The Ice Age

Answers Bible Curriculum 2nd Edition Unit 3 Lesson 28

This week in Sunday school, we’re considering 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? We’ll consider these questions and more as we see how a biblical worldview helps us better understand our world and its history.

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today’s class is going to be a little different from usual because we’re going to be listening to a lecture at the do presentation lecture from Michael Oh R now who’s Michael Oh our heart is a retired meteorologist who’s been working with Answers in Genesis since 2001 in this lecture or series of excerpts from a lecture Oh art articulates why creationists scientists believe in an ice age and how that ice eh ties in with a Genesis flood so we’re going to hear him talk about that now I hope you’ve had your coffee this morning or whatever you normally eat or drink to keep you energized because the information of this lecture is going to come at you kind of fast and or does use a fair bit of scientific terminology in his explanation it does define his terms but it can be a little difficult to keep up with but do your best and don’t worry because at the end I’ll review his arguments so that we can make sure we didn’t miss the main points now understand that the goal of today’s class is not to answer every scientific question that’s related to the ice age it’s rather the goal of today’s class is to give you a basic understanding of the ice age and how it ties in with the Bible as we’ll see the ice age is really part of the common history that we all share as humans also please remember before we get started that what we’re talking about today is theory that comes from fallible interpretations of data fallible meaning it’s not necessarily perfect or error-free do not treat the model or scientific theory we talk to talk about today as scripture models of the ice age models of the flood they are fallible and they will be revised they have been revised since they’ve been proposed and they will continually be revised our theories and explanations and sometimes exchanged for a whole new explanations as we get a better understanding of scientific data historical data but that being said there is valuable or there is value in looking at the model the basic model we’re going to discuss today because there are questions that arise in life especially if one examines history or science questions such as why are there ancient rock paintings of fish in this Sahara Desert how do we explain that or how did man and animals get from the Middle East to North America after the flood and after Babel these are separate continents how’d they get there or why did animals like the woolly mammoth and the saber-tooth Tiger disappear is there any way we can answer those types of questions if we believe in the Bible it’s not just out of curiosity or understanding history though that makes exploring a biblically based model useful even if we’re not scientists are particularly interested in history we are continually bombarded by scientific claims in our media and education system when it comes to the ice age today scientists for instance claim that there were multiple ice ages in history and that these ice ages lasted thousands of years what do we do with these claims we want to be able to skillfully assess such scientific assertions and determine whether they’re really accurate so from a historical standpoint and from an apologetic standpoint I trust that today’s lesson on the ice age will be useful to you here’s what we’re going to do pretty straightforward we’re gonna watch presentation creationist explanation of the ice age we’re then going to review that explanation and then we’ll compare that explanation to or compare broadly that explanation to a secular uniformitarian understanding of ice age let’s pray before we go on My Lord our Lord and God I pray that you to make this a profitable time Lord where you strengthen the faith of your people give them a greater understanding of the past make them more skilful in being able to talk about these things with other people so that thoughts that are raised up against the knowledge of you thoughts that contradict your scriptures can be unmasked for what they are and they can be shown to be foolish but we love your word we love that it is totally trust word I pray that you give me ability to help explain this material today in Jesus name Amen all right well before we start listening to the lecture let me just answer one more question what actually is an ice age and anyone tell me I don’t suppose it’s a term that you’re gonna be using very often the term sounds really dramatic when you think ice age perhaps you’re thinking of a completely frozen planet or a blizzard that covers the entire earth for months on end that’s not actually one of nice ages the real definition of an ice age is way less exciting an ice age is simply a period of time with extensive glaciation on the earth now what does that mean it just means there’s substantially more land covered by ice and then normal so again I’ll say the ice age is just a period of time with substantially more land covered by ice now believe it or not there actually are some places on the earth that are permanently covered in ice places in the Arctic in the Antarctic such as Greenland or Antarctica actually about 12% of the Earth’s land mass all the land on the earth is permanently covered in ice so an ice age then just represents a period of time where that percentage is substantially higher substantially more than 12% that counts as an ice age so that was there an ice age in our past how bad was this ice age can we explain how it happened and what evidence is there to support our explanation let’s now hear from retired meteorologist Michael O our this video is about twenty five twenty seven minutes so I’m gonna listen to it for a little bit of time as you listen again don’t worry so much about the technical details try and catch the broad concepts and like I said we’ll review the information afterwards all right so let’s play the video now was there an ice age 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 in Marines and lateral Marines in Marines and lateral Marines are formed when the glacier pushes out material ahead of it and as its along the side it’s called a lateral moraine when it’s in the front it’s called a terminal or in 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 that 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 probably due to the effects of the sunshine and less volcanic ash in the stratosphere of why we’re getting some of the global warming there’s a beautiful in moraine very sharp looking made not too long ago probably made about 1890 another feature you observe around glaciated areas is scrat’s bedrock as the glacier moves over bedrock it has rocks on the bottom of it and those rocks on the bottom scratched the bedrock so it’s typical to see strike striated Bay a 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 there’s a one-set going that way and there’s another set going this way like this and it’s probably because the rock turned a little bit in the ice ices were plaster 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 two features where it’s claimed have been glaciated here’s one area where I nearly live used to live west of Great Falls Montana and your Augusta Montana these this is the Rocky Mountain Front the Rocky Mountains were glaciated during the Ice Age and the ice came about ten miles out of the high plain and formed this in marine just typically as what you see at the Athabasca glacier I’m taking a picture of this from this part of the end marine right here it was breached right in here probably when the glacier melted it breached sudha in marine right here so that’s why there’s a gap there when you look at the material in the in 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 in you go up into the Rocky Mountains you see scratch bedrock go on east in fact there’s an 800 foot cliff right along here the glacier came up out of this valley scratched the bedrock and went down over an eight hundred foot cliff also you find in 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 at the basket glacier this is probably one of the best Marines that I’ve ever seen before this is the horseshoe-shaped lateral ten Marines around a beautiful Wallowa Lake in northeast Oregon and about it moved out onto the enterprise plane in northeast Oregon about four thousand feet altitude where it gets probably a high temperature of 90 as the average in July there’s a lateral marine in marine and latter they’re very sharp-looking indicating that the Ice Age ended not that long ago furthermore a feature like this could not form during the flood this feature has to form by other mechanisms and it’s on top of flood sediments so well the Ice Age occurred after the flood and here’s this another picture of that lateral moraine you can see the trees for scale this lateral moraine is 600 feet tall and here’s what you see within the lateral marine glacial till rocks of all sizes and a finer grain matrix and you see these around the Sierra Mountains and other of Mount 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 sub rounded or rounded I think that a lot of erratic s– were transported by water this one is very angular this is the famous Okotoks erratic Southwest at Calgary Alberta this forms a line of erratic from Jasper Alberta down into northern Montana it’s 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 here’s another famous erratic called the Bellevue erratic now this erratic is now erratic Boulder is a boulder that rocked it doesn’t outcrop in the local area it’s been transported somehow that’s what they mean by an erratic Boulder or exotic boulders another name this one is found southwest of Portland Oregon in the Willamette Valley it’s composed of argillite which is a slightly metamorphosed shale and this nearest outcrop of that is in northern Idaho and it’s well south of the ice where the I the boundary the ice by the way how did it get down there and it’s very angular the only way you can think about it as a non iceberg and how would an iceberg take it down there well when glacial lake Missoula broke it spread through Eastern Washington through the Columbia Gorge and spread over Portland Oregon four hundred feet deep been up into the Willamette Valley so if there was a glacial lake Missoula and Lake Missoula flood there had to be a thick ice dam in northern Idaho to block up 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 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 I’m that’s a subject of research but it got pretty far south of the Great Lakes and it covered some of the mountain areas as ice caps but interesting enough in Alaska the Brooks Range in Alaska Range they were glaciated but the lowlands of Alaska were not glaciated and that’s where you find all those woolly mammoths Bisons and horses and lots of animals in Ice Age permafrost 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 in northern Germany and Poland and clear out in the northwest Siberia now there’s a little question on the boundary right in here and some people think that the ice covered the Barents Sea north of Norway there so there’s still some controversy over the exact distribution of the ice but when you add it all up ice-covered 30 percent 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 and 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 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 at a giant volcanic tectonic event tectonic is crustal earth movements but at the end of the flood you have a huge 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 aerosols that you’d cause a pretty good cooling right off the bat also The Fountains of the great deep and volcanism caused a warm ocean there’s lots of ways to cause a warm ocean in in any flood model but the fogs are the great deep imply that there was a water trapped in the crust and it came up and at the end of the flood that warm water coming from the crust would have been added to the current oceans resulting 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 degrees Fahrenheit you would have seven times the amount of evaporation of water then at zero degrees centigrade or 32 degrees Fahrenheit huge amount of evaporation with warmer water also the mechanisms going to persist but it’s going to wane with time as the volcanic ash 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 the volcanic dust and aerosols 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 aerosols filter out of the atmosphere sink out of the atmosphere in about one to three years so you have to keep replenishing the stratosphere after the the flood and indeed there’s a tremendous amount of Ice Age volcanism in Ice Age sediments indicating we had tremendous volcanism for quite a while after the flood now they notice they know that uniformitarian notice that they know volcanism causes cooling but you know when they stretch out the ice agent a two million year period it’s nothing but when we telescope it into a short timescale they’ve become very very significant now with basic meteorology you can guesstimate that’s a that’s meteorological 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 a little bit warmer land here so you’d have a storm crack just south of the ice sheet and storms would generally follow these 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 and wintertime storms falls on the north side of the storm so it’d fall right in there where the ice was building up in this schematic this is where the ice is still building up also you can figure out where the main evaporation areas are generally with west to east flow you have fairly a 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 in an hour and arc the 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 degrees north like Southwest United States the Dead Sea area Australia lots of places were once much wetter here’s a plot of the what’s called pluvial 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 six hundred feet deep this is like Bonneville which is a Great Salt Lake about six to eight times as large eight hundred feet deep deeper by the way the average depth of salt a Great Salt Lake Lake not today is only fifteen feet deep it was 800 feet deeper during the Ice Age now uniformitarian how they gonna get a climate change to fill these things up in those areas it is very difficult but like I said they’re in our model we fill them up first as the flood drains off it’ll fill up pockets or basins 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 Bonneville here shore lines and high Delta’s if you land at Salt Lake Airport look out the window along the foothills and you see the shorelines there’s a two distinct shorelines in fact I found shorelines around this this lake is called Lake Lahontan it’s today that you just have a few shriveled remnants of that Lake these Lakes right here and get up to almost a hundred degrees now in the summer I’ve taken pictures around there they’re a Mono Lake they’re glacial Lake nor on a lake and then Death Valley I there’s shorelines all 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 serra 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 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 worth 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 Hudson which they live why would the Sierra be much wetter during the Ice Age well because he had a huge amount of evaporation right after the flood the lowlands of Siberia Alaska in the Yukon were unglaciated and this is a mystery and here’s a plot of 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 is because those models are tweaked to produce it anyway Phillips and Hilde said in the Journal of climate Siberia and Alaska well they said we now have glaciation they did produce glaciation but unfortunately it was outside the areas where it existed during the last ice age and that included the lowlands of Alaska Siberia and the Yukon in other words those lowlands like to glaciated why were they glaciated in our model it’s because of all the warm onshore flow mainly it was the onshore flow that kept it ice-free now the woolly mammoths in Siberia what were millions of mam is doing in Siberia where they couldn’t live today mainly because it’s boggy they can’t get around and the bog vegetation is toxic to them because they’re they grass not only were the woolly mammoths since library yet woolly rhinoceros horse Bisons 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 died during the flood or during the Ice Age I think from what I’ve seen that studied it’s overwhelmingly they died at the end of the Ice Age one of the main evidence is you 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 I 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 they would be able to migrate over a bering land bridge now as the snow piles on land it evaporates from the ocean of the original water and the sea level drops and the bering land bridge is very shallow so man and animals could easily migrate 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 Ages the distribution of the Saiga antelope the solid line there represents the current distribution of the Saiga antelope and the dashed 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 Saiga antelope has thin hooves and it likes wide-open spaces Plains and can’t negotiate permafrost very well swamps very well indicating that this area was totally different ecologically during the Ice Age then it is there today during the summers it’s a it’s quite a swampland because of the melting of permafrost permafrost melts that much and it has nowhere to go and sort 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 uniformitarian zai think have not really faced this problem because they grudgingly might say well maybe there’s a little warmer climate but but some say he was during the Ice Age it had to be a lot colder in Siberia and they say well that would solve the problem of those bogs and freeze the bogs well if it freezes the bogs what are they gonna 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 tule mammoths I believe was to elf and the mastodons and mammoths are part of the elephant kind but regardless they’re gonna grow slowly they grow slowly and then finally when their population is going to mushroom 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 is a dynamic climate it becomes colder drier and windy and they go extinct at the end of the Ice Age this is the famous beerus vaca mammoth that was towed out of us Northeast Siberia and that’s generally the position they found him it’s in the st. Peter Petersburg Museum in st. Petersburg and it had a broken four leg and 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 buried in are they buried in bog with bog material River material some are in dinos 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 fauna a particular interest for paleontologists is what’s called the odama the indominus our heels a permit of that are formed after permafrost melts around it and leaves some permafrost as hills this is actually a Loess layer that is windblown silt as a rule containing the largest amounts of remains of Late Pleistocene animals they’re buried in windblown silt so what’s the picture here well I believe they died in in large dust storms sort of like what happens in the Dust Bowl era this is a picture from the Dust Bowl era that if you were in a dust storm you would see just a cloud or this dust 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 being ahead of a cold front and suddenly the winds just really pick up and it just the visibility drops to zero and dust rest I buy dust return the Dust Bowl eras dust recovered up fences machinery this one is up to the top of a house and by the way I believe that the amount of windblown silt in in those areas of Siberia some in place some places over a hundred feet thick so I believe you had worse dust storms up there in Siberia than you did in the Dust Bowl era me my ass well why are we gonna have like 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 wooly mammoth peaceful eating grass and buttercups yes buttercups the reason we have those is because they were in his mouth and in its stomach half decayed the digestion of a woolly mammoth doesn’t occur in the stomach it occurs in the end after the stomach by the way I think that’s a key to why we that vegetation is only half – Kade but anyway the winds come up oh oh he’s gonna ride it out guess what he ends up like a snow fence and what happens to snow fences this 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 right arm a leg bone because it appears that he was alive when that front leg broke and by the way there’s an analogue for this in hot spring South Dakota where some of the mammoths that fell into that sinkhole they’ve excavated fifty-two mammoths in Hot Springs South Dakota and 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 the dust packing up would be almost like concrete finally other dust storms totally cover them up and Ian Dunn’s ends up in a standing position in the dust and the perma how do you get them in the permafrost this has always been a major question one person said do you jam them into the permafrost no the permafrost in this case will come up to meet him and by the way permafrost also shifts and falls once you get it up there and the faulting can break the pelvis of the Barras of our mammoth and it’s ribs so in a nutshell that’s the story of I believe they went extinct also something called disharmonious associations they find as a rule you’ll have animals that love the heat and love the cold that were buried in Ice Age deposits together in the book core ternary extinctions of prehistoric revolution it’s said the Late Pleistocene communities that’s ice age communities were characterized by the coexistence of species that today our allopatric translated not climatically associated and presumably ecologically incompatible dis harmonious associations have been documented for Late Pleistocene Ice Age Flores that your plants terrestrial invertebrates lower inverted raised 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 we have a hundred associations of hippos with musk ox and reindeers in the same stratigraphic 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 flood and leaving the the ark would find it congenial up in there and finally is but as the temperatures cool off he was he found himself in the wrong environment and he was being populated by reindeer and musk ox and woolly mammoths and finally they all died and were buried in what it says here in this quote his stratigraphic context it seemed to indicate contemporary 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 contents or went extinct all over the world end ice age extinctions 100 species of large animals in North America that 70% died at the ended 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’d love they were lost in Siberia it was colder drier and windier I think that dust storms which was 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 in Pleistocene megafauna 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 rarely be explained in the post-flood Ice Age model ok very good I’ll come back to our presentation here our PowerPoint I know that was a lot of information it’s good information but I think would be useful to review and summarize what we just heard from Michael Hobart so OS presentation breaks down into three main parts answering three different questions why is there an ice age how does the flood explain the ice age and then what evidence is there for the flood model so let’s deal with each question in turn was there an ice age remember an ice age is just a period of substantially increased ice coverage on the world’s land masses to answer this question what meteorologists and other scientists do is they compare the features of glacier covered lands today with the features we find in other places that are similar to that and part describes some of those features and one of them are Marines lateral and end Marines now what’s a marine a marine is defined by oh art it’s a collection of various sized rocks and a finer grain matrix okay it sounds very science II what does that mean basically it’s a collection of mixed rocky debris all shoved and these Marines are also called glacial till now Marines or glacial till they’re formed when glaciers move or expand glaciers by the way they’re just large ice sheets so this powerful moving ice pushers with great pressure on the rocks and soil in its path and either shove them to the side creating lateral moraines or shoves them forward which creates an N meringue and these Marines then are very distinctive if you find Marines you know that there is a glacier nearby or that there once was a glacier nearby there’s another sign of ice coverage in an area and that is scratched bedrock see as the glacier expands it carries rocks with it and is moving rock and ice it lays deep scratches in the rocks that the glacier passes by and vice versa the rocks carried by the glacier are often turned and so it puts scratches on rocks going in different directions criss-crossing so scratched bedrock is another telltale sign of ice coverage of glaciation and we find scratch bedrock as well as Marines all over the northern hemisphere and then there are erratic boulders does anyone remember what erratic boulders are yeah Rob that’s right erratic or alien or exotic borders they clearly don’t belong with the rest of the AH Crocs in the area and it seems like they were deposited there somehow they’re alien to the area now what’s interesting about many of these erratic boulders that we find in the northern hemisphere is that they have sharp edges which means that they didn’t roll there and they probably even weren’t they weren’t carried there by water but they were likely carried by glaciers carried by these expanding ice sheets so we find these three telltale features in a lot of places in the northern hemisphere so the land if the land all over the Northern Hemisphere’s has these features but no longer has glaciers there but what does that mean well that most likely means that the area did have glaciers at one time it was once covered by ice sheets but if they were so if there was so much land that was once covered by ice sheets that no longer was now then what likely occurred in our world an ice age it must have been an ice age on the earth at one time to explain all these land features that show glaciation both uniformitarian and creationist science scientists agree that our earth previously experienced an ice age and how far did the ice sheets extend well you saw a little bit there in the graphic most of Canada was covered about half the United States was covered and in Eurasia we had most of England Northwest Siberia Scandinavia were all covered by ice there’s probably a bit of the southern hemisphere that was also covered by ice areas in Chile Argentina New Zealand and Southeast Australia in all about 30 percent of the land on earth was covered by ice during this period that’s almost triple the amount of land that’s covered by ice today so hence an ice age but why why the ice age what brought the ice what caused the ice to go away why were some areas glaciated in some areas not even if those areas were at high latitude second part of our arts lecture he talks about the creationists the basic creationist of the Ice Age now when it comes to the timing it’s actually not that difficult to determine whether the ice age took place before the flood or afterwards because of the the evidence of the flood sediments the rocks and soil that is consistent with the global flood we have ice age material on top of that which indicates what about the timing of the ice age it would have to be after the flood to be deposited on top of flood sediments it would come afterwards now meteorological II there are two contradictory preconditions or what seem to be contrary preconditions to form an ice age on the one hand you need cooler temperatures on lands that ice can build up and not melt and on the other hand you need large amounts of evaporation to form in tense precipitation these things don’t usually go together because of what you need for increased evaporation you need warm temperatures especially over water bodies and this creates a seemingly impossible problem for secular scientists they see there’s evidence of an ice age but they can’t really describe the mechanism that would create it because you need lots of evaporation and cooler temperatures at the same time and these normally would prevent one another but what does give these preconditions the flood does Genesis 7:11 as we looked at previously it describes the flood as a it suggests that the flood was a massively traumatic tectonic and volcanic event remember the water comes from two sources during the flood the waters from above the floodgates of the sky being open and then the Fountains of the great deep bursting forth and that likely describes hot water from within the Earth’s crust and even hot molten material from under the earth so because the flood was this tectonic and volcanic event you’ve probably got hot water and hot mantle Tyrael spilling into the oceans you’ve got volcanic activity erupting everywhere you’ve got tectonic plates crashing into each other and that means that we’re gonna get some of the effects that produce an ice age we have the volcanic activity producing aerosols which find their way into the stratosphere a stratosphere is just the second layer of our atmosphere and aerosol is at that layer of the atmosphere reflect and block sunlight and without the sunrays reaching the ground what happens to the temperatures on land they go down the land gets cooler especially during summer by the way aerosols are just extremely tiny particles that float the atmosphere so the otherhand we have on the one hand we have volcanic ash and aerosols produced in cooler land temperatures which is needed for an ice age but on the other hand all the tectonic and volcanic activity is doing what to the oceans it’s warming it up a warmer water evaporates faster and as that or it says there’s multiple ways that water could have been warmed up and it very likely was warmed up and that crew that produced the increased evaporation so the flood gives a coherent explanation for producing an ice age you get those two seemingly contradictory preconditions cooler temperatures on land the higher levels of evaporation but what’s even more key is that these features are long lasting but not permanent eventually these anomalies on the earth fix themselves which is important for ending an ice age because you see one problem that uniformitarian scientists run into it with their explanations of the ice age is that they can in their model sometimes produce an ice age they can explain what creates an ice age but then they can’t explain how it stops you can’t get the ice age to stop but the flood if the flood is the producer of an ice age it explains why the ice age would end because the features that produce the ice age would have waned with time air assaults would settle out of the atmosphere even though volcanism even though volcanoes would still be active during the ice age that volcanic activity decreases aerosols eventually settle out of the atmosphere and that allows more sunlight to hit the land moreover when evaporation takes place on the ocean what happens to the temperatures of the ocean cools down that’s what evaporation does this is why we sweat actually when you sweat it’s not that the water that your body produces cools you down it’s the evaporation of the water from your skin because when the water evaporates it takes some of the heat with it and the same thing would have happened to the oceans as the water evaporated the oceans were gradually cooling so these mechanisms that produced the Ice Age they would have eventually disappeared now or it also talks about how using the same meteorological understandings basic meteorological understandings that we have today we can infer some storm patterns that would have that would have taken place during the Ice Age and we can see that the very places where precipitation most likely would have happened are the very places that just studying scientifically we see there was ice buildup there was great amount of ice buildup so it makes sense the model makes sense now with these processes how long was the Ice Age how long was this period of increased glaciation on the earth Oh art says about 700 years now take that take that suggestion with an asterisk there’s a lot of variation among creationist scientists as to how long ice age actually was at least one other person I read says the ice age was about 250 years so that substantially less but generally creationist talking about the ice age taking mere hundreds of years which is quite different from uniformitarian scientists as we’ll see a little bit later on but anyways going back to orl we have ice build up for about five hundred years and then 200 years of ice recession ice decreasing so using the timeline we’ve been discussing in our course based off the Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies this would mean that the ice age would begin right after the flood around 2,350 BC and it would end remember of course there’s gradual changes throughout the period but starting into a 2350 BC and ending around 1650 BC or about 200 years before Israel’s exodus from Egypt now why doesn’t the flood talk about this ice and glaciation I mean the flood the Bible is that not really mentioned in the Bible because it didn’t affect the areas that the Bible talks about you’re in the Middle East doesn’t really matter what’s happening in higher northern climes there’s no need to comment on the ice and snow though it is interesting that job which would have likely been written during the Ice Age does takla a fair amount about ice snow and precipitation anyways but we have a period of hundreds of years that would be the ice age on the last part of a large presentation we hear about how this unique flood ice age model fits with various pieces of scientific data that have been uncovered and a number of these are mentioned I’ll just go through them talks about the wet deserts places that are extremely hot and dry today have evidence of formerly great amounts of plants animals and even water and this has to be expected if the ice age had a different climate especially increased precipitation in various parts of the world due to oceanic evaporation and he mentioned to two specific examples part mentioned Lake Bonneville in the Southwest United States it’s a much deeper lake at one time but is hardly deep at all today and then the plentiful rock paintings in the Sahara Desert of all kinds of animals even domestic lights now the support for the ice age in this model is the unfrozen lowlands at high latitudes now high latitudes were talking very high very far north on the earth being so far north one might expect that these places would be ice-covered and devoid of life that’s not the case we find all sorts of animal remains there Ice Age animals so why didn’t they become covered with ice if they’re so far north well the flood model explains that these places were adjacent to the coasts and because the oceans were warmer the weather patterns were bringing warm air and weather from the warm oceans to these coastal lowlands and it caused these parts of the earth to remain ice-free even though they’re very far North other animal remains especially wooly animals emphasize the unique environment of the Ice Age consistent with this model there remains there are remains of animals like the woolly mammoth in areas that would have been impossible for those animals to live places that are swamps or frozen tundra today this shows us that these lands were different in each pass during the Ice Age they were most likely fertile grasslands and that’s why the animals are really multiplying there and again animal remains in these areas are likely post-flood because as art says we find these animal remains on top of and in glacial till this is not flood sentiments but ice age type deposits many of these large animals are found all over North America which shows that man and animals were able to migrate to North America likely over the Bering Land Bridge and this is because the high evaporation of the Ice Age and the trapping of snow and ice on land did what to the levels of the ocean brought it down you had lower sea level because so much the water was already trapped on land frozen and a lots of evaporation taking place so this means that many parts of the world that are covered by water today during the Ice Age were actually not covered by water the bering land bridge between Russia and Alaska would be one example England was probably joined to the rest of the European continent as another example Indonesia was more joined join the various places making migration and boat travel much more feasible allowing people to get to Australia people and animals many offshore islands around the world were once joined to the larger landmass because of the lower sea levels but this allowed the animal and people migrations during the period after the flood and after Babel second animal that helps a second group of animal remains that helps explain the Ice Age in the flood model are the remains of the Saiga antelope they only live in a very small area today because they have such a particular preference for planes and for mild weather and yet we find the remains all over eastern Siberia and Russia how can this be if those terrains couldn’t support the Saiga antelope today well it must have been different in the past and again this is this makes sense according to the flood ice age model then there’s the unique deaths of many woolly mammoths the Ice Age did create livable environments in northern lowlands and other places but these environments eventually changed and part of the changes included the environments becoming colder drier and windier and though the ice agent as a whole it caused cooler summers in various places and milder winters when the ice ages effects diminished these environments were no longer hospitable to the animals living there and we also had the arrival of dust storms dust storms as bad or even worse than the dust storms in the Dust Bowl era Dust Bowl area early 1900s in the United States these dust storms were capable of rapidly covering stationary mammoths until it was too late for those mammoths to escape I mean you heard him explain that for one particular woolly mammoth that was discovered dead but in an upright position like was trying to get out of some dust this really connects with well enough piece of evidence I’ll mention in a second but also we have the concept of dis harmonious association the changing environments of the Ice Age resulted in this strange phenomenon what is dis harmonious association big sciency word that just refers to animals who normally don’t live in the same environment living in the same place during the Ice Age a large cites the example of hippos and reindeer both living in England at the same time hippos they live in a much warmer clime and reindeer in a much colder climate but they were able to exist together but then they all died at the end of the Ice Age why is that they and other animals why do we have these mass extinctions it’s because these unique hospitable environments that were created in some areas during Ice Age they disappeared at the end of the Ice Age when those factors promoting such a climate had waned to be sure a man played a role in these mass extinctions especially of large animals man often hunts large animals to extinction or to much smaller numbers there’s a lot of bang for your buck when you kill a large animal it’s also part of protecting protecting the people that you live with and so and probably contributed to the mass extinctions at the end of the Ice Age but environmental factors were certainly working – animals that were formerly suited for their environments no longer work because the Ice Age was ending so that covers many of the pieces of evidence that part mentions in his presentation again we could explore many of these aspects and other aspects in more detail but what’s the big picture what do I really want you to understand from today’s lesson two main conclusions one there is strong evidence of an ice age in our world this is not anti-christian this is not anti Bible there is a lot of evidence for this and it actually fits with the bottle the flood provides a good explanation of why the ice age happened and why it why progressed and featured the elements that it did but what do uniformitarian scientists what do secular scientists think when it comes to the ice age now let me just briefly clarify when I say uniformitarian I mean specifically that they don’t believe that any major events any major catastrophes that would have affected the entire earth happened in the past it’s not wrong to say all right the processes we see today those are the processes that likely took place in the past creationist scientists are doing the same thing but the creationist scientists believe in catastrophism they believe that there were special events that took place in the past that affected the entire world like creation like the flood but uniformitarian deny that they say no there were you know some anomalies but nothing that was that catastrophic nothing that really affected the entire and so that really affects the way that they view the ice age they do believe in an ice age but unsurprisingly they do believe in a worldwide flood so the flood was not the trigger for the Ice Age in fact for uniformitarian in the uniform attained in doesn’t believe in an ice age but ice ages kernel current thought is that there have been five ice ages the first one took place about 2.2 billion years ago and the most recent took place about two million years ago they actually believe we’re in an ice age right now we’re in the part of the ice age where the ice is receding because for them ice ages refer to vast periods of time which is slightly different conditions on here and these ice ages they progress according to a cyclical pattern within this large two million year long ice age there are cycles of a hundred thousand years or forty thousand years where the ice expands and retreats and we’re in like I said supposedly one of those periods were the ice is retreating and have been for the last ten thousand years now what causes them to to suggest this to believe in multiple and cyclical ice ages well it’s because the the one great cause that they seem to agree on as for creating ice ages has to do with the orbit of the earth around the Sun 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 changes in the Earth’s atmosphere it causes these ice age cycles but this explanation actually doesn’t hold up very well under scrutiny because the differences in the Earth’s orbit and its tectonic plates and the environment they’re too slight to substantially affect the Earth’s environment in an ice age and they can’t they can’t produce the unique conditions that are needed for an ice age where you have the high evaporation and the lower temperatures on land so this is why actually many uniformitarian scientists just as Michael Hobart mentions admit they don’t really know what causes the ice ages it’s not very well understood they’ll say but they are sure that there are many ice ages and that they do proceed according to cycles and they base this off complexity of the Glacial expansion and other bits of data like certain oceanic rocks and ice core rings of course this data is interpreted according to uniformitarian presuppositions but I hope that you’ve seen today there is a much more reasonable explanation for the ice data for the Ice Age and that is the flood the great flood of God’s judgment very likely caused unique conditions on earth that resulted in a small period of several hundred years which the earth was more covered by ice that’s basically it now again this theory this model this explanation that we look at today is not inerrant like Scripture is but it does help make sense of the data that we’ve seen while remaining true to the authority of Scripture this is another illustration of what it means to have a biblical worldview that’s what I hope you’re getting from our Sunday School lessons and I hope that your understanding and even implementing in your life there is a lot of data there’s a lot of information the world a lot of interesting things to ask questions about and to study but one needs to proceed according to a biblical worldview and that means you start with the Bible you can start with the Bible because it’s trustworthy because it’s God’s Word because it’s perfect you start with the Bible and then you interpret everything you see in the world according to Nevada your own experiences scientific data you can you can rest on the Bible as your foundation because it’s perfect and that gives you a good foundation for understanding and creating models and explanations for what you see in the world and this is not just true with the Ice Age it’s true with creation it’s true and you think of some of the current issues that we have today abortion sexuality gender psychology start with the Bible and then look at the data and you’ll come to a much more accurate understanding but when you start outside the Bible when you start with man’s autonomous reviews and meant what man thinks is wise and right and you come to come you come to certain conclusions and then you try and read those back into the Bible that’s when you create lots of problems for yourself and for others so in the big picture of the Ice Age there’s an even bigger picture and that is the value of a biblical worldview now let’s see how much time we have left oh you don’t have any time you have questions about today’s lesson or about the ice age please email me but that’s all for this week next week we’re moving on from the flood to an event not too long after the flood the rebellion of man against God that Babel let’s close in prayer well God we thank you for your word that it is sure and it helps us God it helps us to see clearly just like a lamp lights our way it helps us to make sense and to see what things really are in the world God there’s still many questions about the ice age and other aspects of our past and it’s amazing to make scientific discoveries in these in other areas but Lord we will be wise if we proceed with a biblical worldview the fear of you God is the beginning of knowledge and it is the beginning of wisdom I pray that everyone listening today would truly appreciate that not just for this question about the Ice Age but for all of life and Jesus name Amen you’re welcome and I’ll see you next week