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Paleoclimatology -- The Ice Age
Description of the Ice Age
Ice
•Ice sheets covered the large areas of the Northern hemisphere
•3500-4000 m (
miles) thick
•depressed the ground 7-800 m (
feet or .4-.5 miles)
•lowered the sea level 121 m (
feet)
Climate
•tundra and steppes throughout Europe and Asia
•temperate climate in southern US
•temperate climate in Israel and northern Africa
•dryer overall
•increased storminess along jet stream
Evidence of the Ice Age
These include nine different items.
1.
•scratches left behind by the rocks that are carried along under the ice as it
moves.
2.
•are the rocks that are pushed ahead of the ice and left behind when the ice
retreats.
3.
•boulders that are carried on top of the ice and left behind when the ice
melts.
4.
•places where the ice pressed the ground down and the hole remains after
the ice leaves.
5.
•formed by dirt that was carried along by water melting off the ice.
6.
•piles of dirt that were deformed by the moving ice into a teardrop shape.
7.
•flat bottomed valleys formed by the moving ice.
8.
•drilled from Greenland where the ice never melts
•Ice Cores -- GRIP, GISP2 -- Summit in Greenland
–Antarctica
•record of snowfall during entire ice age
•chemicals give information about the past
9.
•Atlantic Ocean
•Ponds in North America and Europe
Cause of the Ice Age
Models by Dr. L. Vardiman
•hot ocean ridges according to creationist theory
•precipitation increased in model where the ice sheets were
Timing
•evolution -- 90,000 years to grow, 10,000 to melt
•Flood models -- 500 years to grow, 200 years to melt
Effects of the Ice Age
From the Bible
•Job lived about 300 years after the Flood. This would probably have been
during the Ice Age. In Job 38:22-30, God talks about hail, snow, ice, and the
freezing of the deep (ocean). If Job lived during the Ice Age, he would have
known people who had seen the great walls of ice in Northern Europe
From the Bible
•Much of the land of Israel today is desert. But in Exodus 3:7,8 God describes it
as a land of plenty. This would have been near the end of the Ice Age. During
that time the land would have been much moister than today.
Babel
•As the people traveled away from Babel, anyone traveling northward would
have soon found the climate becoming inhospitable. The cold would have made it
difficult for plants to grow, and the animals would probably migrate making
hunting hard. Lack of sunlight combined with a shortage of fruit would have
caused rickets, the disease that shaped Neanderthal’s body.
Babel
•The water in the ice sheets would have come out of the oceans, lowering their
level and forming an ice bridge between Siberia and Alaska. It is possible it also
made migration throughout the Pacific islands easier also.
Babel
•The area around Babel, Mesopotamia, Palestine and Egypt for example, would
have had excellent climate for rapid growth, as is seen in the early civilizations in
this area.
Demise of the Ice Age
Conditions
•warming trend
•melting ice sheets
•changing vegetation
Younger Dryas
•colder again
•dry again
•vegetation changed back
•rapid onset and termination
–evolution 10 years onset, and termination
•possibly caused by meltwater flood