Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2004

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Claim CH590:

Source:

Response:

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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).
   
   
3. 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.
   
   
4. 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.
   
   
5. Changes in climate are correlated with Milankovitch cycles, long-term cycles in the earth's orbit (Lindsay 1997).

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Further Reading: