conclusion both uniformitarians those who don’t believe the Bible’s history and just assume everything that is is the way things were both uniformitarians and creationist scientists agree that our Earth previously experienced at least one Ice Age how far did the ice sheets extend you may have seen it on the video most of Canada about half the US and in Eurasia most of England Northwest Siberia Scandinavia the video only focuses on the Northern Hemisphere there apparently was in the southern hemisphere too like Chile Argentina most of New Zealand Southeast Australia there’s evidence of ice sheets there as well in all about 30% of all land was covered by ice at one point in the Ice Age so we’re not talking about a frozen planet no that’s not the ice age but it is substantially more ice coverage almost triple the amount of land that is covered by Ice today that’s the way the world once was okay we see evidence of an Ice Age we we know with confidence that it existed but why why the Ice Age what brought the ice what caused the ice to go away and why are some areas in the Ice Age glaciated why others are not even when they’re at high latitude that is they’re very far north you’d expect them to be covered by ice but they don’t end up being covered by Ice why well in the second part of the lecture Michael Ard introduces us to the basic creationist explanation for the Ice Age first of all there’s no need for us to ask if the ice happened if the Ice Age happened before the flood or after because the physical evidence for the ice age is above what we could identify as flood sediments it’s above soil and rock layers that only could have come about from the flood so the implication must be the Ice Age came after the flood if we have all the physical evidence for the Ice Age on top of flood layers then it must have occurred after the flood now meteorologically you need two seemingly contradictory preconditions to create an ice age do remember what those are or one one of them yeah Dwayne War motions you need warm motions to produce or you need lots of evaporation potentially from a warm ocean but what else cooler temperatures you need cooler temperatures to form the ice so you need lots of evaporation but cooler temperatures on land so the ice can build up and not melt now these things don’t well don’t go well together uh you need a lots of evaporation to perform to form intense precipitation but these things don’t normally go well together because what do you need for increased evaporation you need warmth you need high temperatures but an Ice Age requires cold temperatures so this is a a difficult problem for secular scientists uniformitarian scientists they see evidence for an ice age but they cannot really describe the mechanism that brought it about because how do you get lots of evaporation and cooler temperatures at the same time one usually prevents the other but what actually would give you the these two seemingly contradictory preconditions lots of evaporation cooler temperatures this is what Michael O’s argument is it’s the flood the flood could fulfill these preconditions because as we read in Genesis 711 with The Fountains of the great deep breaking open as well as the floodgates of the sky opening the flood was likely a massive massively traumatic tectonic and Volcanic event tectonic meaning movements of the crust plates volcanic we’re talking about uh volcanic material going into the water and into the air you’ve probably got now this is not stated explicitly in the scriptures this is an inference you’ve probably got with those Fountains of the great deep breaking open hot water and mantle material So within the Earth’s crust mantle material spilling into the oceans you’ve got volcanic activity erupting everywhere you’ve got tectonic plates moving and crashing into each other that volcanic activity means the Aerosoles are finding their way into the stratosphere now what’s the stratosphere so in the various levels of atmosphere that we have we live in the troposphere that’s the bottom one the stratosphere is the one right above it so lots of Aerosoles are going into the second layer of atmosphere the stratosphere and these aerosols are blocking and reflecting sunlight and without as many of the sun’s Rays reaching the ground what happens to the land cools down to get cooler temperatures cooler Summers and by the way what’s an aerosol just a extremely tiny particle that floats in the atmosphere so on the one hand you have volcanic ash and Aerosoles producing cooler temperatures which are needed for the ice age but on the other hand all that Oceanic tectonic and volcanic activity does what to the water it warms it up a warmer water evaporates faster so then the deep ocean fountains and vulcanism creates the warm ocean which leads to a high amount of evaporation which leads to a high amount of precipitation which on land stays around in the form of ice in many places because the land is cooler so now you see a coherent explanation from a creationist from a Biblical perspective the flood gives you the worldwide historical flood gives you the two preconditions that you need for an Ice Age cooler temperatures but higher levels of evaporation and precipitation now key to this understanding is that these mechanisms are longlasting but they are not permanent long- lasting but not permanent they eventually fix themselves and here’s another problem for uniformitarian scientists who ignore or don’t believe the Bible they when they’re trying to explain the Ice Age if they’re trying to model the Ice Age if they can somehow get the ice H to start the problem then is how do you get it to stop and a lot of times they can’t we can’t figure out how this thing would stop once you get it going but the flood provides a mechanism that prod produces an Ice Age which lasts but also wanes with time aerosols eventually settle out of the atmosphere after about 1 to 3 years though as aard says there’s evidence there was still lots of volcanic activity during the Ice Age so the aerosols would have gotten regularly replenished nevertheless even that vulcanism gradually decreased so aerosols are eventually diminishing in the atmosphere more importantly due to evaporation what eventually happens to the oceans well the the sea level is going to drop but what about the temperature it cools down this is what evaporation does this is why when you sweat you cool down it’s not because you producing water out of your body cools you down it’s as the water evaporates from your skin it cools you down that’s what water does I mean that’s what evaporation does so the oceans eventually cool the Aerosoles eventually settle out this causes the ice age to wind down now o also talks about how using the same meteorological understandings that we have today we can infer General storm patterns for the Ice Age and from these estimations we would have seen on the earth lots of precipitation in the areas which lo and behold we see lots of evidence of ice build up in the past if we just think of how those storms probably came about in a flood caused Ice Age now with these processes how long was the ice age I don’t know if you caught in his presentation it was only listed on a graph award’s estimate is about 700 years now creationists vary on that number I read another scientists assert that the Ice Age was a mere 250 years but generally cacious talk of an ice age that lasts mere hundreds of years perhaps as much as 700 years which is quite different from uniformitarian scientists as we’ll see in a moment Art’s particular model suggests about 500 years of ice buildup and then about 200 years of ice recession so it’s not like year one boom there’s all the ice and then year 700 or and know year two all the ice is gone there’s gradual buildup gradual decrease so if we if we follow ard’s estimate his model and we combine it with what we understand from the Bible about the timeline of the earth as we’ve discussed even previously in this course this would mean that the Ice Age began soon after the end of the flood which again according to the Genesis genealogies would be around 2350 BC and the Ice Age would have ended around 1650 BC or about 200 years before Israel’s Exodus from Egypt you say well why doesn’t the Bible mention it well what the Bible talks about is taking place in the Middle East you’re not seeing a lot of the effects of the Ice Age there though perhaps that does explain why certain areas in the Middle East and around it were more fertile at that that time in the in biblical times than they are today now again creationist vary on the exact number of years but if we use the 700 that would be about where it fits in the Biblical timeline now in the last part of Art’s presentation we hear about the unique nature how the unique nature of the flood created Ice Age fits with various pieces of scientific data what evidence fits the flood Ice Age model the first piece that evidence first piece of evidence that or offers is wet deserts places that are extremely hot and dry today have evidence of formerly great amounts of flora fauna and water but this is to be expected with a different Ice Age climate especially with increased precipitation in various parts of the world due to Oceanic evaporation but also cooler Summers and even milder Winters making those places much more livable so oard mentions two specific examples Lake Bonville in the Southwest United States states which is desert today and the plentiful Rock paint ings in the Sahara Desert another support for this ice age model are unfrozen lowlands at high latitudes being so far north one might expect these places would be ice covered devoid of Life they’re near places that are ice covered but why aren’t these lowlands glaciated why aren’t they covered with ice because they’re near the coasts and the coast is bringing warm onshore flow those warmer oceans they bring warmer air into the area so those places remain not quite as cool as the other places around them and they don’t glaciate they don’t get covered with ice so even at high latitudes even very far north you have certain lowlands that are near the coast that remain ice free which makes sense according to the flood model it’s hard to explain in uniformitarian model animal remains also emphasize this aspect of unique environments during the Ice Age or talks about a few of them first there are the large wooly animals we find the remains in places that seem imp possible for them to have lived if their environments are similar to today places that are swamps or frozen tundra but these lands were different they must have been different in the past even during the Ice Age most likely fertile grasslands unless we get confused these animal remains they must be post flood because in what kind of soil do we find them buried glacial till which is something that only could be formed in the Ice Age which is on top of flood sediments so many large animal remains even of wooly animals they’re found all over North America and Siberia both speaking of North America specifically both man and animals were able to migrate to North America over the bearing land bridge because somebody already mentioned it as ice sheets as ice sheets form on land due to the high evaporation of the Ice Age what happens to the ocean it gets lower lower sea level because the water is trapped on land in the form of ice doesn’t flow back into the ocean to replenish the sea level so the sea level drops this means that many parts of the world that were cover that are covered by ocean today were actually uncovered back then the bearing land bridge linking Alaska and the eastern part of Asia is one example but England also would have been joined to the European continent Indonesia would have been joined in various places making migration to Australia uh easier and many offshore islands around the world today they would have been attached to the main continents during that time which explains how the animals and even people got there a second animal able to prosper in Ice Age created environments that o talks about is the PSA analou they only live in a small area today due to their very specific preferences for living conditions they prefer wide open Plains mild weather and yet we find them from past remains all over Siberia and Eastern Russia which they would not be able to live in today it must have been a different climate back then but not only the remains of where we found where animals lived but also the remains of how these animals died fit fits well with an ice age flood Ice Age model specifically the demise of woolly mammoths and though the Ice Age created some livable climates in Northern lowlands and other places that environment eventually changed and according to oard many fertile Northern Plains they became colder drier and windier though the Ice Age had created cooler Summers and milder Winters in various places when the ice ages environmental effects diminished these environments became no longer hospitable for the animals that were currently living there and one deadly change that developed in many places especially for the mammoth was the rise of a certain kind of storm what kind of storm dust storms uh again formed because of the drier colder windier climate these storms were as bad or worse as some of the dust storms in the dust bow area and they were capable of rapidly covering stationary mammoths until it was too late for those mammoths to try to move we mentioned in a previous lesson I think Mark brought it up but remember to get fossils to get animal remains preserved uh in a in a substantial way you need rapid covering not just something that dies on the surface and then decays otherwise you’re not going to get a fossil so with dust storms like this you’re going to get rapid coverings of animals like willly Mammoth and which is why we find them today again this is something that we would expect from a post Ice Age caused by a flood or at the end of Ice Age caused by the flood along with this another concept that oard mentions having to do with changing environments is disharmonious Association does anybody remember what that refers toal would normally live together dying that’s right you have animals that prefer widely different climates apparently living and dying in the same place hippos and reindeers both living in England at the same time that doesn’t make make any sense but it does make sense if you see that the Ice Age caused different environmental conditions in many places even ones that are much more congenial to many types of animals the new temperatures though and the new storms at the end of the Ice Age cause these environments to no longer be survivable for many of these animals which leads to mass extinctions to be sure a man played a part in these extinctions too just as he does many times large animals tend to get hunted to extinction by man that’s even a problem today but many environmental factors at the end of the Ice Age were working against animals that were formerly well suited to their environments not just the dust storms that would definitely take out a whole bunch of animals especially the large ones but simply the fact that it’s no longer wet enough or it’s no longer cool enough or it’s no longer warm enough and these animals just can’t survive and so they die off now this is just an overview of what was his overview so there are very there are various other aspect the ice age that we could explore in more detail which we can’t right now but don’t miss the main points there is strong evidence of an ice age in our world and the flood is a good explanation for the ice age as the flood likely would have supplied unique the unique environmental conditions to produce the ice age but also for the ice age to end the way that it did and leave its mark on the world only 5 minutes left so let me go to this last bit what do secular uniformitarians think of the Ice Age this the last part we want to talk about today what’s the general uniformitarian thought how does it compared to a Bible believing worldview Bible starting worldview well in summary fashion secular scientists don’t believe there was a worldwide flood that’s no surprise so it’s not the trigger for the ice age in fact for them there is no Ice Age there are ice ages currently the thought is that there are five ice ages the first place the first one taking place about 2.2 billion years ago the most recent taking place about 2 million years ago in fact they would say that we’re still in an ice age for them the term Ice Age refers to a vast period of time with maybe even only slightly different conditions on the earth Within These ice ages ice expands and Retreats according to cycle so it can happen multiple times within an Ice Age every 40,000 years or 100,000 years ice reaches its maximum level and then it Retreats according to them we’re in an ice retreating period and have been for the last 10,000 years what causes this multiple and cyclical set of ice ages well the only cause they can sort of buy into is that it has to do with the Earth’s orbit explanation is a bit detailed but basically they suppose that slight changes in the Earth’s orbit over thousands of years along with tectonic plate movements and slight changes in the Earth’s atmosphere alt together it causes an Ice Age cycle however this explanation doesn’t hold up very well under scrutiny because the differences in Earth orbit are too too slight to substantially affect the Earth’s environment but even more problematically you cannot get both preconditions for an Ice Age with these methods that is high evaporation and precipitation but lower temperatures this is why many uniformitarian scientists admit as even Michael oard mentions that they don’t really know what caused the ice agees it’s generally not well understood they are sure though that there have been many ice ages based off of the way they assess the evidence this complexity of glacial expansion other bits of data like certain Oceanic rocks and Ice core Rings again this is interpreted according to uniformitarian assumptions but they say there must have been many ice ages there must have been several ice ages but there is a more reasonable explanation for this ice data the great flood of God’s judgment caused unique conditions on the earth that resulted in a small period of several hundred years in which more of the Earth was covered by Ice again this is not inherent scripture but this this is an explanation that helps make sense of the data that we do see while starting from a reliable Foundation the scriptures stand on the authority of the scriptures start with that and then use that as the as the proper lens for interpreting the data that you see in the world this is what Michael art is attempting to do this is what we’re attempting to do as a class this is what it means to have a Biblical worldview it doesn’t make you uh a lite who doesn’t understand how science works or how technology Works rather you bring in true and reliable assumptions to make sense of the data that you see when it comes to the ice age when it comes to the flood when it comes to Creation when it comes to anything that you see in the world this is just another illustration of what it means to have a biblical worldview okay 9:59 so no no time for questions if you do have questions about this there’s of course more information in the Answers in Genesis resources in book form and on their website you can come talk with me afterwards too I’m not an expert on the ice age but I can at least tell you what I’ve learned from anwers and Genesis but that’s all for this week next week we move on to our final lesson and the final C of our course’s subtitle we have been examining the ancient consequences of sin in Genesis 3:11 we’ve seen corruption at the fall we’ve seen the C catastrophe of the flood but next week we investigate confusion man’s rebellion and God’s intervening Judgment at Babel which again helps to explain and make sense of what we see in the world today even in the spreading out and the differences of various people groups so be back for that investigation let me close in prayer Lord God we thank you for your reliable word we don’t know Lord all the specifics about what what you did in the past but we do see evidence of it in the world and how we assess the evidence is going to lead to widely different conclusions whether we come to the evidence believing your Bible or we come to the evidence rejecting your Bible or ignoring your Bible but Lord you have shown us that your Bible is reliable it’s the god breathed word so what what sure way could we have of assessing the evidence than to believe your word and assess the evidence accordingly Lord I pray that You’ bless the rest of the service today bless your people grow us more into the image of Christ in Jesus name amen thank you