The Ice Age Model
The evidence for an Ice Age that covered 30% of the high and mid latitude continents is overwhelming. This is known when you compare glaciated areas today with large areas of the continents today. Even tropical mountains were glaciated with a snow line about 3,000 feet lower than today. The glaciation features are still mostly fresh, indicating that the Ice Age occurred not that long ago. In fact, the Ice Age is the last major geophysical event in earth history.
However, the cause of the Ice Age (or ice ages) has been and continues to be a major mystery of earth science, and there are well over 60 theories: “Although theories abound, no one really knows what causes ice ages” (David Alt, 2001, “Glacial Lake Missoula and Its Humongous Floods,” p. 180).
It is obvious that the Ice Age occurred after the Flood, since beautiful horseshoe-shaped moraines are preserved on the surface out from many mountain valleys of the western United States. Moraines are formed at the edges (lateral moraine) and end of a glacier (end moraine) by the deposition and pushing of rocks of all sizes into ridges. These geometric features cannot be formed during Flood runoff, but are typical of glaciation.
The immediate climatic consequences of the Genesis Flood can produce the conditions needed for an Ice Age. These conditions are much cooler summers (cooler than 20°F), much greater snowfall, and persistence in time. The Flood was a tremendous catastrophe involving meteorite impacts, volcanism, and large crustal movements. The volcanism would have produced a shroud of ash and aerosols (very small particles) trapped in the stratosphere after the Flood. The ash and aerosols reflect some of the sunlight back to space, cooling the atmosphere, especially over mid and high latitude continents. But particles slowly fall out of the stratosphere, which would be replenished by copious post-Flood volcanism for which there is abundant evidence.
The heat produced by the Flood remained in the water of the oceans, which would have been warm from pole to pole and top to bottom. Of course, there was no sea ice. The significance of a warm ocean immediately after the Flood is the warmer the water the greater the evaporation, which would be most significant at mid and high latitudes compared to today. The warm ocean water and the heat given off during condensation would end up as a large heat source for the atmosphere, keeping winters much warmer at high and mid latitude.
So, the big picture is cool summers and mild winters (little seasonal contrast) at mid and high latitude continents adjacent to warm oceans. Such a combination can result in huge snowfall that will persist year after year building up to ice sheets. The time for an ice age can be estimated by the cooling time of the ocean. So, the post-Flood rapid Ice Age was about 700 years long. Secondary issues related to this Ice Age model are: 1) there was only one Ice Age; 2) the ice sheets were about 50% thinner than the crude estimates by mainstream scientists; 3) there was a mix of warm and cool climate plants and animals during the Ice Age; 4) millions of woolly mammoths lived in the unglaciated lowlands of Siberia, Alaska, and the Yukon Territory; 5) Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets mostly built up during the Ice Age with additional amounts after the Ice Age (ice cores ages are greatly exaggerated); 6) ancient ice ages claimed hundreds of millions to a few billion years ago in the evolutionary science dating scheme are really huge landslides during the Flood; and 7) the extinction of many large animals on all continents except Africa at the end of the Ice Age. For more information, see the online Books/DVDs section.
A question to ponder is: If evolutionary scientists cannot explain the last major geophysical event in earth history, while creationists can, then why should we believe them for older events?
