Claim CH590:
The great release of energy during the Flood caused much water from the
new oceans to enter the atmosphere. This moisture fell at the poles as
snow and caused the Ice Age.
Source:
Morris, Henry M., 1974. Scientific Creationism, Green Forest, AR: Master
Books, pp. 126-127.
Response:
- Adding heat to a system tends to make it hotter. The falling moisture
would have been a hot rain, not snow.
Creationists invoke evaporation as a cooling method. They forget that
all the heat lost to evaporation returns when the water condenses
again and that more latent heat is then released in the freezing.
- A proper ice age cannot fit into a young-earth timescale. For a
continent-scale glacier to form, advance enough to change the
landscape, and retreat takes centuries or more, not a decade.
Cores from ice sheets reveal annual layers that date back 160,000 years
in places. Volcanic eruptions recorded in the top few thousand years
match historic records. The top 4,000 or so layers have to be annual
layers. It is unlikely that the other 156,000 layers were laid down in
just a few years (Brinkman 1995).
- The earth under the ice sheets is isostatically adjusted to the mass of
ice. Even if 10,000 or more feet of ice were dropped on Greenland and
Antarctica in only a few years about 4,000 years ago, it would take over
12,000 years to reach the observed (today) degree of adjustment.
Scandinavia and Canada are still rebounding from the disappearance of
glaciers covering them at the end of the last ice age (Strahler 1987,
chap. 27). It would have taken thousands of additional years for the
weight of the ice to push them down in the first place.
- There are multiple lines of evidence for many glacial advances and
retreats in the last 2 million years (Shackleton 2000).
- Species of foraminifera vary with ocean temperature. The
variation is recorded in deep ocean sediments, showing many
long-term changes (Strahler 1987, 252).
- Oxygen isotope ratios (18O/16O) indicate when
more water is held in glaciers (because 16O evaporates
more easily and so is disproportionately common in snow). This
ratio is recorded in carbonate shells in seafloor sediments; it
shows the same sort of variation (Strahler 1987, 253).
- Formations caused by glaciers on Mauna Kea show that the volcano
experienced at least four glaciations. Lava flows between the
formations show that the glaciations were separate (Strahler
1987, 255).
- The water level of Lake Bonneville (of which Great Salt Lake is a
remnant) rose in times of glaciation, leaving different fossil
shorelines. Simultaneously, glaciers from the Rockies advanced,
leaving superposed morainal material. Research on these deposits
reveals glaciations at about 125,000, 200,000, 300,000, 400,000, and
440,000 years ago, plus several more cycles between 500,000 and
800,000 years ago (Strahler 1987, 255).
Furthermore, there is evidence for ice ages in the late Ordovician and
in the late Carboniferous to early Permian (Strahler 1987, 265).
These ice ages would have had to occur in the middle of the Flood.
They cannot be easily discounted because they are indicated by just the
same kind of evidence that causes creationists (and mainstream
geologists) to recognize a recent ice age.
- Changes in climate are correlated with Milankovitch cycles, long-term
cycles in the earth's orbit (Lindsay 1997).
References:
- Brinkman, Matt, 1995. Ice core dating.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icecores.html
- Lindsay, Don, 1997. Astronomical cycles.
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/astro_cycles.html
- Shackleton, Nicholas J., 2000. The 100,000-year ice-age cycle
identified and found to lag temperature, carbon dioxide, and orbital
eccentricity. Science 289: 1897-1902.
- Strahler, Arthur N., 1987. Science and Earth History: The
Evolution/Creation Controversy, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books,
chpt. 26-28.
Further Reading:
Alley, R. B. and M. L. Bender, 1998. Greenland ice cores: Frozen in
time. Scientific American 278(2) (Feb.): 80-85.
created 2003-6-7, modified 2003-9-6