The Flood

Alan Feuerbacher

Index:

• Part 1: General Description of the Flood
• Part 2: The Polar Regions
• Part 3: Where Did the Water Come From?
• Part 4: Where Did the Water Go?
  • Part 5: Dating Methods
  • Part 6: Plate Tectonics
    • Part 7: Volcanic Chains and Hotspot Tracks
    • Part 8: Seafloor Spreading and Continental Drift
    • Part 9: Subduction Zones
  • Part 10: The Mediterranean Was a Desert
• Part 11: Traces of the Flood and the Ice Ages
  • Part 12: Documented Flooding in the Pacific Northwest
  • Part 13: Summary of Ice Age Events
  • Part 14: Evidence for Ice Ages Through 1960
  • Part 15: Ice Ages Confirmed
  • Part 16: More Evidence for the Ice Ages
• Part 17: Other Problems with the Flood
  • Part 18: Rain Prior to the Flood
  • Part 19: Rise of Continents Due To Flooding
• Part 20: Flood Legends
• Part 21: Summary on the Flood

Part 1: General Description of the Flood

Introduction

The Noachian Flood account is a foundation stone of the Bible, since many Bible writers refer to the Flood as a historical event. If it could be shown by geological evidence that the Flood occurred, strong support would be lent to the Bible's truth. However, if such evidence indicated the Flood did not occur, its claim of inspiration could be damaged for those who respect truth.

In this essay I will examine evidence, especially geological, that the Watchtower Society uses to prove the Flood was a historical event, as well as information the Society has not covered. After researching this material, I was forced to conclude there is little geological evidence the Flood occurred. If it occurred, it left few traces, except possibly in legends and certainly in the Bible.

General Description Of The Flood

The events of the Flood according to the Genesis account and Watchtower publications are:

From Genesis:

1. The flood was a global cataclysm.

2. It lasted about a year.

3. The highest mountains were covered by the floodwaters.

4. The draining of the floodwaters took about eleven months.

5. The source of the waters was the "floodgates of the heavens" and the "springs of the watery deep."

From the Insight¹ book:

6. The source of the flood was the water above the "expanse" created on the second creative day of Genesis.

7. Prior to the flood there were no high mountains, no deep sea basins, and no icecaps.

8. During or after the flood the earth's crust shifted, mountains were created, and the shallow sea basins were deepened.

From the Aid² book:

9. There was no rain prior to the flood.

10. The polar regions were suddenly plunged into a deep freeze.

11. Great gorges and drifts of debris were created.

The evidence presented in Insight on the Scriptures and in Aid to Bible Understanding is in three categories: the scriptures, legends, and physical evidence. The scriptural evidence is not an issue since the Bible clearly says there was a Flood. Hence, I will discuss the physical evidence in detail, as well as each of the above listed points, and bring in other references to the Flood in the Society's publications as needed. Legends are difficult to objectively assess, and therefore I will have less to say about them. Note that Genesis says nothing that can be proved or disproved by reference to physical phenomena. A miracle could have occurred and there would be no way to detect it. The problem in that case is how such a global cataclysm could leave no physical traces.

Part 2: The Polar Regions

The Society has often used the discovery of so-called quick-frozen animals as evidence for the Flood, as the following excerpts from some of its latest publications show. The excerpts should clear up some misconceptions about the claim there are "quick-frozen mammoths in Siberia," and about related topics.

The Insight book says:³

What evidence proves that there truly was a global deluge?.... Other possible evidence of a drastic change: Remains of mammoths and rhinoceroses have been found in different parts of the earth.... in Siberian cliffs.... in Siberian and Alaskan ice. In fact, some were found with food undigested in their stomachs or still unchewed in their teeth, indicating that they died suddenly.

The Creation book says:⁴

.... further evidence that a flood of immense proportions occurred in the not-too-distant past is the great number of fossils and carcasses deposited in icy, mucky dumps. The Saturday Evening Post⁵ noted: 'Many of these animals were perfectly fresh, whole and undamaged, and still either standing or at least kneeling upright.... Here is a really shocking -- to our previous way of thinking -- picture. Vast herds of enormous, well-fed beasts not specifically designed for extreme cold, placidly feeding in sunny pastures.... Suddenly they were all killed without any visible sign of violence and before they could so much as swallow a last mouthful of food, and then were quick-frozen so rapidly that every cell of their bodies is perfectly preserved.'

This fits in with what happened in the great Flood. The Bible describes it in these words: 'All the springs of the vast watery deep were broken open and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.' The downpour 'overwhelmed the earth,' being accompanied no doubt by freezing winds in the polar regions.... There, the temperature change would be the most rapid and drastic. Various forms of life were thus engulfed and preserved in frozen muck. One such may have been the mammoth that was uncovered by excavators in Siberia and that is seen in the accompanying illustration. Vegetation was still in its mouth and stomach and its flesh was even edible when thawed out.

It should be noted that The Saturday Evening Post did not "note" anything in the above quotation. Rather, it was "noted" by the author, Ivan T. Sanderson, in an article "Riddle of the Frozen Giants." Attributing editorial weight where there is none is unfair to readers.

Next, note that Insight gives no indication how finding undigested food in the mouths of frozen mammoths actually relates to a flood. Rather, it leaves the connection vague -- somehow the sudden death of animals indicates there was a flood. But sudden death occurs in many other ways. Nor does Insight show the significance of finding remains of animals in different parts of the earth or in common strata. Dinosaur remains are found all over the earth and in common strata. Surely Insight is not taking the creationist position that dinosaurs died in the Flood, since the Society appears to have abandoned creationist style Flood Geology by the late 1970s. All the references I've found that speak of animals supposedly found in common strata, show after detailed analysis that the animals were not just thrown together in a pile. Rather, they were buried in sequences of deposits that are often dateable and show evidence of accumulation over long periods of time. On The Track Of Ice Age Mammals says concerning certain fossil bearing Pleistocene deposits:⁶

In southern Britain.... remains of both hippopotamus and reindeer are found commonly, though never in the same deposit. The hippopotamus is usually interpreted as an indicator of warm conditions, reindeer of cold.

For an extended and excellent discussion of sedimentary strata see God's Time-Records in Ancient Sediments⁷ and Neglect of Geologic Data: Sedimentary Strata Compared With Young-Earth Creationist Writings.^{8, 8a}

The Creation book makes a clearer connection between freezing conditions and the Flood, but upon close examination the argument proves unconvincing. Specifically, if the earth were immediately covered by floodwaters, to a depth sufficient to cover the mountains, how could any animals become frozen, especially by "freezing winds?" They would have been submerged by the flood water and isolated from freezing winds. This key concept is not explained. An alternative, not mentioned, would be that the water itself was cold enough to freeze the animals. But then how would it have remained unfrozen? Also, the Saturday Evening Post article claims the animals were killed without any sign of violence. Does this sound like the effect of a flood large enough to cover the earth? The Bible says the Flood "came and swept them all away." How can Creation argue that animals were killed without any sign of violence? The Post article is itself inconsistent with the photograph of the mammoth presented along with it. This photo appears also on page 203 of Creation. The mammoth was buried in an upright struggling position, but proved to have a broken hip and other broken bones.

Sanderson's Saturday Evening Post article advanced a theory that was so extreme that no scientific journal would accept it for publication. Actually the article merely perpetuated a long-standing myth. Many of the its statements were exaggerations and falsehoods. They were similar to the speculations of other authors of the time, and have sometimes been further exaggerated by authors who have quoted from the article.^8b Many of Sanderson's statements that clearly refer to the famous 1899 discovery of the Berezovka mammoth, which is the one pictured on page 203 of the Creation book, are easily seen to be untrue when compared to the original source material. Of course, Sanderson gives no references to source material.

Let's examine the facts about frozen mammoths and such, by going to sources more reliable than The Saturday Evening Post. First I'll set forth a point Creation states directly, or one which it quotes from the Sanderson article, and then show what reliable sources have to say about it.

"Many of these animals were perfectly fresh, whole and undamaged...."

In 1979 a frozen bison was found in Alaska (see below), which did have parts fresh enough for humans to eat, since one author claimed to have eaten meat from it. However, the excavator of the Berezovka mammoth reported:

.... Upon the left hind leg I also found portions of decayed flesh.... The stench emitted by this extremity was unbearable, so that it was necessary to stop work every minute. A thorough washing failed to remove the horrible smell from our hands, and yet we were obliged to perform part of our task with bare hands.⁹

".... beasts not specifically designed for extreme cold...."

The woolly mammoths.... were apparently well adapted to the cold climate; their long hair, warm underwool, and thick layer of subcutaneous fat protected them against the cold air....¹⁰

The layer of fat beneath the skin is 9 centimeters thick.¹¹

".... Suddenly they were all killed without any visible sign of violence...."

Not true. The Berezovka mammoth had many broken bones:

The left fore leg is bent, so that it is evident that the mammoth tried to crawl out of the pit or crevice into which he probably fell, but apparently he was so badly injured by the fall that he could not free himself.... The right fore leg was so placed as to indicate that the mammoth after falling had supported himself on this leg while attempting to step forward with the left one. We concluded that while in this standing position he became exhausted and died on this very spot, and that he had by no means been washed there by the water from elsewhere.... probably our specimen broke through into a crevice, which would account for his position and for the fracture of such heavy bones as the pelvis and the right forearm. After falling, the mammoth no doubt tried to crawl out, the position of both fore legs being peculiarly like that of an animal making such effort, but the injuries were so serious that his strength gave way and he soon perished.... we exposed several broken ribs.... [we] removed the shoulder bone, which was broken in the middle, evidently injured when the mammoth fell.... we succeeded in exposing.... the protruded male genital.¹²

Death due to suffocation is indicated by the erection of the mammoth's penis. This is consistent with the mammoth's having been buried in its fall. Also note that the article's author specifically comments that the mammoth could not have been washed by water to its final resting place since it died partially standing up. This is inconsistent with the picture given by the Biblical statement that the Flood "swept them all away."

The animals "were quick-frozen so rapidly that every cell of their bodies is perfectly preserved."

Actually only the superficial parts of the Berezovka mammoth were preserved. Most of the internal organs had already rotted away by the time of its discovery.^12a

.... the remains of food in the stomach were exposed. The latter was badly decayed.... The walls of the stomach.... were badly decayed and torn.... the other organs are destroyed.... I collected bits of blood.... To the touch they resemble coarse dry sand.... blood that was taken from above the sternum.... had a bright clay-yellow color, and to the touch felt like chalk.... The stench is not near so intolerable as during the first two days, possibly because we have grown accustomed to it.¹³

The mammoth's "flesh was even edible when thawed out."

"The flesh from under the shoulder, which is fibrous and marbled with fat, is dark red in color and looks as fresh as well-frozen beef or horse meat. It looked so appetizing that we wondered for some time whether we should not taste it, but no one would venture to take it into his mouth, and horseflesh was given the preference. The dogs cleaned up whatever mammoth meat was thrown to them.¹⁴

Dogs are often not fussy about what they eat, even eating feces on occasion.

Histological examination of fat and flesh of the Berezovka mammoth showed 'deep penetrating chemical alteration as a result of the very slow decay,' and even the frozen ground surrounding a mammoth had the same putrid odor, implying decay before freezing.... Furthermore, the stories of a banquet on the flesh of the Berezovka mammoth were 'a hundred percent invention'....¹⁵

What really appears to have happened (as I was told by Professor Anatol Heintz) is that one of them made a heroic attempt to take a bite out of the 40,000-year old meat but was unable to keep it down, in spite of a generous use of spices.¹⁶

A number of books present further information about frozen animals found in the Arctic. Here are some examples:

.... frozen mammoths still retaining bits of rotting flesh and hide had been reported since 1692 at a number of localities in northern Siberia. (In Alaska, they are encountered from time to time in river alluvium in the course of hydraulic gold mining.) Nevertheless, mammoths preserved in this way are extremely rare.

A cold to cool climate is clearly indicated for the woolly mammoth by the heavy coat of hair and the layer of insulating fat, and the common occurrence of its remains near glacial deposits in association with the fossils of other Arctic animals, such as the hair-covered woolly rhinoceros, musk oxen, reindeer, and a distinctive community of many now-extinct animals. According to Russian botanists, the stomach contents of several frozen examples of the woolly mammoth have yielded some eighty species of well-known northern grasses, sedges, and trees of high-boreal and tundra areas.¹⁷

In May, 1846, a mammoth carcass was found in Siberia along the banks of the Indigirka River, although it was soon lost. The river was in violent flood, tearing away its banks and carrying great chunks of ice and frozen soil out to sea. A Russian government survey team had found the mammoth as the river was dislodging it from the river bank. The team dragged the mammoth onto the riverbank and began dismembering it. Time-Life's Ice Ages tells the story recorded by a team member named Benkendorf:¹⁸

First we hacked off the tusks and sent them aboard our boat.... Then the natives tried to hew off the head, but this was slow work. As the belly of the brute was cut open, out rolled the intestines, and the stench was so dreadful that I could not avert my nausea and had to turn away. But I had the stomach cut out and dragged aside. It was well filled. The contents were instructive and well preserved. The chief contents were young shoots of fir and pine. A quantity of young fir cones, also in a chewed state, were mixed with the mass.

Shortly after the carcass was cut open, the river undercut the bank and the mammoth was lost.

Note the details of the following find.¹⁹ You may not agree with the dating of the events but the physical evidence pointing to the sequence of events as the author describes it is clear enough.

Just 36,000 years ago, a steppe bison was killed by lions.... close to the present-day site of Fairbanks in central Alaska....

The animal belonged to the species Bison priscus, now extinct....

.... Remains of the steppe bison are often found among the cultural litter of Neandertal man and his successor in Europe, Cro-Magnon man, so it may be assumed that Ice Age man hunted this species for food. Certainly it was one of the favorite animals of the Ice Age artists....

.... [Contemporary animals included] mammoths.... moose, and grizzly bear. And, also, the lion -- a pride of which seems to have been responsible for the death of the bison.

Cattle, in dying, tend to topple. A bison, on the other hand, usually sinks down on its belly, and so did this one. The lions went to work. With their sharp teeth they cut up the tough hide along the animal's back and stripped it down its flanks, exposing the meat, of which most was eaten....

Before long, however, the winter cold put a stop to this. The meat froze and became hard as flint. One lion, hopefully trying to prise off some of it, broke its tooth and left a sliver of it in the meat.

Shortly thereafter the bison was buried and frozen into the permafrost. It was discovered in 1979 and kept in a freezer until 1984. The author relates:²⁰

The meat in its abdomen had spoiled before the bison was completely frozen. But in the neck area small pieces of meat were found attached to the skull. The lions had left so little there that it had frozen through while the meat was still fresh. When it thawed it gave off an unmistakable beef aroma, not unpleasantly mixed with a faint smell of the earth in which it was found, with a touch of mushroom. About a dozen of us gathered.... on April 6, 1984, to partake of Bison priscus stew. The taste was delicious, and none of us suffered any ill effects from the meal.

This is the only documented evidence I can find for someone actually eating remains of an ancient frozen animal from the Arctic. A photograph of this bison, which was nick-named "Blue Babe" because of the blue iron phosphate crystals that were found on its skin, appears in Ice Ages²¹ and On The Track Of Ice Age Mammals.²²

A complete description of the discovery and analysis of the "Blue Babe" find is given by the paleontologist who did most of the work, in Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe -- The Story of Blue Babe.²³ Concerning the reconstruction of how the bison died, this book says, on page 113:

In summary, we can conclude that Blue Babe died in early to mid winter, before his large reserves of fat were significantly reduced. He was killed and partially eaten by one or, more likely, two or three lions, which fed for several days until the carcass was frozen. Freezing slowed consumption by these lions, who then left the kill, allowing other scavengers to pick at the carcass throughout the winter. Indeed, the bison probably was scavenged by an array of mammalian and avian species, judging from bone fragments, feces, and a characteristic pattern of tendon connective tissue left by avian scavengers.

At the close of winter, the bison carcass was buried by silt carried in rapidly moving snowmelt water.... As the mummy lacked blowfly pupae cases and concentrations of scavenger beetles, burial must have occurred prior to the emergence of these insects in spring. The carcass probably thawed the first summer, but remained bedded on frozen ground and covered by cold silt. He was refrozen in subsequent winters and, as silt accumulated year after year, was gradually interred beneath the lower reaches of annual thaw within permafrost.

The author confirmed that the paleontological team ate some of the meat (page 298):

To climax and celebrate [taxidermist] Eirik Granqvist's work with Blue Babe, we had a bison stew dinner for him and for Bjorn Kurten, who was giving a guest lecture at the University of Alaska that week. A small part of the mummy's neck was diced and simmered in a pot of stock and vegetables. We had Blue Babe for dinner. The meat was well aged but still a little tough, and it gave the stew a strong Pleistocene aroma, but nobody there would have dared miss it.

The above information highlights a number of interesting facts: (1) Lions and bison that are now extinct once lived in North America. Paleontological evidence indicates these animals have been extinct in North America since the end of the last ice age, but they were contemporary with man in Europe and Asia prior to that. (2) The bison was frozen shortly after death, on the surface of the ground. This is obvious since the lions were able to eat part of it, and one broke its tooth in the frozen flesh. (3) The bison was not quick-frozen, as most of it had been eaten, the carcass had been scavenged by a variety of animals, and part of the remaining meat (the abdomen) had had time to decay. The abdomen was underneath the rest of the carcass, protected from the cold by the rest of the warm body, and was therefore the most likely area to stay warm long enough to start to decay. (4) After this the bison was buried, preserved for a long time, and found in the approximate position in which it died. (5) Lions at that time ate meat.

Now, the radiocarbon date of 36,000 years for the bison's death is very close to the limit of accuracy of that dating method, as there is hardly any radiocarbon left to measure, and the Society says that the method is reasonably accurate only for dates after the Flood. This, along with the above five points, and the fact that the bison was contemporary with Neanderthal man as well as other "ice age" animals, indicates the bison died a long time ago, and certainly before the Flood. But these things are contrary to the Society's view that, prior to the Flood, the earth was in a hothouse condition. It is also clear the bison was not killed in a flood of any sort. Therefore frozen animal carcasses in the Arctic are not necessarily evidence of the Flood. Serious doubt is also cast on the idea that animals lived together peacefully before the Flood, since lions ate bison.

Is the find of the partially eaten and decomposed remains of this frozen bison unique? Not at all. Quite a few frozen animals have been found in Siberia and Alaska, all in various stages of decomposition, and all giving evidence that they were trapped and killed by normal processes.

In 1977 a frozen baby mammoth, christened Dima, was found in the USSR in a remarkable state of preservation.²⁴ A bulldozer used in gold mining operations uncovered it from a layer of permafrost. Very little decomposition had set in before it was frozen, so that even the viscera were well preserved. There was no sign of disturbance by scavengers. The carcass was emaciated; no fat of any kind was present. The gastrointestinal tract was nearly empty of food but contained considerable amounts of mineral particles, silt, clay, gravel, plant detritus and the mammoth's own hair. Mineral particles were also found throughout the respiratory system. Histological evidence showed that Dima was under considerable physical exertion before death. Radiocarbon dates and other evidence of age are equivocal, indicating ages ranging from 9000 to 40,000 years.

The interpretations as to how Dima died and was preserved vary, but the most likely scenario, according to Guthrie, is that the animal became trapped in sticky, organically rich, water saturated silt in late autumn. It was probably sickly, as suggested by a heavy parasite load. It struggled to get free for several days, rapidly depleting its fat stores in the cold mud, finally dying when it could no longer keep its head above the mud. During its struggles it breathed in and swallowed much silt, as well as biting its own hair. The complete burying in mud protected the carcass from scavenging. The following spring the carcass was buried deeper by mud and silt flowing from higher on the slope. These conditions remained until the animal was discovered.

In 1968 a mummified horse was found in Siberia, and has been referred to as the Selerikan pony. Guthrie relates (p. 30):

An interesting story is associated with the Selerikan find (Lazarev 1977b). The horse was found deep underground by drift gold miners. Two legs and a tail emerged from the ceiling of the mine, 9 m below the surface in frozen ground. The miners used the horse's hind legs to hold cables and hang lanterns, but when the legs got in the way, they were blown out of the frozen ground with blasting powder and thrown away. Several months later, word of the find got back to Yakutsk and the Siberian Academy of Sciences sent a delegation to Selerikan to investigate. The body of the horse still remained, frozen in the ceiling. Using small blasting charges, the remainder of the horse was blown out. Later that summer, the horse's legs and tail were found in the dump. However, the head could not be found, and examination of the neck skin showed that it had not been preserved with the carcass.

Examination of the carcass again showed extensive decomposition of the internal organs, as well as a full gastrointestinal tract. Apparently the horse became mired in sticky mud and sank up to its neck. Predators soon killed it and dragged away the head. It too, was buried in later mud flows and preserved.

As with Dima and the Selerikan pony, other frozen partial carcasses have been found. Without exception they are in various stages of decomposition and show signs of scavenging. For an up-to-date account of the discovery and interpretation of these finds, including the Berezovka mammoth, see Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe.²⁵

The rest of the documented evidence about "frozen mammoths" and such is summed up in a 1961 Science article that came out shortly after Sanderson's Saturday Evening Post nonsense. Here are the highlights:

In contrast to scientific efforts, a number of popular and quasi-scientific articles have appeared in recent years, in which fragmentary knowledge, folk tales, and science fiction are combined under the guise of verity -- much to the chagrin of scientists and the confusion of the public. The most recent of such articles is that of Sanderson, who.... consistently disregards the actual observations of scientists and explorers (discussed below)....

Long hair, thick wool, and a heavy layer of fat definitely indicate a cold climate. Stomach contents reveal an abundance of grasses, sedges, and other boreal meadow and tundra plants, along with a few twigs, cones, and pollen of high-boreal and tundra trees. In general, this floral assemblage is 'richer...., somewhat warmer and probably also moister' than the present flora of the tundra in which frozen mammoth carcasses are now found. Quackenbush found 'large trees' associated with fossil mammoth in a now-treeless part of Alaska and also came to the conclusion that the climate was somewhat milder when the mammoths lived. The flora of deposits enclosing frozen mammoth carcasses is similar to that of the stomach contents. Furthermore, the healthy and robust condition of the frozen cadavers indicates that the mammoths fared well on such a diet.

The fauna of which the woolly mammoth formed a part was composed mainly of boreal and arctic steppe- and tundra-dwelling animals, although a few problematical warmer-latitude types appear in some European deposits.²⁶

Note that the preceding does not indicate a tropical climate, which must have existed if the Society's scenario of pre-flood conditions is correct. Much evidence also shows that the ice ages were cyclical, so that there were many of them and there were wide ranges of climates existing at various times in various parts of the world during the past few million years.

There is much geological evidence that Canada and Scandinavia were mostly covered by glaciers in the last ice age, Alaska was partly covered, and Siberia was more nearly glacier free. Therefore ice age animal remains ought to be scarce in those localities. Are they?

Even bones of the woolly mammoth are rare in Scandinavia, and they are lacking entirely in most of the Canadian archipelago. Other than two very fragmentary carcasses from Alaska, all of the frozen cadavers have come from northern Siberia. There have been at least 39 discoveries of frozen mammoth remains, with some soft parts preserved, but only four of these were nearly complete.²⁷

Note that discoveries of frozen remains are rare, although skeletons are common enough.

On the other hand, fossil tusks of woolly mammoth are very abundant and have been collected by ivory hunters for centuries.... The obvious conclusion is that the frozen mammoths were members of a populous race located in Siberia (and elsewhere).... And, contrary to some popular accounts, the figures cited above do not support the conclusion that 'absolutely countless numbers' of woolly mammoths were frozen and that 'many of these animals were perfectly fresh, whole, and undamaged....'²⁸

Heavy bones and ivory last a long time in any climate. That they should last a very long time in a very cold climate should be no surprise.

.... Marine fossils have never been discovered in deposits containing frozen mammoths.... Digby said that 'practically all cold-storage mammoths and woolly rhinos are found on the sides of cliffs sloping down to rivers -- a lake in one or two cases.'²⁹

If all these animals died in the Flood, and if, as the Creation book³⁰ says, "seashells are found on high mountains"^30a why are there no marine fossils buried along with the frozen mammoths? As for the method of burial,

One point of fact helpful in this problem is the specificity of the frozen animals: in Siberia only mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses have been found frozen and preserved, and the former have been found in much greater numbers than the latter.

So far no other members of the contemporary Eurasian fauna -- stag, horse, reindeer, antelope, musk ox, and so on -- have been found frozen and well preserved. That only the bulky and awkward 'giants' of the fauna are so preserved points to some peculiarity of their physique as a contributing factor. The low-slung rhinoceros would have trouble negotiating marshy ground and snow drifts. Similarly, the mammoth, with his stiff-legged mode of locomotion, would have difficulty on such terrain and, moreover, would probably not be able to cross even small gullies. It would be nearly impossible for him to extricate himself if he had fallen into a snow-filled gully or had been mired into boggy ground.... Also, the mere weight of the mammoth's body would have been a dangerous attribute if the animal happened to graze too near the edge of a river bluff which had been softened by the summer sun.

The stomach contents of the frozen mammoths indicates that death occurred in the warm season, probably in late summer or early fall, when melting and solifluction would have been at a maximum and, accordingly, locomotion would have been difficult.

Since only the heavy-footed giants of the fauna -- the mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses -- have been found in a frozen state, it is very unlikely that a catastrophic congelation occurred in Siberia.³¹

An excellent description of one type of burial process is found on page 54 of How To Deep-Freeze a Mammoth³² and a good photograph of the type of soil conditions that can do the burying is found on page 58 of Ice Ages.³³ Basically, all that happens is that the top layer of permafrost softens in the summer sun, slumps downhill, and buries whatever lies in its path. In winter, everything freezes up again, but if the slump is thick enough the lower parts can remain frozen for a long time.

A comment from Ice Ages sheds more light on the burial process:³⁴

.... the conditions in which Benkendorf found the mammoth in the Indigirka River may have been similar to those in which it died. The surveyor was surprised to find that the carcass was in an upright position, as if the ground on which the animal had stepped, "thousands of years ago, gave way under the weight of the giant, and he sank as he stood, on all four feet." Since that carcass was lost, the time of its death can only be guessed, but hundreds of other Siberian mammoths have been found in identical positions, suggesting that they perished when a rapid thaw melted the permafrost and turned the tundra into a huge bog.

The process of burial and freezing has been observed:³⁵

It is recorded that, in 1947, about 25 of 150 reindeer that went to the beach at Nicholson Peninsula, Northwest Territories, Canada, became mired in a gelifluction [solifluction] flow. Herders managed to pull out 18, but the other seven were swallowed up in a short time. Probably they are still frozen in the permafrost today, potential frozen fossils of the future.

An excellent description of the overall question of frozen mammoths and such is found in chapter 9 of On The Track Of Ice Age Mammals.³⁶ It covers many more details than I can cover here, and is well worth reading. Of interest is the age distribution of the relatively few frozen carcasses, such as the Berezovka mammoth.³⁷

The absolute age in years of the frozen carcasses was for a long time a subject of speculation. During recent years, with the availability of carbon¹⁴ dating, the exact age of many of them has become known, with surprising results. Their ages fall into two main groups, one ranging in age from about 45,000 years to 30,000 years and a smaller number of remains about 14-11,000 years old.

Although skeletal remains lacking soft parts are known from the period 30-12,000 years ago, there is very little carcass material of this age. A tendon on a 22,000-years-old bone of a lion from Alaska is one of the rare examples. As we have already seen, this intervening period was a time of massive glacial advance, the ice sheets in the northern hemisphere expanding to their maximum extent about 18,000 years ago. There were minor, more temperate, periods from about 45-25,000 years ago and about 12-11,000 years ago. It was apparently during these ameliorations that most of the known carcasses became frozen. This appears to be a climate-related depositional phenomenon, related to the amount of available water (which reached its minimum at times of glacial advance) and does not reflect an absence of mammoths from the areas in question. Under cold arid conditions, with little moisture to supply mudflows, carcasses would have tended ultimately to rot on the surface with only the bones surviving for potential fossilization. Under moister conditions summer mudflows could rapidly have covered carcasses lying in their paths, which became permanently frozen when the permafrost level rose above them the following winter.

A comprehensive description of frozen animals in the far north is given by Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe.³⁸ Much other very useful information can be found in After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America.³⁹

Many authors, including the Society's writers, often claim that animal remains found in caves are evidence of the Flood. They say that thousands of remains found in a single cave prove that animals took refuge from the rising flood water. But is this the case? Let's look at some geological findings. On The Track Of Ice Age Mammals said about cave deposits in general:⁴⁰

The quantity of mammalian remains found in caves and their fine state of preservation is sometimes astonishing. Two factors contribute to the accumulation of such deposits. Firstly, caves are places where remains tend to become concentrated by natural processes. Some caves are dangerous, with shafts in their roofs down which mammals may fall. In addition, some animals use caves as breeding places or eating or sleeping shelters and they may die there or leave the bones of their prey there. Secondly, though not invariably, caves are places where remains are likely to survive as fossils, once they have been deposited there. They are protected from weathering by the cave roof and the alkaline conditions prevailing in limestone caves favour the preservation of bone. Bones found in lava caves may be less well preserved.... [By] the early nineteenth century, it was becoming apparent to those who were beginning to excavate in caves that the processes that had led to the accumulation there of sediment and bones in the past could, in favourable situations, still be observed taking place at the present day. Studies of this fossilization in action, together with the development of excavation techniques that separate fossils from different layers, have since developed into the sophisticated methods being applied by palaeontologists today....

Natural open shafts are common wherever there are caves.... Such open shafts act as collecting places for debris falling in from above. If there is no cave stream below to wash it away, this builds up to form a conical talus which may finally block the shaft to ground level. Such shafts are of great danger to animals walking nearby, which may fall into them, their bones then becoming incorporated into the talus deposit below. A skeleton of a rhinoceros recently found beneath a 'sky light' in the roof of a lava cave on Mount Suswa in Kenya, was of an animal that had apparently fallen in from above.

One of the finest examples in the world of a talus cone with remains of Pleistocene mammals beneath a once open shaft was discovered in 1939 in Joint Mitnor Cave, Buckfastleigh, Devon in southwest England. Among the animals that had fallen into this were the hippopotamus, narrow-nosed rhinoceros, straight-tusked elephant, bison, giant deer, red deer, fallow deer, wild boar, cave lion, spotted hyaena, wolf, fox, wild cat, badger, brown bear, hare and rodents. The fauna is characteristically warm and is believed to be of Last Interglacial age, about 120,000 years old. It is of special significance that, although there is a fair representation of carnivorous species, most of the bones are of herbivores, especially bison, which are the animals which make up most of any mammalian population on the surface and which are statistically most likely to become entombed in this manner....

Occasionally such deposits may be so saturated with water that they turn into mudflows and progress along cave passages carrying incorporated bones with them. In this way, bones can be transported for considerable distances underground without the aid of running water.

Although water-laid sediments, both those laid down along stream beds.... and in still water lakes, are very common in caves, the frequency with which bone deposits have been explained away by 'washing underground' greatly exceeds the number of instances where this has really happened.... Considerable concentrations of mammalian bones do nevertheless sometimes occur in Pleistocene stream deposits in caves; and here it is necessary to consider whether any other process has also taken part in their assembly.

The hippopotamus-bearing deposits found in the cave near Yealmpton, Devon,.... were composed of horizontally bedded layers of gravel, sand, silt and clay that had clearly been laid down by a former cave stream; though how the bones had found their way into these deposits was not at all clear when the cave, which was filled to the roof with sediment, was first accidentally broken into by quarrying operations. Further quarrying resulted in the opening of a large cave chamber with a series of small talus cones beneath shafts. The animals had apparently fallen into the cave, in the same manner that occurred in Joint Mitnor, and their remains were then secondarily picked up and carried away by the cave stream flowing through the chamber, for redeposition elsewhere along its course. Groups of hyaena coprolites (droppings) spread along the streamway suggest that live hyaenas also had access to the cave.

Most important of all the processes of bone accumulation in caves is the activity of cave dwelling animals, which may die underground or leave the remains of their food there. Man may also leave his implements and the ashes of his fires and bury his dead in caves.

Important examples of accumulations of remains of Pleistocene mammals carried into caves by Palaeolithic man include a pile of bones and skulls of woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros found during the Cambridge University excavations in the Cotte de St. Brelade, Jersey, in the 1960s and 70s; and great quantities of bones of horse and reindeer excavated over a century ago in the Cave of Bruniquel, Tarn et Garonne, France. Among the Bruniquel finds were numerous fragments of reindeer antlers which had been cut by Palaeolithic man, using sharp flint knives, for the removal of slivers of antlers that were to be fashioned into other tools. The waste fragments of antler had then been abandoned on the cave floor....

Of the animals known from fossil remains in European caves, probably the great cave bear of Western Europe has attracted the greatest attention. The Drachenhole, a cave near Mixnitz in Austria, is estimated to have contained the remains of over 30,000 cave bears, which accumulated as a result of a small number of animals continuing to occupy the cave over a long period of time.

On The Track Of Ice Age Mammals describes many more examples of Pleistocene cave deposits, of which this is the last I will show:

Another important cave site [is Victoria Cave, Settle, Yorkshire], first excavated a century ago, with a lower cave earth filled with hippopotamus, straight-tusked elephant, narrow-nosed rhinoceros, hyaena and other mammals; overlain by a long series of later deposits. These show that the area was subsequently glaciated; and there was later occupation by upper Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Romano-British man. There can be few British caves which demonstrate in such a striking manner the climatic fluctuations of the Pleistocene. The cave is situated at an altitude of 400 metres on craggy moorland, and it seems incredible, at the present day, to think of hippos walking across this wild part of the Yorkshire moors.⁴¹

A question sometimes asked is, How could such large animals as mammoths survive on the presumably meager diet provided by the Arctic? Apparently they were migratory, and so were in the worst parts of the Arctic only in summer. This is similar to the behavior of caribou today. A few comments from National Geographic, June 1988, p. 759, concerning musk-oxen that live on Ellesmere Island may be instructive. They survive "by living in relatively low densities and covering a lot of ground.... It is hard to believe that such a large herd animal can survive in any numbers on so spare a diet."

I believe that the evidence considered here should settle the matters of the supposed sudden freezing of the polar regions, "frozen mammoths," and the like. There is little evidence that a flood killed large numbers of animals all at the same time. There is much evidence that they died over a long period of time as a result of natural events. The majority of mammoth carcasses in Siberia have been found in an upright position, indicating they were not swept away by a flood. Mammoths and such were not quick-frozen -- this is simply a popular myth. In Siberia, large numbers of mammoth skeletons and ivory are found simply because there were many mammoths living there for hundreds of thousands of years, and large bones and ivory deteriorate slowly in the Arctic climate. The misleading Saturday Evening Post article of 1960 should not be used as evidence. In many publications, the Society refers to various other sources that say things similar to the Post article, but the original references are generally not given. Without these references, any conclusions drawn from such quotations must be viewed with suspicion. To illustrate, one reference I've found -- Byron Nelson's The Deluge Story in Stone, Augsburg Publishing House, Minneapolis, Minn., 1931 -- is so full of inaccuracies that it is ludicrous to quote from it.

A major unknown for scientists is the cause of extinction of the ice age animals. But the Flood theory does not explain these extinctions, either. Genesis implies that every kind of animal was saved, and yet many kinds became extinct, such as giant ground sloths, saber-toothed cats, mammoths, and mastodons. It cannot be argued that these were just different varieties of today's animals that are no longer seen. For example, what animal do you know that is related to the extinct giant ground sloth? Mammoths and mastodons, "according to E. H. Colbert, a vertebrate paleontologist, are 'as different as cats from dogs.'"⁴² Lastly, why would so many animals become extinct as a result of the Flood? Why was God's command to Noah, to take two of "every living creature of every sort of flesh.... of all moving animals of the ground according to their kinds, two of each will go in there to you to preserve them alive," not obeyed? This is a serious problem for one who argues for the truth of the Flood account.

Finally, how could the Society's writers not be aware of the details I've presented from the Smithsonian Institution Annual Report for 1903 writeup on the Berezovka mammoth? Picture credits from the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. for a photo of this mammoth are given in both the God's Word or Man's book and the Creation book. If the writers went to the trouble of obtaining the photo, they must have, or they should have, also obtained the original writeup in which it appeared, just as I did.

With the above material fresh in mind, note the comments from the 1989 book The Bible -- God's Word or Man's?⁴³

Another evidence for the Flood appears to exist in the fossil record. At one time, according to this record, great saber-toothed tigers stalked their prey in Europe, horses larger than any now living roamed North America, and mammoths foraged in Siberia. Then, all around the world, species of mammals became extinct. At the same time, there was a sudden change of climate. Tens of thousands of mammoths were killed and quick-frozen in Siberia. Alfred Wallace, the well-known contemporary of Charles Darwin, considered that such a widespread destruction must have been caused by some exceptional world-wide event. Many have argued that this event was the Flood.

The writer assumes all the animals became extinct in one global event and the climate suddenly changed at the same time. He gives no evidence for this. The actual evidence is that the climate changed relatively rapidly, from cold to warm conditions, over a period of a few thousand years. He states that huge numbers of animals were quick-frozen, again without citing evidence. The evidence for his statements is actually found in the citation for Alfred Wallace. The citation is from Time-Life's Ice Ages, which I cite many times in this essay. A few quotations from this book will show the actual situation, which the writer of The Bible -- God's Word or Man's seems to have missed. Wallace's statements turned out to be incorrect, as is shown by further discussion in Ice Ages. After describing the discovery and loss of a mammoth carcass (mentioned above) by a man named Benkendorf, the book says:⁴⁴

Benkendorf's dramatic find brought him face to face with one of the great mysteries of the Ice Age: What could have caused the sudden, worldwide extinction of the giant mammals, or megafauna, that inhabited the earth until only a few thousand years ago? After making a systematic review of past and present species, the eminent zoologist Alfred Russel Wallace would conclude several decades after Benkendorf's adventure: "We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared. It is surely a marvelous fact, and one that has hardly been sufficiently dwelt upon, this sudden dying out of so many large mammalia, not in one place only but over half the land surfaces of the globe."

The toll of death was especially apparent in Siberia, where, according to a 19th Century geologist, "the bones of elephants are said to be found occasionally crowded in heaps along the shores of the icy seas from Archangel to Behring's Straits, forming whole islands composed of bones and mud at the mouth of the Lena (a river west of the Indigirka), and encased in icebergs, from which they are melted out by the solar heat of their short summer in sufficient numbers to form an important item of commerce."....

One of the first people to grapple with some of the difficult questions surrounding the death of the gigantic Ice Age beasts was the Reverend William Buckland, professor of geology and mineralogy at Oxford University, who examined what he called a "charnel house" of prehistoric remains in a cave at Kirkdale, Yorkshire, in 1821. In addition to the fossils of animals native to cold and temperate climates, the cave contained the teeth and bones of warm-climate elephants, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses. Scientists now know that these species inhabited northern Europe during the last interglacial, but Buckland was puzzled, he wrote in 1824, to find that a cave in northern England should be the last resting place of species that "at present exist only in tropical climates, and chiefly south of the equator." He was equally disturbed by the fact that the tropical species had apparently occupied the site only a short time after [italics added] the cold-climate animals. However, he deliberately avoided drawing the conclusion that shifts in climatic conditions could have caused successive waves of extinction....

See page 21 of this essay for a discussion of these findings, showing that that Wallace's idea of a charnel house was based on incomplete reconstruction of the cave findings.

In 1876 Alfred Wallace advanced one of the first and most obvious theories to explain the extinctions. Enough bones and fossils had been collected by then to permit him to catalogue and mourn the passing of a long list of vanished fauna.... The elimination of so many species, Wallace wrote, must have been the result of some exceptional event that had occurred almost simultaneously in many parts of the world. Citing evidence that the northern portions of both Europe and North America had been covered with ice when these large animals were disappearing, Wallace maintained that the ice had probably "acted in various ways to have produced alterations of level of the ocean as well as vast local floods, which would have combined with the excessive cold to destroy animal life."....

It is clear where the writer of The Bible -- God's Word or Man's? got his information about Wallace's ideas. The question remains, were Wallace's ideas correct? Ice Ages continues:

.... it was the timing of the extinctions that cast the most serious doubts on Wallace's hypothesis. Even in his lifetime, scientists knew that not all of the extinctions had occurred during the coldest phase of the last ice age. Charles Darwin, on his famous expedition to South America aboard the Beagle beginning in 1831, had found fossils of many extinct species in sediments laid down after the last glaciation. Darwin's finds were significant; modern radiocarbon dating of the remains later confirmed that the main wave of extinctions occurred not when the ice sheets reached their greatest extent, but after they had begun to retreat. And so the mystery deepened....

Many animals other than humans lived in caves and consumed their prey there, leaving behind extensive documentation of prehistoric dining habits. During the 19th Century, examination of a cave in South Devon unearthed fossilized bones of some 20,000 hyenas. The same cave was further excavated in the 1940s; this time, examination of cave-floor strata revealed that during a period of 200,000 years the cave had been occupied by successive generations of wolverines, bears, hippopotamuses, woolly rhinoceroses, elk and humans.

So significant changes in climate and fauna did occur. The point is how long did it take? How sudden were the changes? Did they occur within the year allotted to the Flood, or did they take longer? Continuing with the above quotation, Ice Ages said concerning events near the end of the last major glacial period, that the

conclusion of the cold period was marked by a toll of death the likes of which had never before afflicted the creatures of the earth.

The first wave of extinctions hit Africa some 60,000 years ago, about the time when the last major glacial advance of the Pleistocene crested. During the next 20,000 years, 40 per cent of the large mammals on the continent disappeared.... Eurasia was struck next. In Europe, about 50 per cent of the megafauna vanished.... The gradual elimination of these species also took about 20,000 years. In North America, however, the story was different. A full 70 per cent of the large animals.... died within the geological eyeblink of perhaps 1,000 years.

See also what was said above. So Wallace's first theory, that the extinctions happened suddenly and simultaneously worldwide, has proven incorrect. Had the writer of The Bible -- God's Word or Man's? considered the rest of the material in Ice Ages he would have seen there was no basis for his statements.

Part 3: Where Did the Water Come From?

The question of where the water for the Noachian Flood came from has long been pondered. The Society explains that the Flood water came from water originally suspended above the "expanse" that was created on the second creative day of Genesis.⁴⁵ All the Society's publications say much the same thing -- the waters above the expanse were "vast quantities of moisture suspended high above the earth, evidently in the form of a heavy vapor."⁴⁶ The older publications attempt to give some explanations as to how this water could be held above the earth,^46a but the writers of the Insight book seem to have realized that these explanations were inadequate and have not attempted any explanation, since "these are only speculative. The Bible says simply that God made the expanse with waters above it and that he brought the Deluge. His almighty power could easily accomplish it."⁴⁷ No doubt this is really the best that can be said. But let's examine whether an amount of water great enough to overwhelm the earth could be suspended above the earth by natural forces operating today -- forces that are not miraculous or that require the changing of physical laws after the Flood. If no reasonable physical mechanism exists, God must have brought the Flood by some means not connected with "waters above the expanse." This is an important consideration -- otherwise anything and everything can be "explained" by miracles, and then there is no basis for reasoned discussion. I could claim that the universe was created on January 1, 1991, with everyone's memories intact, and no one could disprove it. However, few would take this claim seriously.

The first consideration is how much water it would take to flood the earth. The Society's publications consistently say that before the Flood, mountains were much lower than they are now. How much lower is never discussed, but Genesis clearly says the earth had mountains for the Flood to cover.

For purposes of illustration, let's pick a very low height for the highest mountains before the Flood and examine the consequences. Let's say the highest mountains were 114 feet above sea level. The Bible says the waters overwhelmed the mountaintops by 15 cubits, or 22 feet. Add that to the 114 foot mountain height and you get 136 feet. Now, the weight of water is such that a column of water 34 feet high weighs the same as a similar column of air extended to the limits of the atmosphere. A column one square inch in cross section weighs 14.7 lbs. This size column is used to define the standard atmospheric pressure of 14.7 lbs. per square inch. Looked at another way, this means that the pressure increase from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom is the same as the pressure increase from the top of 34 feet of water to the bottom. A consequence of this is that at sea level a pump can pull water only to a height of about 34 feet. In general, pressure can be measured in terms of equivalent atmospheres: one atm. of pressure is defined as 14.7 lbs. per square inch, because that is the pressure of the atmosphere at sea level. Similarly, the pressure 34 feet down in the ocean is 2 atm. (1 atm. for the water and 1 atm. for the air). Therefore the pressure at the bottom of a 136 foot deep body of water is 5 atm. (136 / 34 = 4 atm. for the water, plus 1 atm. for the air). Here is the point -- if that 136 foot depth of water covered the earth, and was then lifted up so that it became suspended in the atmosphere, the pressure at what was the bottom would still be 5 atm. This is simply because the atmosphere would be holding up the water, and the laws of physics say that for a fluid acted upon by a gravity field, the pressure at the bottom of the fluid is proportional to the weight of all the fluid above, whether that fluid be water, water vapor or air.

Apply the foregoing to the "waters suspended above the expanse." If the waters were held up by the atmosphere, they would be part of the atmosphere, and the pressure at the surface of the earth would have to be equal to 1 atm. plus the pressure due to the weight of the suspended waters. This has consequences for animal and plant life, as they can only take so much pressure before their biological processes are disrupted. Therefore, you may say, maybe the waters were held up by means other than being suspended in the atmosphere. Well, what are the means in general for suspending a thing above the earth? There are only two non-miraculous possibilities: either it has mechanical support, or the thing has to be in orbit. If you disagree, then what are the other possibilities? As for miraculous means of support of the water, it is not reasonable to suppose that God would suspend physical law for the billions of years from the beginning of creation to the Flood, or for the hundreds of millions of years of the history of life, or even from the start of the second creative day. Nor would he permanently change physical law just for the sake of causing the Flood. And it is not possible that the water canopy was in orbit like a satellite. Physical law says that if distributed material is in orbit it must assume the shape of a flat ring, like the rings of Saturn. An orbiting shell or canopy is not physically possible because only a relatively tiny portion of it could have the proper orbital velocity. The rest would fall down or fly off into space. So the only reasonable possibility to suspend the water is the mechanical means of atmospheric pressure.

Now, as mentioned above, oxygen breathing animals can only take so much pressure. A creature would not be crushed by the pressure, but would be poisoned by too much oxygen, or its body chemistry would not function properly. This is shown by the precautions that deep-sea divers have to take when diving below about 150 feet, at a pressure of about 5 atm. They have to replace the nitrogen in the air with helium, an inert gas, and reduce the oxygen concentration. If nitrogen is not replaced or if the oxygen concentration is not reduced, the body chemistry is poisoned. Too much oxygen, for example, produces hyperventilation and delirium.

This places a severe limit on how much water could be suspended above the earth. Man requires special measures to live in an atmospheric pressure greater than 5 atm., so the Flood depth had to be limited to at most about a hundred feet, as seen from the above discussion. If the depth was not so severely limited, you would have to propose radical changes in physical law, or in the body chemistry of virtually all animals, so they could survive in the radically changed atmospheric conditions after the Flood. There is no evidence such a thing has occurred.

Another problem related to atmospheric pressure, which I've never seen discussed, is related to the design of flying creatures. Such creatures -- insects, pterosaurs, birds, bats -- have been around a long time, long before any Flood occurred. The design of a flying creature must account for air density. Birds are wonderful examples of optimal design, and their design shows they were made to fly in air that has the present density. They have powerful wing muscles and respiratory systems optimized for strenuous effort in the thin air of high altitudes. Had there been a thick vapor canopy before the Flood, held above the earth by physical processes operating today and not by miracles, the air would have been much denser than it is now. Birds would not have had to work nearly as hard to fly as they do now. If they had the same design as today, they would not have been optimally designed for conditions then. They would have needed much smaller wings and had different respiratory requirements, to name just two. This fact alone is compelling evidence that a thick vapor canopy never existed, but that atmospheric conditions have been similar to today's as long as flying creatures have existed.

If my proposed depth for the Flood of about a hundred feet seems unreasonably low, think what happens to atmospheric pressure as the proposed depth is increased. The pressure problem gets worse. But some creationists propose another source for the water. Genesis says that the source of the waters was not only the floodgates of the heavens but also the "vast springs of the watery deep." If we assume that the watery deep refers to the earth, such as subterranean caverns, and limit the amount of water above the "expanse" to 1 atm. worth, enough to provide 40 days of rain, and propose that the vast majority of the Flood water came from the springs of the watery deep, the pressure problem goes away. Then the depth of the Flood could potentially be thousands of feet, a much more reasonable value. But there are no subterranean caverns today that hold huge quantities of water, nor is there evidence that there ever were such. In fact such caverns could not exist:

We know for certain from laboratory studies of the behavior of rocks under great pressures, and from geophysical soundings, that large caverns do not exist at great depths in the earth.⁴⁸

Another possibility for obtaining the required water is from the earth's mantle. It has been estimated that in the mantle is dissolved about 3400 times as much water as is in the ocean.⁴⁹ But extracting this water, of course, requires a miracle.

There are other difficulties related to the scenarios described above. Zoologist Michael Archer described the results if enough water to flood the earth deep enough to cover today's mountains suddenly became available:⁵⁰

The appearance and disappearance of the additional amount of water (4 400 000 000 km³) required to cover the Earth's mountains, which is over three times the amount (1 370 000 000 km³) presently contained in all of the Earth's oceans, would have imposed simply impossible constraints on the pre-Flood creatures of Earth and the inhabitants of the Ark during its journey (Soroka and Nelson, 1983). If that much extra water fell as rain, the pre-Flood Earth had to have had an atmospheric pressure about 840 times higher than it has now and an atmosphere which consisted of 99.9% water vapour (which would, incidentally, have been unbreathable). Further, from a thermodynamic point of view, because 2.26 million joules must be given up as heat for each kilogram of water condensed out of the atmosphere (Soroka and Nelson, 1983), that much water vapour condensing into rain would have raised the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere in excess of 3500 DegC during the time of the Flood. The consequences for the occupants of the Ark in what would have been a boiling ocean and unbreathable atmosphere bear thinking about. Even if the extra water welled up from within the Earth, the temperature of subsurface waters of this volume, because of their closer proximity to the hot mantle of the Earth, would have resulted again in oceans boiling away at temperatures of approximately 1600 DegC. Either way, Noah's geese would have been cooked.

Note the problems all this excess heat causes for the claim that the Flood produced the frozen mammoths of Siberia. Someone might object that it would be easy for God to remove the excess heat. If he did all this, it seems a rather round-about way to destroy all the inhabitants of the earth. Why not create the water out of nothing, or even simpler, just destroy the source of the problem -- men?

The above arguments indicate there appear to be only miraculous ways to obtain enough water to flood the earth and not destroy all life in the process. This difficulty is an important problem, but there is one even more important. Let's now examine the questions of where the water went after the Flood, how the continents and ocean basins got to be as they are, and other issues related to the height of mountains and the depth of the Flood.

Part 4: Where Did the Water Go?

Like the question of where the water for the Noachian Flood came from, the problem of where it went has been discussed extensively. Concerning the disposition of the water, the Insight book says on page 610:

Evidently [the water] is right here on the earth. It is believed that there was a time when the oceans were smaller and the continents were larger than they are now, as is evidenced by river channels extending far out under the oceans. It should also be noted that scientists have stated that mountains in the past were much lower than at present, and some mountains have even been pushed up from under the seas. As to the present situation, it is said that 'there is ten times as much water by volume in the ocean as there is land above sea level. Dump all this land evenly into the sea, and water would cover the entire earth, one and one-half miles deep.'

This amount of water is equivalent to about 300 atmospheres (see previous section on where the Flood water came from).

So, after the floodwaters fell, but before the raising of mountains and the lowering of seabeds and before the buildup of polar ice caps, there was more than enough water to cover 'all the tall mountains,' as the inspired record says.

.... With the sudden opening of the 'springs of the watery deep' and 'the floodgates of the heavens,' untold billions of tons of water deluged the earth. This may have caused tremendous changes in earth's surface. The earth's crust is relatively thin (estimated at between 30 km [20 mi] and 160 km [100 mi] thick), stretched over a rather plastic mass thousands of kilometers in diameter. Hence, under the added weight of the water, there was likely a great shifting in the crust. In time new mountains evidently were thrust upward, old mountains rose to new heights, shallow sea basins were deepened, and new shorelines were established, with the result that now about 70 percent of the surface is covered with water. This shifting in the earth's crust may account for many geologic phenomena, such as the raising of old coastlines to new heights.

The Aid book says much the same on page 440, and adds:

.... With the canopy of water vapor a 'greenhouse effect' was created that provided even the polar regions with a tropical temperature, as geologists well know existed at one time. With the canopy, there was no need for it to rain, 'but a mist would go up from the earth and it watered the entire surface of the ground.'

.... This shifting in the earth's crust accounts for many geological phenomena, such as the raising of old coastlines to new heights. Mighty hydraulic forces were set on a rampage -- angry waves smashing mighty boulders together and drifting them great distances from their native setting, raging waters carving out valleys and canyons in all parts of the earth, tidal waves heaping up strange sedimentary deposits and burying beneath their thick layers the debris of animal and plant life.

.... With the removal of the insulating canopy the polar regions were suddenly plunged into a deep freeze and many forms of animal life were refrigerated for thousands of years. Glacial pressures were brought into play. However, the great gorges of the earth and the drifts of debris can be accounted for only by irresistible, incompressible water on the rampage, rather than by continental glaciers of so-called ice ages.

The God's Word or Man's book on pages 112-113 again says much the same, but is more specific on some points:

Since the mountains and sea basins rise and fall, it is apparent that at one time the mountains were not as high as they are now and the great sea basins were not as deep.... What happened to the floodwaters after the Flood? They must have drained into the sea basins. How? Scientists believe that the continents rest on huge plates. Movement of these plates can cause changes in the level of the earth's surface. In some places today, there are great underwater abysses more than six miles deep at the plate boundaries. It is quite likely that -- perhaps triggered by the Flood itself -- the plates moved, the sea bottom sank, and the great trenches opened, allowing the water to drain off the land.

It should be noted that the above accounts provide no quantitative information whatsoever, such as how long it took for the various geological phenomena to occur, in what manner the tectonic plates moved, how high the mountains rose, how low the seabeds descended, the volume of water ocean trenches could accommodate and how that would affect sea level, the order in which all these events occurred, or any phenomena on which it is possible to be pinned down. Few source references are provided, at least in the later publications. In the following discussion I will provide both quantitative information and complete source references.

The above cited references to the Flood make the following main points:

1. The present oceans are the remains of the floodwaters, which implies that the Flood would have been not more than about 8000 feet deep.

2. The mountains and deep sea basins formed during or shortly after the Flood.

3. The polar regions froze during or shortly after the Flood, forming the ice caps and burying tremendous numbers of animals and plants in mucky dumps.

4. Prior to the Flood there was a tropical climate earthwide because of the greenhouse effect of the water canopy, and rain was unknown.

5. The floodwaters were responsible for carving out valleys and canyons all over the earth, and leaving great drifts of debris.

To show whether the above points are in accord with observations of the world around us or not, I must discuss in detail a number of subjects including dating methods, plate tectonics, and the ice ages. Due to its length and application to issues beyond the question of where the water went, the discussion of ice ages is in a section by itself.

In researching this material I've noticed that many lines of argument the Society has used in the past, as evidence for the Flood, have been discarded. A large number of geological findings in the last thirty or so years has made many of these arguments untenable. This is especially true of arguments that were originally advanced, and are still used, by the so-called creationist movement. For example, the Society at one time endorsed, and the creationists still do, the idea that all the fossil bearing rock strata were laid down by the Flood. The Society seems to have changed its position on this. Some of the ideas mentioned above from the Aid book may also have been discarded, as they are not included in Insight, although I have not found any statements in Watchtower publications explicitly stating this.

It is also instructive to look at the Society's latest articles on the Flood, "The Unforgettable Flood" and "The Flood in the Legends of the World," in the January 15, 1992 Watchtower. These articles discuss no physical evidence whatsoever, so that the only evidence presented is the Bible itself and legends.

Part 5: Dating Methods

Geological dating methods have long been a thorn in the Society's collective side. This is mainly due to its contention that the creative days of Genesis were precisely 7000 years long. This section establishes that geological dating methods are reasonably accurate, and just as important, are consistent with one another.

Radioisotope dating of fossil beds and geological events points to an explosion of life at the beginning of the Cambrian period about 600 million years ago. A line of evidence totally independent of radioisotope dating methods is consistent with this chronology, and provides independent confirmation of the validity radioisotope dating. This is consistent with the Bible principle that "at the mouth of two or three witnesses every matter may be established." How To Deep-Freeze a Mammoth⁵¹ explains:

Typical coral animals live inside a small cup made of lime that the animal itself builds up. New lime is deposited every day during the coral animal's lifetime. This happens only during daylight, for the coral lives in symbiotic relationship with a plant that needs sunlight for its life processes. When the deposition of lime ceases for the night, a growth line is formed which can be seen under a microscope. Analogous differences between summer and winter make it possible to distinguish annual growth lines, each of which contains 365 24-hour lines. Moreover it seems that the monthly four-week period may be reflected in the growth of the corals that live in areas where they are affected by changes in the tides. Such a coral skeleton thus becomes a kind of calendar, in which the passing of the days, the months, and the years can be read.

This is true not only of present-day corals. Similar growth lines also occur in fossil corals. In Scientific American (October 1966) the British scientist S. K. Runcorn describes corals from the Devonian period (for which radiometric age determinations give an age of about 400 million years). They, of course, are only distantly related to present-day corals (they belong to an extinct group called Rugosa). These corals from such an inconceivably distant past have the same daily, monthly, and annual rings as the modern ones. This indicates that the moon existed that long ago....

If we use the daily growth lines to calculate the number of days in the Devonian year, we find to our surprise that their number was around 400, rather than 365 as they decently ought to be.... If we look at somewhat younger (late Carboniferous, about 300 million years old) corals, the number of days in the year had been reduced to ca. 380 and in those of the present day they have of course come down to 365. So it seems that the earth is rotating ever more slowly on its axis. Other organisms besides corals give analogous evidence, with bivalves yielding particularly useful data for the time period from 350 million years ago to our day.

Actually scientists have known a long time that the rotation of the earth is slowing down, and in recent years it has even been possible to measure the retardation with the aid of the new atomic clocks. The retardation is caused by the friction effected by the tides. It is also possible to calculate how many days the Devonian year ought to have had, provided the friction over all these years has been the same as it is now -- that is, provided the moon has always retained its position [tidal friction has actually varied over time as continental drift has changed the configuration of oceans and continents]. The result was 399 days. So the correspondence is extremely close and we are forced to the conclusion that the same moon, our old friend, must have been there all the time.

As to the length of the day, an astronomy book⁵² says that

variations in the period of rotation of the earth have been detected by comparing the theory giving us the positions of such bodies as the moon and sun and certain planets with the actual observations of these positions. In addition, it is now possible to compare the unit of time as defined by the rotation of the earth with the unit defined by highly precise atomic clocks.... the slowing down in the rotation of the earth.... results in a lengthening of the day by 0.0016 second per century.

Creation and Evolution: Myth or Reality?⁵³ gives more details of the mechanism.

Studies of growth in fossil corals have made a fascinating contribution to geochronology involving past ocean tides and the inferred relationship between the earth and the moon. The moon pulls ocean water in a tidal bulge which moves westward as the earth rotates toward the east. The tidal drag acts as a brake on the spinning earth, gradually slowing it down. Early in the eighteenth century, Edmund Halley, Astronomer Royal of England, noted that there was a discrepancy between the recorded locations of ancient eclipses of the moon and their predicted places of observation. He pointed out that the differences could be resolved by assuming a slowing down of the rate of rotation of the earth. Modern astronomers have confirmed his theory, and by precise methods have found that the earth is now slowing at the rate of 0.002 seconds per century. This seems very little, but can be appreciable over tens of millions of years.

The slowing of the earth's spin decreases the number of days in the year and causes the moon to draw away from the earth, thus conserving the energy within the earth-moon system [actually it is the angular momentum that is conserved]. The rate of recession of the moon away from the earth is now calculated at about 5.6 centimeters per year. [This has been directly measured by laser ranging.] Until recently there was no way to test these astronomical deductions, but paleontology now provides an independent test.

The discovery was made by John W. Wells at Cornell University, a leading investigator of living and fossil corals. Wells knew that the skeletons of corals (and many other kinds of invertebrates) display parallel growth rings similar to the annual growth of trees. He was able to show that annual bands of living corals are themselves made of narrow lines which closely correspond to one day's growth.

With his fossil corals, he reported in 1963 that specimens of Devonian age averaged about 400 lines per year, and Carboniferous corals about 380. Subsequent investigations by intrigued paleontologists have shown that the number of daily growth increments per year in corals and molluscs has indeed been decreasing through geological time.

Astronomers had already calculated that average tidal friction would allow 425 days per year in the Cambrian and 400 days per year for the Devonian. As well as providing evidence of close agreement between these two scientific approaches, John Wells' work also provides a measure of the antiquity of fossils in years, totally independent of radiometric methods.

Following up Wells' discovery, Colin T. Scrutton, of the British Museum (Natural History), found what appeared to be monthly bands in Devonian corals equivalent to the intervals between times of the full moon. He calculated 13.03 lunar months in a Devonian year of 399 days. This work has opened up a whole new field of historical research involving the earth-moon relationship.

See Plate Tectonics & Crustal Evolution⁵⁴ and Scientific American, October, 1982, p. 170, for more a technical presentation. These works show the effect of changing tidal friction on day length as the continents have drifted around.

The above discussion shows that two independent lines of evidence, radioisotope and biological/astronomical, point to similar dates for when ancient corals and molluscs existed. The probability that both could be wrong by the same amount is very low. If this is not compelling evidence of the overall reliability of radioisotope dating methods, I don't know what else could be expected.

The Society often prints articles or reports that try to discredit radioactive dating or other geological methods, when these methods point to conclusions that contradict what the Bible or the Society say about some matter. These articles always show that one specific measurement, say a particular date, can be in error by a large amount. But they rarely show that the body of measurements as a whole, or the method itself, is wrong. It is easy to show that in many cases a single measurement can be wrong, but it is much harder to show that many measurements, which as a group point to a particular conclusion, are wrong. This is especially true when two or more independent methods point to similar conclusions. Even an ardent "scientific creationist" like Henry Morris, author of The Genesis Flood, in a discussion of radioactive dating methods, admits this:

Furthermore, it will be maintained that even though any given age measurement may be completely erroneous due to leaching or emanation or some other effect, there are many cases now known where the age estimate has been checked by two or more different methods, independently. It would seem improbable that the elements concerned would have each been altered in such a way as to continue to give equal ages; therefore, such agreement between independent measurements would seem to be strong evidence that alteration had not occurred and that the indicated age is therefore valid.⁵⁵

Large bodies of geological data which point to certain conclusions have been assembled by scientists. Some of the data are certainly wrong, as are some of the conclusions. But picking out one wrong thing here and there does not invalidate the entire set of conclusions. It must be shown how the preponderance of evidence points to different conclusions. This cannot be done using the sweeping generalities found in most of the Society's publications.

To illustrate more clearly what I'm getting at, suppose you are given the problem of figuring out what a large color painting represents, but you are never allowed to see it directly. You must examine it using only a light meter that measures color. The original is hidden behind a screen, which has a tiny, movable hole in it. You plug the light meter in the hole, move it around and take readings. You have been further told the painting is partly destroyed, and the light meter sometimes gives incorrect readings. You are to measure the color of the painting at a large number of points, and then paint a corresponding dot on another canvas. You will never know if any given dot correctly represents the original painting -- some dots will be garbage. But as you proceed, a recognizable image will emerge, and eventually you will be able to describe the original painting. Note that only if a pattern were there to begin with, and the light meter was reasonably reliable, could you make sense of the reconstruction.

Scientists face the same sort of problem in making measurements and drawing conclusions. When many observations using disparate measuring techniques lead to a conclusion, it is probably correct. With radioisotope dating, any given date may be bad, but when a large number of measurements point to a particular date, it will be wrong only if the dating method is itself fundamentally wrong. If a measurement technique yields random dates, no sense at all could be made of a large number of them. If the method has a built-in bias, then that will show up, but at least some sense will be able to be made out of it. By bias I mean that most dates will be off by a fixed amount of time or by a fixed percentage. In that case, if a second type of dating method yields the same results, it is extremely unlikely that both methods are incorrect. There are just too many ways things can go wrong. It is true that scientists sometimes use extremely sparse data to extrapolate to unwarranted conclusions, but with radioactive dating methods the data is profuse.

For example, the eruption of Mount Mazama that formed Crater Lake in Oregon had been dated by the mid-1960s by radiocarbon methods to between 6500 and 7000 years ago. A direct count of layers in ice cores from Greenland, in which ash from the eruption was found, gave a date of 4401 B.C., or 6391 years ago, not all that far from the radiocarbon dates, and in fact consistent with findings from tree ring studies that radiocarbon dates tend to be somewhat older than actual dates. Human artifacts have been found under ash from this eruption. A 1979 Scientific American article said:⁵⁶

.... tests showed that tephra layers found at certain archaeological sites came from Mount Mazama.... One of the archaeological sites was Fort Rock Cave.... Under the tephra [were] found sandals made of sagebrush bark, one of which was dated by carbon-14 analysis and found to be some 9000 years old.

Later the article mentions that the bulk of dating evidence put the eruption date at about 5000 B.C. The article also talks about the eruption of a volcano in the Mediterranean:

In the eastern Mediterranean the volcano Thera, on an island in the Aegean Sea, erupted in about the middle of the 15th century B.C., spreading tephra southeastward over an area that includes Crete. At that time Crete was the center of the Minoan civilization.... Archaeological excavations have revealed that the Minoan culture declined and disappeared suddenly after about 1450 B.C. Archaeologists have been puzzled by the unusual suddenness of the collapse, and when the approximate date of the Thera eruption became known, it was proposed that the tephra fall was the cause.... One carbon-14 date shows that the volcano probably erupted between 1499 and 1413 B.C., but [an investigator] found tephra from Thera in Minoan buildings that had been abandoned and covered by about 1500 B.C., according to the dating of artifacts in the area. The mystery will not be solved until more accurate dates are available.

The mystery had more light shed on it during the 1980s. The New York Times, August 9, 1981 reported on the activities of Danish, Swiss, and American scientists who had penetrated more than a mile deep into the ice cap in southern Greenland at a point named Dye 3. From winter-summer variations in the preserved frozen core, the drillers were able to read the year-by-year weather for the past 11,000 years. The article published a chart showing a volcanic explosion in 1390 B.C. that may have been one of several that spelled the end of the volcanic isle of Thera in the Aegean. These and related discoveries were also described in National Geographic.⁵⁷

Exploring Our Living Planet added more information:⁵⁸

By 1984, a University of Arizona team working with bristlecone pines, the oldest trees known, announced that their tree rings put the eruption at a startlingly early 1628-26 B.C. In 1985 scientists from the Smithsonian Institution reported finding grains of volcanic ash, apparently from Thera, in Nile Delta sediment. The ash lay at a depth corresponding to the early 16th century B.C.

In 1987 some Danish scientists weighed in with findings from distant Greenland: a trace of ash in the layered ice cap that would put the eruption still earlier, near 1645 B.C.

And in 1988, ancient trees preserved in Irish bogs confirmed the bristlecone chronology, yielding a single probable year: 1628 B.C.

So here we have a case where six dating methods -- archaeological, radioisotope, tree ring, bog deposit, river deposit and ice core studies -- point to ages within 7% of each other. Note that three of them are independent of one another -- archaeological, radioisotope and ice core layer counts.

The two examples I've just mentioned well attest to the overall accuracy of radiocarbon dating, both before and after the date of the Flood.

The 1986 Awake! series of articles⁵⁹ "Scientific Dates for Prehistoric Times," etc., is a prime example of the type of reasoning where a small number of instances of difficulty are used to show that the general case is incorrect. Many facts and figures are given showing how the various methods of dating may have serious problems in any particular case, but it is not shown how the methods can show overall consistency and yet be fundamentally wrong. For example, there are many events attributed to the close of the last ice age that are dated to about 11,000 years ago, usually by radiocarbon dating. But if radiocarbon dating is so prone to huge errors, how is it that any consistency can be found, and why does the 11,000 year figure keep showing up? If radiocarbon dating is so bad, why do other dating methods, such as direct count of ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica, give similar results?

See the section below, "More Evidence for the Ice Ages," for more details on ice cores, up to date as of July, 1993.

The Awake! series on geological dating says in conclusion, on page 27,

How do the results of scientific dating affect our understanding of the Bible?.... if we understand that the days of Genesis were long periods of thousands of years, with billions of years prior thereto for planet Earth's formation, there is no problem.... We have seen that geologists find generally good support in radiometric dating for their theories on the history of the earth, although most of the dates are far from certain.... We can confidently stand on this fact: The chronology in the Bible stands unimpeached by any scientific dating.

This, of course, ignores the fact that geologists' "theories on the history of the earth" say that the history of life goes back at least 600 million years and probably 3 billion, mountain ranges containing fossils go back hundreds of millions of years, etc. These are most assuredly not dated only thousands of years ago. I agree this does not contradict Bible chronology, as the Bible says nothing about dates prior to man's creation, but the Society's longstanding chronology of 34,000 years for the history of life is certainly contradicted.

Perhaps the Society should reexamine its position that the creative days were only 7000 years long. That position is no more tenable than the creationist claim that most sedimentary rocks of the world were formed in the Flood, which the Society no longer holds. Interestingly, the Society bases this idea ultimately on an old tradition that the seventh creative day of Genesis is itself 7000 years long, and that the Messiah would reign during the final 1000 years of it. The Society's founder C. T. Russell recognized this tradition in The Time Is At Hand, 1889, saying on page 39:

And though the Bible contains no direct statement that the seventh thousand will be the epoch of Christ's reign, the great Sabbath Day of restitution to the world, yet the venerable tradition is not without reasonable foundation.

That this is indeed an old tradition is shown by its inclusion in the New Testament apocryphal book (probably 1st century A.D.) The Epistle of Barnabas, Ch. 13. It seems the Society has forgotten its founder's view on the matter.

Occasionally a Watchtower publication omits critical information or uses dubious information to prove a point about dating methods or other topics related to science. For example, the Creation book said on page 96 that:

Biblical chronology indicates that a period of about 6,000 years has passed since the creation of humans. Why, then, does one often read about far longer periods of time since acknowledged human types of fossils appeared?

Before concluding that Bible chronology is in error, consider that radioactive dating methods have come under sharp criticism by some scientists. A scientific journal reported on studies showing that "dates determined by radioactive decay may be off -- not only by a few years, but by orders of magnitude." It said: "Man, instead of having walked the earth for 3.6 million years, may have been around for only a few thousand."

Upon checking this reference, which was to Popular Science magazine, I found the Society is not entirely honest with its readers on four counts. First, Popular Science is by no stretch of the imagination a "scientific journal." One could equally refer to The National Enquirer as a news journal. Referring to Popular Science this way is an attempt to lend "scientific authority" to a publication that has none. I realized by the time I was thirteen that Popular Science is not a "scientific journal." Second, the Popular Science article is mostly about the success of various dating methods, and only in the last few paragraphs is space given to the views of a single physicist, Robert Gentry, who dissents from the usual view. Third, the fact the dissenter is a Seventh Day Adventist, and a creationist who believes the universe was created in six literal days is not made clear. Statements from six-literal-day creationists regarding the accuracy of radioactive dating ought to be viewed like comments from Richard Nixon that politicians never lie. Fourth, the article's statement that man "may have been around for only a few thousand years" is merely a conclusion the article points out can be drawn from the views of Robert Gentry. It is not a conclusion the magazine itself, using its editorial voice, is making -- but Creation makes it appear it is. The reader gets the impression the article presents much scientific evidence showing radioactive dating is on shaky ground. But simply reading the Popular Science article shows that is not what it's about. Here are some excerpts from the article. Judge for yourself whether Creation gives a correct view to its readers. Better yet, read the article yourself.

So, today, everything -- human artifacts, animal remains, ancient rocks -- can be dated fairly accurately. The dates may be off a little, but that's mainly a matter of impurities in the sample or need to refine techniques, say the scientists involved.

Yet major mysteries and curious anomalies remain -- the odd speculations advanced by Columbia Union College's Robert Gentry, for instance.

Physicist Gentry believes that all of the dates determined by radioactive decay may be off -- not only by a few years, but by orders of magnitude.

His theory revolves around "halos," tiny, ringlike discolorations found within coalified wood (wood on its way to becoming coal) and mica, often in the proximity of radioactive uranium or thorium. Some halos can be explained in terms of conventional radioactive decay. Others, known as giant halos, cannot. They're simply too big to be caused by alpha particles thrown off by known isotopes, and they don't fit into any accepted theory. If the theory of radioactive decay is weak in one spot, says Gentry, doubt is cast on whatever answers isotopes give you.

Further, when Gentry studies halos in coalified wood, he finds that the uranium/lead ratios are often not at all what they should be. "Since the coalified wood was obtained from deposits supposedly at least tens of millions of years old," he says, "the ratio between uranium-238 and lead-206 should be low." They're not. They're so high, in fact, that "presently accepted ages may be too high by a factor of thousands." And man, instead of having walked the earth for 3.6 million years, may have been around for only a few thousand. "The possibility of reducing the 4.5-billion-year history of earth by a factor of a thousand," he says with some ire, "has not yet been seriously considered."

Most scientists simply dismiss the idea. As one physicist told me, "You can believe it or not; I don't."

"I realize it's difficult to believe," counters Gentry. "It would invalidate the whole underlying principle of radioactive dating: that the rates of decay are forever unvarying -- an untestable assumption."⁶⁰

Some research on Robert Gentry turned up the following:⁶¹

Mr. Gentry's findings were published almost ten years ago and have been the subject of some discussion in the scientific community. The discoveries have not, however, led to the formulation of any scientific hypothesis or theory which would explain a relatively recent inception of the earth or a worldwide flood. Gentry's discovery has been treated as a minor mystery which will eventually be explained. It may deserve further investigation, but the National Science Foundation has not deemed it to be of sufficient import to support further funding.

Here are some other comments, from physicist and professor of science history, Stephen G. Brush, concerning a number of points of scientific creationist criticism, including Robert Gentry's, of radioactive dating:⁶²

7. The existence of primordial polonium 218 halos in minerals indicates that the earth was not formed gradually over a long period of time but was created in a few hours "by Fiat nearly 6 millenia ago" (see Gentry 1979).

According to Gentry, the halos he has observed in certain minerals were produced by the decay of primordial polonium 218, an isotope with a half life of only three minutes. If his interpretation were correct, it would imply that the earth was created in a few minutes, but Gentry presents no basis for a quantitative estimate of when this event occurred. While he has attempted to cast doubt on the long time scale based on radioactive dating, I have not found in any of his publications a criticism specific enough to call for a reply. There are alternative explanations for the halos that he attributes to primordial polonium (York 1979). In particular, Hashemi-Nezhad et al. (1979) showed experimentally that the diffusion of lead in mica can be rapid enough to explain the anomalous polonium halos. According to one of the experimenters in this group, "the haloes are inconsistent with creation less than tens to hundreds of millions of years ago unless one invents two easily observable but unobserved lead isomers of quite improbable characteristics" (Fremlin 1981).

Gentry does not claim that his results lead directly to a specific age for the earth, but he argues that the ratios of uranium 238 to lead 206 found in coalified wood from the Colorado Plateau could be explained by an infiltration of uranium a few thousand years ago (Gentry et al. 1976b, and telephone conversation, 16 September 1981). To accept his view that the infiltration event was associated with the creation of the earth would require discarding theories based on a large amount of data from many areas of science in order to explain a single isolated type of observation. It does not seem sensible to throw out well-established principles of science without having alternative principles that could explain at least most of the same observations, and no such alternative exists (Damon 1979; York 1979). This is a good illustration of the fact that no scientific theory can or must explain all observations and that a theory that is able to give satisfactory explanation of most observations will not be replaced unless a better one is available. Gentry's postulate of recent creation of the earth is contradicted by so many other facts that it has gained no support from other scientists who are familiar with this field. (See Dalrymple 1982a for further details on problems in Gentry and other creationists' critiques of radioactive dating.)

It should be evident by now that the Popular Science article's reference to "the odd speculations advanced by.... Robert Gentry" means precisely that. The Creation book's quotations from this article distort what it said.

In conclusion, it is clear that independent evidence, in the form of ancient coral growth rings and the slowing of the earth's rate of rotation, and in the form of ice cores, confirms the general validity of radioactive dating methods. To convincingly show these dating methods to be invalid, one must show how radioactive dating consistently shows errors, and show how independent methods that point to similar conclusions are also invalid. In particular it must be shown how two or more invalid methods can be consistent with one another. It is not sufficient to argue that "men make mistakes, so all scientific methods may be wrong," as the Society invariably does.

Part 6: Plate Tectonics

The science of plate tectonics is a relatively recent arrival in geology. It came to have wide acceptance among geologists during the 1960s and 1970s, and much information has been added during the 1980s. The August, 1985 National Geographic magazine article "Our Restless Planet Earth" gives a good introduction to the subject. Exploring Our Living Planet⁶³ gives a much more extensive look and is well worth reading. Here I will present much more detail.

The book Islands⁶⁴ gives a good description of how plate tectonics works:

[The] crust of the earth is a spherical shell of rock that consists of a few rigid plates.... These tectonic plates drift about continually, shifting position and jostling each other. Consequently, the boundaries between them are marked by earthquakes.... Plates are created by solidification of passively upwelling magma, which fills in the cracks where plates drift apart. The cracks are called spreading centers, and they are characterized by tensional earthquakes (caused by stretching), which are confined to shallow depths because the hot crust in these places is too weak for stresses to accumulate any deeper.... Such a crack gradually opened between what are now Africa and South America roughly 200 million years ago. Those continents are far apart now, but the seismically active crack still exists at the crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge....

The magnetic field of the earth reverses polarity at intervals on the order of a hundred thousand to a million years. When lava cools, some of the minerals in it act as tiny magnets and orient themselves in the direction of the magnetic field. The spreading crack on the crest of a midocean ridge is frequently filled with lava, which then cools, splits, fills, splits, and so on. Thus the cold rocks of the ridge contain a fairly permanent record, like a magnetic tape recording, of the reversals of the earth's magnetic field through geological time. Indeed, the whole ridge is like a stereo tape recording with magnetic patterns on each flank that are commonly mirror images of each other. The pattern of normal (like now) and reversed magnetic orientations (anomalies) has been dated by comparing rocks of known age on land with those on the sea floor. Inasmuch as most of the magnetic anomalies of the ocean basins have been mapped by ships, the age of most of the vast, deep sea floor is known. Using the width of dated magnetic anomalies, it is possible to measure how rapidly the mid-ocean ridge crest where they were created was spreading apart -- even though it was 100 million years ago.

.... when a spreading center produces an area of new crust, an equal area of old crust must be removed from the earth's surface somewhere.... The regions where tectonic plates drift together and crust is lost are mostly subduction zones. In such a zone, one plate plunges beneath the other, usually at an angle between 30Deg and 45Deg, and goes on down for hundreds of kilometers into the mantle. The plate that plunges is almost always oceanic crust, because continental crust is more buoyant. The path of the plunging plate can be traced by the earthquakes that are generated.... Typically, subduction zones have the largest and most damaging earthquakes in the world because the rocks there are old, cold, and able to accumulate large strains before breaking.

The great compressive forces in subduction zones deform the crust into deep oceanic trenches and high continental mountains such as the Alps and Himalayas. The reheating of the plunging oceanic crust and sediment causes magma to liquefy at depth. It rises to the surface to form lines of beautiful volcanoes like the Cascade Mountains of Oregon and Washington and including the most beautifully symmetrical of all -- Fujiyama in Japan. Like sea-floor spreading, subduction can take place within continents or ocean basins, but in fact it takes place mainly at the boundaries between continents and oceans. The Pacific, unlike the Atlantic, is ringed by subduction zones and the line of fire of active volcanoes. The reason is not that the zones develop at the edges of continents; as at spreading centers, the forces that move plates are much too great to be influenced by the type of crust. What happens is that the buoyant continents drift to subduction zones and stay there like rafts at the edge of a whirlpool in a river.

The crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is not straight; it is offset just like the Atlantic coasts of Africa and south America and for the same reason. The offset is an abrupt step, and it is caused by transform faults, which, like spreading centers and subduction zones, are one of the three basic elements of plate tectonics. A transform fault is, as the name implies, merely a fault, a cut in the earth's crust, running between the other two kinds of tectonic elements. Most transform faults offset the crests of midocean ridges; a few run between a ridge and a subduction zone; even fewer run from one subduction zone to another. The earthquakes on ridge-ridge transforms are quite shallow (1 km to 5 km deep) because the crust there is young and weak. However, where transform faults cut older crust, earthquakes may be 10 km to 20 km deep.... The most famous transform fault is the San Andreas fault....

The earth's rigid surface layer, or lithosphere, is almost wholly in buoyant equilibrium, or isostasy. Because the lithosphere effectively floats on a weak plastic layer, or asthenosphere, its elevation is related to its density. High mountains are composed of rocks of low density, and the deep sea floor is composed of rocks of high density.

The crest of a midocean ridge rises high above the deep sea floor because the young crust created at the spreading center is hot. As the crust drifts away, it cools by conduction to the cold sea floor; it grows denser, so it subsides to form the sloping flanks of the ridge. Cross-sectional profiles of ridges show that their flanks are concave upward between the high crest and the deep basins on either side. It is immediately clear that cooling and subsidence are more rapid when the plate is young than later. The relation between depth and age has been determined in thousands of places and is empirically expressed for crust younger than 60 million years [by a simple mathematical formula].... Thus, it is possible to calculate the expected depth of the sea floor if its age is known. Likewise, the subsidence history of a plate, its depth at any time in the past, can be calculated. The ability to make these calculations has greatly improved understanding of the elevation and subsidence of islands.

The fact that tectonic plates are rigid might seem entirely obvious because solid rock, such as Gibraltar, is the very image of rigidity. However, it is all a matter of scale and the duration of stressing. If the whole earth is shocked almost instantaneously by a great earthquake, it rings like a rigid bell at low frequencies appropriate for its size. On the other hand, geologists have known for a century that the very slow application of pressure to heated rock can cause it to deform like toothpaste or soft clay.... Thus, dealing as they do with millions and billions of years, geologists tend to think of the earth not as rigid but as yielding and plastic.

Moreover, a famous scientific paper in 1937 had demonstrated that it was impossible to lift up a large area of continental crust. (It had a striking cartoon of a giant crane lifting up the earth's crust, 30 km thick, under the state of Texas.) The solid crust proved to be too weak to be lifted up at the edges without sagging in the middle. Consequently, it was a considerable surprise to geologists and geophysicists when it was proved that enormous tectonic plates are rigid. Not in the vertical direction -- plates do bob up and down locally by small amounts to maintain isostasy, and they cannot be lifted any more than Texas can -- but horizontally, they are inflexible.

The rigidity of the plates was demonstrated by appeal to a theorem of the mathematician Leonhard Euler. This states that if one rigid shell moves over another without changing direction, two diametrically opposed points must remain fixed. These points are called Euler poles. The motion of any point on the moving shell may be considered as a rotation around an axis that connects the Euler poles. Relative to the inner shell, points on the moving shell traverse circular arcs centered on the Euler poles. If a tectonic plate is rigid, it can be considered a fragment of a spherical shell (the lithosphere) moving over an inner shell (the earth's mantle). Then its movements must conform to Euler's theorem.

If the Euler poles were, by coincidence, the poles of rotation of the earth, the circular arcs would exactly coincide with the parallels of latitude. In fact, they rarely do, so one must visualize Euler latitudes measured from the actual location of the Euler poles. The motion of a whole rigid plate can be described accurately only by an angular velocity around an Euler pole. The velocity of a given point, however, may be expressed usefully as a linear rate, usually as millimeters per year. This rate varies with Euler latitude from zero at the poles to a maximum at the Euler equator....

A point on the side of a drifting rigid plate, like all other points, must follow a circular arc, and thus the transform fault boundaries at the sides of plates must lie on circular arcs. The crust of the North Pacific was demonstrated to be a rigid plate -- by analysis of the motion on the faults that bound it -- by Dan McKenzie and Robert Parker in 1967. From California to Alaska to Japan, all the faults plotted along circles centered on an Euler pole near Greenland. Jason Morgan, also in 1967, showed that transform faults and fracture zones between plates lie along circular arcs around an Euler pole. Morgan also showed that, in the Atlantic, the widths of magnetic anomalies and thus the rates of spreading vary with the Euler latitude in exact correspondence with Euler's theorem.⁶⁵

An intriguing discovery in the Pacific was linear chains of volcanic islands, which seemed to continue underwater far beyond the islands themselves. The most striking example is the Hawaiian volcanic chain, which extends from the big island of Hawaii 1000 km west-northwest to Gardiner Pinnacle, through shoals, shallow banks, guyots (drowned ancient volcanic islands that were eroded down to sea level before they sank), and seamounts (drowned volcanic islands that were never eroded), past the island of Midway. It then bends into a north-northwest trending underwater chain called the Emperor Seamounts, which extends to the Kuril Trench off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The islands farther down the chain give the appearance, and have been measured, to be older than the ones closer to Hawaii. The island chains and the age sequence were first recognized by an American geologist, James Dwight Dana, in the 1840's. Concerning this chain, Islands goes on to say:

Nothing could be more obvious to a geologist now than an age sequence in the Hawaiian Islands. Flying in from the south, one first sees the smooth carapace of the gigantic active volcanoes on the island of Hawaii. Then past Maui to Oahu and Kauai, the islands are ever more deeply eroded into knife-edge ridges and enormous valleys. Assuming only an equal intensity of erosion, the age sequence is manifest. Dana deduced all this at a time when few scientists even believed that valleys are eroded by the streams that run through them. Dana concluded that depth of erosion 'is therefore a mark of time and affords evidence of the most decisive character.'

As sea-floor exploration progressed in the 1950s, the islands tended to be ignored because so many large undersea volcanoes were discovered. These were of two general types: flat-topped guyots, which were drowned ancient islands, and pointed-topped seamounts, which had never been truncated by waves. The guyots were assumed to be geologically old, at least old enough to grow 4 km to 5 km up from the sea floor, be truncated, and sink to various depths. Moreover, some were dredged and proved to be roughly 100 Ma [million years] old. Many of the seamounts and guyots were in lineations trending northwest -- like Dana's island chains with age progressions. However, some groups, such as the Emperor Seamounts, had a distinctively different trend that was almost due north. This was particularly intriguing because the purely submarine Emperor trend was clearly an extension of the Hawaiian trend with a connection at a 'bend' or 'elbow.' Moreover, the Hawaiian trend itself seemed to continue even beyond Midway atoll. Evidently, another stage of submergence carried even atolls beneath the waves....

In 1957 L. J. Chubb.... showed that almost all the high islands in the Pacific have west-northwesterly trends. Not just the ones noted by Dana, but four other groups as well. But atolls are relatively senile chains of islands, and Chubb showed that they have a different trend that is more northwesterly. He would have included most of the submarine volcanoes in his generalization that the 'direction of earth-movements' had changed gradually during geological time from NNW to NW to WNW.

The nature of these 'earth-movements' was proposed by J. Tuzo Wilson in 1963.... He proposed that the sea floor spreads because it is carried along by convection currents that rise from deep in the mantle in thin sheets, flow horizontally beneath the crust, and then return to the mantle in thin sheets. That left a motionless core in each convection cell. Wilson visualized in this core a fixed source of lava, which would rise to build volcanoes. The horizontal convective flow would carry volcanoes away from the source, and the result would be a linear age progression of volcanoes.

But the reality of the age progressions still had to be confirmed. In 1964, Ian McDougall (and later, Brent Dalrymple and others) began to publish the ages of insular volcanic rocks. Dana had been sure only of the sequence in which the volcanoes became inactive. The isotope geochemists showed that each giant island in the Pacific was produced in only a million years or so, and, although there was minor volcanism later, the Dana progression indeed gave the sequence of island formation.

In 1972, Jason Morgan, one of the inventors of plate tectonics, applied it to the problem of the lineations of islands. He showed that the island lineations of the Pacific plot as circular arcs around an Euler pole and that the spacing of islands in the age progressions depends on the Euler latitude. However, the islands do not indicate relative motion between rigid plates but relative motion between one rigid plate and a framework of lava sources called hot spots, in the mantle. If the mantle itself is considered motionless and hot spots do not move around in it, Morgan had tied the past motion of plates into the present geological framework.

Lines of volcanoes have come to be called hot-spot tracks, and they have been studied intensively all over the world. The tracks on different plates can be compared from a knowledge of the relative motion between plates. It appears that hot spots do indeed lie in a fairly rigid framework embedded in the mantle. So-called 'absolute motion' of plates is relative to this framework. Individual hot spots persist for 10 Ma to 100 Ma or more, and, if they drift, it is by no more than a few millimeters per year. Their characteristics indicate that they consist of long, narrow plumes of magma rising from the hot lower mantle. These fixed plumes penetrate the lithosphere and rapidly build volcanoes, which become extinct when drifting separates them from the source area.

Morgan's analysis included the origin of the Emperor-Hawaii bend. Inasmuch as the hot spots are fixed, the Pacific plate simply changed its direction of motion without interrupting the production of volcanoes. From other hot-spot tracks of the same age as the Emperor trend, an older Euler pole was established and with it the motion of all such tracks for about 80 Ma in the Pacific.⁶⁶

Another type of evidence that led to the acceptance of plate tectonics is related to the apparent wandering of the magnetic poles:

Because the magnetic and geographic poles generally lie fairly close together, determination of the position of the magnetic poles of the past also provides a guide to the probable position of the contemporaneous geographic poles.

Studies of the palaeomagnetism of samples of continental volcanic rocks of different ages have demonstrated that the magnetic poles have changed position over time, appearing to 'wander' widely over the face of the Earth. It is now realised that in most, but not all cases it was the continents, not the magnetic poles, which moved. The rocks of each continent preserve a magnetic record over time of the position of that continent relative to the poles.

For example, the 'polar wander paths' for Africa and South America, plotted independently, follow similar but widely separated tracks... However, if the continents are brought together [with the east coast of S. America abutting the west coast of Africa] the two separate wander paths merge. The obvious conclusion is that for the period represented by the magnetic records (dated radiometrically and/or palaeontologically as covering the period 450-200 million years ago) Africa and South America were closely joined, moved as one unit and began to separate 200 million years ago.⁶⁷

The above are samples of the tremendous amount of data indicating that plate tectonics correctly describes how the crust of the earth moves, and how mountain ranges and ocean basins are formed. Although many details have yet to be worked out, this does not invalidate the essentials of the theory, any more than my wife's lack of understanding of the chemistry of colloidal suspensions prevents her from making gravy.

Genesis says that the floodwaters were drained within a little over one year after the Flood started, so the events the Society describes as "under the added weight of the water, there was likely a great shifting in the crust.... new mountains were thrust upward.... shallow sea basins were deepened," had to mostly take place in that one year period.

The following sections present what I consider to be the main lines of evidence for plate tectonics. This evidence invalidates the Society's invocation of rapid crustal movements because ".... the continual motion of the plates over the partially molten asthenosphere.... [is what] explains the development of ocean basins and the formation of mountain ranges,"⁶⁸ and not that "under the added weight of the water, there was likely a great shifting in the crust."⁶⁹

Part 7: Volcanic Chains and Hotspot Tracks

Three independent lines of evidence point to similar age sequences and absolute ages in the Hawaii-Emperor Seamount volcanic chain.

1. Radioisotope dating with the potassium-argon method shows increasing age with distance northwest of the island of Hawaii, up to 4.4 million years at Kauai, and radioisotope dating of dredgings from the Emperor Seamounts yields similar increasing age with distance from Hawaii.

2. Starting from a reconstruction of the original shapes and volumes of the islands and comparing it to the present volume, an average depth of erosion may be calculated. This average depth increases smoothly with distance from Hawaii. Plotting on a graph the radioisotope derived age versus the average depth of erosion yields a smooth curve.

3. The average age of the oceanic crust on which the Hawaiian Islands and Emperor Seamounts lie, determined by both the thermal subsidence and radioisotope dating of the crust, increases smoothly with distance from Hawaii.⁷⁰

This sort of evidence, including the bend in the chain, can also be seen in two other volcanic chains, the Tuamotu Archipelago-Line Island chain, and the chain formed by the Austral, Gilbert and Marshall islands. The three chains

are approximately parallel and could all have been formed by the same motion of the Pacific plate over three fixed hot spots. In each case the most recent volcanic activity has taken place near the southeastern end of the chain, and the islands and seamounts get progressively older to the northwest.⁷¹

The almost perfect fit of volcanic chains in the Pacific Plate with a pole of rotation at 70Deg N, 101Deg W and a rate of rotation about this pole of 1 deg/[million years] for the last 10 [million years] provides strong support for the hotspot model.⁷²

The above mentioned hotspot tracks can be seen on depth maps of the ocean floor, as well as maps showing gravitational anomalies over the ocean. See Islands,⁷³ "The Earth's Hot Spots,"⁷⁴ "The Oceanic Crust"⁷⁵ and Exploring Our Living Planet.⁷⁶ Landprints⁷⁷ contains a clear map of the net crustal motion that produced the Hawaii-Emperor Seamount chain. That the hotspot activity continues is shown by the existence of the Loihi Seamount, an active underwater volcano thirty miles southeast of Hawaii. Its summit is 3,200 feet below the ocean surface,⁷⁸ making it an undersea mountain with a summit 12,000 feet above the ocean floor.

The track of the hotspot under Yellowstone Park can be spectacularly seen on any 3-dimensional topographic map of the region, as well as maps in "Yellowstone Park as a Window on the Earth's Interior,"⁷⁹ "Our Restless Planet Earth"⁸⁰ and "Measuring Crustal Deformation in the American West."⁸¹ The hotspot clearly appears to have "burned" the Snake River plain through the Rocky Mountains as the North American tectonic plate drifted westward over the past 50 million years. For this to have occurred, the Rocky Mountains, up to 14,000 feet in elevation, must already have been in existence. This is further evidence that high mountains have existed far longer than the 4400 years since the Flood.

The existence of the Yellowstone hotspot illustrates many other interesting geological phenomena that bear on the Flood.

Several times in the past two million years magma.... has filled immense chambers under the [Yellowstone] plateau. The now partially crystallized and solidified magma is the source of heat of the numerous hydrothermal features in Yellowstone National Park: geysers, hot springs, mud pots and fumeroles.... Over the past two million years thousands of cubic kilometers of rhyolitic magma has erupted to the surface. The average rate of magma production has been comparable to the rate at the most active volcanic regions of the earth, including Hawaii, Iceland and the mid-ocean ridges. The volcanism of Yellowstone is more episodic. Periods of voluminous eruption lasting for only a few hours, days or months are separated by quiescent intervals lasting for as much as hundreds of thousands of years.

.... most of the rhyolite was erupted not as lava flows but as particulate flows of volcanic ash and hot gas. Work [on the latest sequence] has shown that most of the rhyolite erupted in three catastrophic cycles over the past two million years....

.... The voluminous hot-ash flows were on a scale known nowhere else in recorded geological history. The ash, which flowed for tens of kilometers, welded to form hard rhyolites covering thousands of square kilometers. The massive eruptions of each cycle considerably drained the sub-surface magma chambers, causing the chambers roofs to collapse to form huge calderas: craterlike basins tens of kilometers across. In the course of these explosive eruptions fragments of glassy and crystalline volcanic material were thrown high into the atmosphere and carried for thousands of kilometers. Remnants of these materials have been found as far away as Saskatchewan, Texas and California....

The ages of the volcanic rocks created in the three cycles of volcanism were determined by [the potassium-argon method]. This dating in conjunction with geological mapping and stratigraphy suggests that the first and most voluminous cycle of volcanism began about 2.2 million years ago.... and reached its climax two million years ago with the first catastrophic ash-flow eruption. The resulting cooling unit.... has a volume of more than 2,500 cubic kilometers....

The climactic eruption of the third cycle expelled 1,000 cubic kilometers of magma.... giving rise to a caldera 45 kilometers wide and 75 kilometers long.⁸²

See also "Giant Volcanic Calderas"⁸³ for information on other giant eruptions like those at Yellowstone. The calderas have been found worldwide. This article says about the last Yellowstone eruption, "The camouflaging effects of vegetation and glaciation have made the traces of that eruption quite difficult to recognize today." The article also describes the Cerro Galan caldera in northwestern Argentina. It is 2.6 million years old, 34 kilometers long, 6 kilometers high, and left ash layers half a kilometer thick. Many of the ash layers are welded into a "hard, dense rock" which has been heavily eroded.

One huge eruption about ten million years ago buried a herd of extinct rhinoceroses in Nebraska,^{84, 85} which were found buried in a farmer's field. The rhinoceroses had not been killed instantly, but had been buried by an ash fall over a period of hours or days. This was shown by the trampling of juvenile rhinoceroses and other small animals by the larger ones.

Numerous hotspots have been found all over the earth. When the tracks they left in the oceans and on continents are mapped, they indicate the same general pattern of continental drift shown by oceanic volcanic chains and transform faults. See 'The Earth's Hot Spots', Scientific American, April, 1985, pp. 52-53 for such a map.

Another striking hotspot track that illustrates continental drift is seen in the geology of the Reunion Island hotspot, the Seychelles islands and India. The article "Volcanism at Rifts", Scientific American, July, 1989 describes the production of flood basalts that formed India's Deccan Plateau:

Sixty-six million years ago the earth rifted open on the west side of India, and huge volumes of molten rock poured onto the land. Close to two million cubic kilometers of lava were released in less than half a million years, blanketing much of west-central India in layers of basalt hundreds of meters thick. The episode may have dealt a major blow to the climatic and ecological stability of the planet, and some theories even blame it for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Yet it was far from unique; many similar cataclysms have taken place on rifting continents during the course of geologic time.

.... the largely submerged continental block that bears the Seychelles islands rifted away from western India.... This rift extruded vast amounts of magma onto the continental margins.... The melt also poured hundreds of kilometers inland, forming a vast basalt plateau called the Deccan Traps.

After the rifting the Indian subcontinent continued to drift northward on a collision course with Asia. It left the plume responsible for the volcanism far to the south, where it now lies under the volcanic island of Reunion. A trail of volcanic islands, sea mounts and ridges left on the oceanic crust that has moved across the hot spot shows that 66 million years ago it lay directly under the developing rift.

A catastrophic series of flood basalts formed the Columbia Plateau of eastern Washington and Oregon somewhere between 13 and 17 million years ago. That this was a series occurring over a long period of time, and not a single event, is clear. Landprints⁸⁶ says

Between the periods of eruption there was time for grasslands to reestablish themselves and again become inhabited by horses, camels, rhinoceroses, mastodons, and other creatures.

.... Remnants of a forest were preserved at Ginkgo Petrified Forest.... in central Washington.

A rhinoceros fossil was found in 1935 in the basalts of Grand Coulee in Washington, and described by a Professor Beck. It is known locally as the Blue Lake Rhino and is a favorite summer hiking goal. How to Deep-Freeze a Mammoth⁸⁷ describes the events.

The original discovery was made by a party of hikers. In the basalts which crop out along Jasper Canyon, they observed a number of small caves, and amused themselves with investigating them further. In one of the caves they found some bone fragments, which were eventually turned over to Dr. Beck and which the paleontologist Chester Stock identified as belonging to an extinct rhinoceros. Dr. [D. E.] Savage later identified it as the genus Diceratherium, which lived in North America during the Miocene epoch, some 20 million years ago.

Beck and one of his assistants visited the cave and found it to be small, elongated, and of a very odd shape. On the right there were two pairs of short, pipelike extensions, one pair being located at the very entrance of the cave.... while the other pair was located further inside the cave. Beyond that pair, the cave narrowed, then widened again, and ended.

The two scientists must have been thrilled to realize that they were in fact poking their heads into a 20-million-year old rhinoceros, through its left hind leg. This seemed to be the only rational explanation. Apparently, the flowing lava had engulfed the carcass of the rhinoceros, and when the lava cooled and the carcass decayed, the mold and the bones within it were preserved in about the same way as the famous molds in volcanic ash preserved at Pompeii. The mold had then remained buried for millions of years, until the river finally cut its way into the ancient lava flow.... exposing the cave.

.... It turns out that the lava had been flowing out into a lake, where it formed pillow lava -- large, plastic lumps with a tough and cooled surface but with a liquid, burning hot interior. These pillows were packed around the carcass of the rhino, which had been floating in the lake, and so have preserved the shape of its exterior....

Casts of the rhino have been made from the basalt mold; one of them is on exhibit in the Burke Museum of the University of Washington in Seattle. It seems to record faithfully the shape of the body of the extinct rhino. The head is especially rhino-like.... The head has been pulled up in a typical rigor mortis position....

The animal was lying on its left side, and its body is very bloated, which suggests that it had died some time prior to its being embedded in the basalt. Perhaps it died from the heat and the gas that was given off by the eruptions. The final reconstruction thus shows a much slimmer animal, not unlike a modern rhino.... It confirms in all essentials the image that had been formed earlier of this animal, on the basis of fossil skeletons.

The Deccan and Columbia flood basalts could not have formed during or after the Flood -- there is simply not enough time for the sequence of events to occur. The Columbia basalts are composed of several hundred individual flows, forming a plateau averaging half a mile thick. The flows buried the roots of already existing mountain ranges, leaving the tops of the mountains exposed. The highest in Oregon, the Wallowas, are about ten thousand feet. They are eroded remnants of ancient sea sediments. The Wallowa mountains first had to form and erode, then several hundred lava flows had to fill the canyons to a half-mile depth, with some of the flows cooling down enough for soil to form in the time between flows -- enough to support a population of animals, some of which became trapped in subsequent lava flows. Then the Snake and Columbia Rivers later had to cut completely through the flows that had entered their valleys. Finally the Bonneville and Missoula floods (see the following sections on ice ages) had to come through and deposit giant gravel bars in the Snake River Canyon and Columbia Gorge. To claim all this happened in the 4400 years since the Flood is stretching credulity.

The only alternative is that the Flood waters must have been deep enough to cover the Wallowas, over ten thousand feet. But there is not enough water on earth today for that.

Part 8: Seafloor Spreading and Continental Drift

Mid-ocean ridges mark the position of spreading centers. Earthquakes are concentrated at these ridges, as well as at the transform faults that cut across them, and at subduction zones. Spreading centers are strikingly evident in a depth-map of the Atlantic Ocean. Parallel transform faults extending across the Atlantic, from South America to Africa, are even more striking evidence of continental drift.⁸⁸

As the material from Islands explained, the thermal subsidence and heat flow out of the oceanic crust follow physical laws that can be used to predict their values. "The History of the Atlantic"⁸⁹ explains:

The lithosphere can be regarded as being the upper thermal-boundary layer of the mantle convection system. This boundary model leads to far-reaching predictions about the flow of heat out of the ocean floor and about the depth of the ocean. The predictions have largely turned out to be true. Consider the lithosphere of the Atlantic in vertical section. Created at high temperatures at the center of the mid-Atlantic ridge, the plate cools first at its upper surface, where it is in contact with seawater at a temperature of about zero degrees Celsius. As heat flows out of the upper surface into the ocean the plate cools and thickens. The theoretical description of thermal conduction yields a simple equation that predicts the flow of heat through the plate. The equation in turn yields [a mathematical expression] for the flow of heat out of the plate into the ocean as a function of the age of the ocean floor.... The validity of the heat-flow expression can be tested by measuring [the heat flow] at various locations on the ocean floor and comparing the measured values with the predicted ones.... Measurements made at such locations are in close agreement with the predicted values.... The equation works well for lithosphere that is less than 120 million years old.

As the lithosphere cools it undergoes thermal contraction. The rate of vertical contraction can be calculated from the heat flow. This contraction, in conjunction with the gravitational-loading effect of the ocean water, is responsible for the depth of the ocean floor. Again theory yields a simple mathematical expression.... Empirical data indicate that this expression, like the one for heat flow, yields correct values for lithosphere no older than 60 million years.

If the ocean basins had sunk during one year, 4400 years ago, it is highly improbable that the heat flow and ocean depth would obey physical laws based on age.

The existence of mirror-image magnetic anomalies on each side of spreading centers, showing identical radioisotope dates and similar thermal subsidence, is another evidence of seafloor spreading. The radioisotope dates consistently get older farther from the ridge. The dating of the pattern of magnetic anomalies is also consistent with similar dating of magnetic anomalies of rocks on land. The rate and direction of spreading is inferred from dating of magnetic anomaly patterns, and has been measured directly by making use of extraterrestrial reference points.

These 'space-geodetic' techniques make it possible to measure the distance between points 1,000 kilometers apart to a precision of a centimeter or less.... One particularly fruitful technique, known as very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI),.... [achieved] the one-centimeter precision required for studies of crustal deformation.... about 1980. By that time a global network of VLBI stations had been established by [NASA, which was able] to collect and process enough VLBI data to estimate rates of motion along baselines spanning both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans; the rates generally differed from the calculations of plate-tectonic models.... by only a few millimeters per year.⁹⁰

A consideration of the formation of magnetic anomalies is quite instructive. Here is a description of how the rocks in the oceanic crust acquire their magnetization.⁹¹

The magnetization acquired by lava flows and other igneous rocks as they cool is termed thermoremanent magnetization [TRM]. Because igneous rocks start out in a molten state, a reasonable initial hypothesis about TRM would be that it is produced by the magnetic alignment of grains of magnetite in partially molten rock. This hypothesis is wrong.... above the temperature of 550DegC the intensity of magnetization.... rapidly decreases to zero. By the time the sample reaches 580DegC, the rock has lost all of its magnetization.

The temperature at which a magnetic mineral loses its magnetism is the Curie temperature of that mineral.... at 580DegC [rock] is still completely solid. The magnetic grains in the rock cannot possibly rotate as the sample cools below this temperature.... Most igneous rocks.... acquire most of their TRM while cooling through a narrow temperature range just below their Curie temperatures. After the rock has cooled, the TRM is firmly locked into the rock, where it will remain as a magnetic memory for hundreds of millions of years, provided the rock is not reheated or degraded by chemical processes.

As the oceanic crust cools, it takes on the direction of magnetization of the earth's magnetic field. Note that the rock must cool to below 550DegC before it retains the magnetization. But the magma welling up into a spreading center has a temperature of about 1350DegC, which is very near the melting point. As the magma spreads out from the center, it cools. The upper portion, in contact with the ocean water, cools rapidly, but it takes a much longer time to cool deep down. The total magnetism measured above the ocean floor is an average over the total depth that has come below the Curie temperature. Remember that all ocean crust has a pattern of magnetic anomalies imprinted on it -- stripes parallel to a mid-ocean ridge. If it is the case, as the God's Word or Man's book says, that⁹²

the plates moved, the sea bottom sank, and the great trenches opened, allowing the water to drain off the land....

then all the magnetic anomalies and other physical characteristics discussed above must have been formed in one year. But is this reasonable? If the Atlantic Ocean, say, opened in one year, the ocean bottom would have been a great sea of magma,^92a and it could not have cooled below its Curie temperature for more than a few hundreds of feet by now. Even if the earth's magnetic field could have reversed itself hundreds of times in one year, only a thin layer of crust could have taken on the striped pattern seen today. And yet deep drilling shows that the magnetic anomalies are many kilometers deep. Also, the ocean bottom would have to be much hotter near its surface than is actually observed, as it would not have had tens of millions of years in which to cool, and the observed heat flow through the crust would be much different from the calculated value. Nor could depth be expressed as a mathematical function of the age of the crust measured in millions of years.

Geological scientists were not keen, at first, on the notion of continental drift. The idea had been rejected by most geologists since Alfred Wegener first put forth his theory on drift in 1915, because they could not come up with a plausible mechanism that caused the drift. But by the mid 1960s the evidence became so compelling that most geologists were forced to accept it. The evidence came in the form of magnetic polarity reversals recorded by three different kinds of geological mechanisms: (1) Terrestrial volcanic rocks that contained a pattern of reversals of the polarity of the earth's magnetic field were dated by the potassium argon method. The dates were charted on a time scale, showing the pattern in time of polarity reversals for the last four million years. (2) A pattern of magnetic polarity reversals was found in the basalt rock that forms the ocean floor. This pattern was found to be symmetrical about mid-ocean ridges, and the magnetic profile across the ridge was correlated with the terrestrially derived time scale. (3) The polarity intervals of the reversal time scale were demonstrated in deep-sea sediment cores.

The book The Road to Jaramillo⁹³ documents the major discoveries in magnetic reversals that led to the revolution in the earth sciences. It describes the development of potassium-argon dating, and the application of the method to date the magnetic polarity reversals found in rocks. From 1963 through 1966, eleven increasingly refined time scales were published, showing the dates of geomagnetic polarity reversals in terrestrial rocks. Scales seven through eleven were published by the geologists Allan Cox, Brent Dalrymple, and Richard Doell. In publishing scale number eleven in May 1966, they named the most recently discovered polarity reversal event the Jaramillo event. The story of these discoveries makes fascinating reading:⁹⁴

A highly speculative and poorly received hypothesis was advanced in 1963 by Fred J. Vine and Drummond Matthews, and independently by Lawrence W. Morley. It held that the solid rock of the ocean floor is imprinted with the record of field reversals in the form of a sequence of alternately magnetized stripes; the stripes, with widths proportional to the alternating intervals of the polarity-reversal scale, formed as newly created ocean floor spread from mid-ocean ridges. In February 1966, geomagnetic polarity-reversal time scale eleven, containing the Jaramillo event, was successfully correlated with magnetic-anomaly profiles across mid-ocean ridges. Overnight the Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis was confirmed; the acceptance of seafloor spreading thus became inescapable. The revolution had been triggered. Almost simultaneously, from a third independent source, the polarity intervals of the reversal time scale were demonstrated in deep-sea sediment cores.⁹⁵

In 1965 the National Science Foundation vessel Eltanin took seismic and magnetic anomaly data while criss-crossing several mid-ocean ridges in the Pacific. The data from Leg 19 of that trip became the key to the landmark paper published by Fred Vine in December, 1966, that confirmed the concept of seafloor spreading:⁹⁶

In it he compared the magnetic anomalies from various mid-ocean ridges and rises (Juan de Fuca, Gorda, East Pacific, Reykjanes, Carlsberg, Mid-Atlantic, and Red Sea) with anomalies calculated from models of the seafloor that assumed rocks of alternately normal and reversed polarity that matched the geomagnetic reversals dated in the potassium-argon/polarity-reversal time scale. In a masterful integration, he touched on all of the factors that contributed to or were the consequences of the assumption that

'the entire history of the ocean basins, in terms of ocean floor spreading, is contained frozen in the ocean crust. The hypothesis is supported by the extreme linearity and continuity of oceanic magnetic anomalies and their symmetry about the axes of ridges. If the proposed reversal time scale for the last four million years is combined with the model, computed anomaly profiles show remarkably good agreement with those observed, and one can deduce rates of spreading for all active parts of the mid-oceanic ridge system for which magnetic profiles or surveys are available. The rates obtained are in exact agreement with those needed to account for continental drift.'

.... The polarity-reversal time scale was indeed the key to the meaning and interpretation of a very great, global array of magnetic data preserved in ocean floor crust and sediment.

.... A series of papers by the scientists at [Columbia University's ] Lamont [Geological Observatory] followed shortly [after the April, 1966 American Geophysical Union meeting]; they demonstrated repeatedly that the symmetrical magnetic-anomaly pattern along the mid-ocean ridges (both active and dormant seafloor-spreading centers) was present over vast portions of the South Atlantic, Indian, North Pacific, and South Pacific Oceans. These papers also made clear that the pattern is essentially identical in all of the different oceanic regions, and that it is produced by the same mechanism that generates the alternate strips of normally and reversely magnetized basalt. Furthermore, although each spreading center has opened at a unique rate, thus producing a stretched pattern at a fast spreading center and a compressed pattern at slower ones, the various magnetic profiles could be matched perfectly. By the use of the terrestrially derived polarity-reversal time scale, the Lamont group could determine accurately the rates of crustal spreading beneath the sea. By extrapolating that rate, with the implicit assumption (open to great question at that time) that spreading had occurred at a fixed rate during the last 80 million years, and using the profiles from the South Atlantic Ocean as the most trustworthy standard, [Lamont geologists] proposed, in 1968, the remarkable polarity-reversal scale shown as Fig. 8.10 [which shows the correlation of magnetic stripes from all over the world].

The essential accuracy of this time scale has been verified by several subsequent studies.

.... [At the A.G.U. meeting Neil Opdyke of Lamont] reported that the Lamont group had successfully determined the magnetism of deep-sea cores and identified polarity reversals, including the Jaramillo event. Thus, the time scale of the reversalists was corroborated from a third independent source.

.... Immediately after that momentous meeting of the A.G.U. in April, Opdyke returned to Lamont, and after several months of fever-pitched activity, he.... published a most significant and influential paper entitled "Paleomagnetic Study of Antarctic Deep-Sea Cores" in Science, on October 21, 1966. They demonstrated that (1) magnetostratigraphy, coupled to biostratigraphic zonation, permitted reliable dating and correlation between widely separated sites; (2) cores generally held a more complete and finely detailed magnetic record of the time interval they represented than was obtainable from other studies; and (3) the cores provided a third independent source of polarity-reversal data; the core data could be matched with the reversals defined by the potassium-argon/polarity-reversal scale and also with the seafloor magnetic-anomaly profiles.

On a sequence of seven cores taken in the Antarctic region, they performed magnetic measurements and biostratigraphic subdivision (based on Radiolaria) demonstrating that the "magnetic reversals and faunal boundaries are consistently related to each other".

.... J. Tuzo Wilson, in reviewing the extraordinary discoveries that confirmed that the record of reversals is preserved in terrestrial igneous rocks, seafloor basalts, and deep-sea sediments, has remarked that these data constitute a revolution in earth science. "Three different features of the Earth all change in exactly the same ratios. These ratios are the same in all parts of the world. The results from one set are thus being used to make precise numerical predictions about all the sets in all parts of the world."

Thus The Road to Jaramillo shows the three independent lines of evidence for seafloor spreading. Note the correlations among these and previously mentioned data. The spreading rates calculated from hot-spot tracks match those calculated from magnetic anomalies, which are based on radioisotope dating. They both match spreading rates directly measured by space-geodetic techniques. The age sequence of islands on hot-spot tracks, as measured by radioisotope methods, matches the age sequence of the magnetic anomalies of the sea-floor on which the islands sit. These correlations lend strong support to the accuracy of radioisotope dating, as well as scientific dating methods generally. Most of all, they show that much of the ocean floor formed over a period of about one hundred million years, and the oldest ocean floor is about two hundred million years old.

These physical observations -- the worldwide correlation of magnetic anomalies on land, in the ocean basement rocks, and in ocean bottom sediments; the thermal subsidence and flow of heat out of oceanic crust; the observation that trenches form at subduction zones -- are fatal to the notion that the deep ocean basins could have opened in one year, or that a shallow, pre-existing ocean basin could have sunk in place.

There is a new geophysical technique called seismic tomography, which is similar to the CAT scan (Computer Aided Tomography) in medicine, except that it uses seismic waves instead of X-rays to make images of the earth's interior. This technique can directly map the earth's mantle in three dimensions, and shows the existence of hot flows of mantle material that drive continental drift.⁹⁷

The accumulation of terranes at many continental boundaries is another evidence for continental drift. Terranes are essentially pieces of ancient continents and islands that have drifted against the edges of continents and stuck there. Often they have been squashed, rotated and extended, producing a jumble of fragments. These geologic collages are typical of western North America and Alaska. The movement of the plate that is west of the San Andreas Fault, which splits California, is even today pushing continental fragments toward Alaska. See "Terranes"⁹⁸ and "The Growth of Western North America."⁹⁹

On geologic time scales the earth's crust is plastic and will flow, like taffy. Below a depth of about 120 kilometers

the mantle remains solid but becomes ductile -- about as ductile as window glass at room temperature, ductile enough to flow on geologic time scales.¹⁰⁰

Window glass does flow, given long periods of time, as can sometimes be seen in the several hundred year old window glass of old cathedrals, such as Notre Dame,¹⁰¹ which has become thickened on the bottom. But we know what happens when we try to make glass flow too fast -- it shatters. A similar principle applies to rocks and continental drift. Any fast flow of the crust would shatter the rock into tiny fragments. There would be no evidence of flow, such as folded rock layers extending over hundreds of miles. Everything would be an uninterpretable jumble of tiny pieces of rock. The idea that continents could drift around, ocean basins could sink, and mountain ranges could rise in just one year, is incompatible with the physical characteristics of rock. This is clearly seen in the effect of earthquakes that raise mountains by several tens of feet. Boundary regions are shattered. These movements cannot produce the highly folded sedimentary rock layers observed worldwide. Sudden movements break rock layers, they do not fold them.

There is even evidence that continental drift occurs in cycles, where continents collide and form supercontinents, break up, drift around, and collide again.^{102, 103} There is much evidence that most of the continents were near the equator in at least one of these cycles, and that all of them were near the equator at one time or another. This explains the biological evidence of tropical animals and vegetation all over the world. Note that these cycles take a very long time -- hundreds of millions of years. The evidence they occurred could not have been produced in a single year just four thousand years ago.

These cycles of continental drift have produced many episodes of mountain building. This is in contradistinction to the idea that all the high mountains of the world were formed in the one year of the Flood:

.... oceans have repeatedly opened and closed in the vicinity of the present-day North Atlantic, while a single ocean has been maintained continuously in the vicinity of the Pacific.

At present the sea-floor crust of the Pacific is being subducted under all the continents that surround it, whereas the floor of the Atlantic generally butts up against surrounding continental blocks. In our framework this means that the continents are still in the process of dispersing after the breakup about 200 million years ago of the most recent supercontinent.... Pangaea....

A second underpinning of our supercontinent-cycle hypothesis is the timing of various episodes of mountain-building and episodes of rifting. The ages of mountain ranges that could have been produced by the compressive forces that accompany continental collisions reveal a surprising regularity. This kind of mountain building was particularly intense, occurring in several parts of the world, during six distinct periods. The periods were broadly centered on dates about 2,600 million years ago, 2,100 million years ago, a time between 1,800 and 1,600 million years ago, 1,100 million years ago, 650 million years ago and 250 million years ago. The timing shows a certain periodicity: the interval between any two of these periods of intense compressive mountain building was about 400 to 500 million years.

What is more, about 100 million years after each of these periods of mountain building there appears to have been a period of rifting.... The mountain building of 250 million years ago, of course, was followed by the rifting and eventual breakup of Pangaea.¹⁰⁴

The fit of the borders of the continents when reassembled into Pangaea is remarkable. The best known example is that the bulge of the eastern edge of South America fits into the curve of the western edge of Africa. The distribution of various types of rock on the rifted continents shows that they were once part of one large continent. So does the distribution of fossil plants and animals.

Plate tectonics explains the history of many mountain ranges. The Appalachians were formed when ancient North America collided with Africa and Eurasia, crushing and folding the eastern seaboard. They have since been heavily eroded. Similar things are happening today in the Himalayas, where the Indian subcontinent is colliding with Asia. "The Structure of Mountain Ranges"¹⁰⁵ describes what is happening:

As the Indian and Eurasian plates collided the oceanic lithosphere north of the Indian landmass was bent down and thrust under Tibet, much as the plates under the Pacific Ocean are now being thrust under Japan, the Aleutians and South America. (Geologists call this process subduction.) It was as if the Indian plate were a conveyor belt trundling around a spool under southern Tibet.

Sometime between 55 and 40 million years ago the Indian landmass itself struck the south coast of Asia, and at that point the conveyor belt began to jam; the speed of the Indian plate was reduced from between 10 and 20 centimeters per year to about five centimeters per year.... As India plunged under Tibet with tremendous force, a northward-dipping fault tore through the northern edge of the subcontinent. The crust under the fault plane continued to move northward and downward, but a slice of continental shelf and deep crust above the fault plane was in effect shaved off the oncoming subcontinent and thrust backward on top of it. Between 20 and 10 million years ago the process was repeated: the first fault became inactive and a second fault formed at a deeper level. A second slice of Indian crust was thrust onto the subcontinent, lifting up the first slice. The eroded remnants of these two slices of ancient Indian crust are exposed today in the Himalayas, and they constitute the bulk of the range.

The heavy weight of the Himalayas bends the Indian plate downward south of the range. Over millions of years sediments eroded from the mountains have filled the resulting trough, forming the broad plains of the Ganges and Indus rivers. Seismological and drilling results obtained by the Oil and Natural Gas Commission of India have documented the presence of the trough in the Precambrian bedrock under the sediments. The bedrock dips smoothly down toward the mountains, reaching a depth of about five kilometers at the front. Some 200 to 300 kilometers south of the front, at the edge of the trough, the bedrock is exposed at the surface.

It should be clear from the above description that the Himalayas formed over a long period of time, long enough to dump a five kilometer depth of sediment into the Ganges plain. India has been densely inhabited for at least 3000 years. If the Flood occurred 4400 years ago, and we assume that the Ganges plain has filled evenly over that time period, we find that the rate of sedimentation is nearly four feet per year. It is clear that this is far too high a rate for human habitation, and floods of sufficient magnitude to cause it have not been historically observed. If we assume that the Himalayas formed during or shortly after the Flood, then all that sediment would have to be eroded before human habitation, about 1300 years. This implies a sedimentation rate of 12 feet per year. The Himalayas currently erode at about three feet per thousand years. What would be the mechanism to produce such an incredible rate of erosion and sedimentation?

Alternatively, we could speculate that the Himalayas were raised during the Flood, and eroded as the floodwaters drained. But the Himalayas are solid rock, not soft sediments. Being the highest mountains in the world, they would have drained first, and so would have been little eroded by the floodwaters, at least compared to other parts of the earth. If the floodwaters were at most 8000 feet deep, as is implied in the Society's publications, then as soon as the Himalayas rose over 8000 feet erosion would nearly have ceased. And if it were possible for the Himalayas to have been eroded to nearly their current extent in less than one year, certainly all the surrounding terrain should be far more eroded than it is. Yet the Himalayas show far more erosion than the surrounding area, gauged by the depth from the highest peaks to the lowest valleys. Also, the Himalayas show no trace of the great scouring and deposition that should be evident if most of their erosion was produced by a single great flow of water.

It should be abundantly clear that these speculations are not reconcilable with what is actually known about the Himalayas. Either the Flood was deep enough to cover the 29,000 foot depth of the Himalayas, or the Himalayas arose in a short period during or after the Flood, and erosion of them subsequently deposited the huge depth of sediment in the Ganges Plain in that short time. Either way, there is great difficulty reconciling the geology of the Himalayas with effects attributed to the Flood.

The Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest show a striking feature: a series of volcanoes rising in a line about one hundred miles inland from the Pacific coast, from Mount Garibaldi in British Columbia to Mount Lassen in California. The volcanoes are the result of upwelling magma due to subduction of the Juan-de-Fuca plate under the western edge of North America. The most famous are Mount St. Helens, which erupted catastrophically in 1980, and Mount Rainier, the highest at over 14,000 feet. The volcanoes are built on a foundation of the flood basalts that formed the Columbia Plateau, and of older, eroded volcanoes. There are many extinct volcanoes in all stages of erosion. Much geological evidence shows that the volcanoes have been erupting continuously for many millions of years. Old ones grow extinct and erode away, and new ones take their place, often covering up the older remains.

Now, the 8,000 foot maximum depth for the Flood implied by the Society's publications is not enough to cover the tops of these volcanoes. Therefore, either the Flood was deeper than 8,000 feet, or Cascade volcanoes erupted, eroded to their bases, and new ones erupted again many times in the 4400 years since the Flood. But if the Flood was deeper than 8,000 feet, we are back to the problem of where the extra water went. If it wasn't that deep, how can one explain the short length of time for the eruptive sequence of the volcanoes, as well as that of similar volcanoes worldwide? And how did the volcanoes come to be on top of the Columbia flood basalt layers, which themselves flooded the already existing 10,000 foot Wallowa mountains?

A similar problem occurs with the Hawaiian and other Pacific islands. If the Flood were only 8,000 feet deep, then since Hawaii now rises to nearly 14,000 feet above sea level it must have been formed after the Flood. But we have seen that Hawaii is only the latest in a very long sequence of islands that have erupted and eroded away. The problem gets worse if one imagines the ocean basins to have been shallow enough to flood the land to 8,000 feet. A large number of seamounts, guyots, and islands, including the Hawaiian chain, would be above the surface (as the average ocean depth would be lower), since they are higher than the ocean floor by as much as 30,000 feet in the case of Hawaii. In fact, Hawaii is the highest mountain in the world, measured from its base. If the ocean basin were extremely shallow, Hawaii would have risen at least 20,000 feet above the floodwaters. The only alternative, that all these island chains and seamounts formed in the 4400 years since the Flood, is not reasonable. There are islands, whose rock bases were eroded flat by waves to 13,000 feet above the ocean floor, which then sank slowly enough to accumulate over 8000 feet of coral¹⁰⁶ on top. There is too much evidence, as I've discussed elsewhere, that these chains took tens of millions of years to form.

Another line of evidence showing the age of high mountains and the existence of seafloor spreading comes from the Great Rift Valley of East Africa. Africa is apparently rifting open at this valley, which is a continuation of the rift which forms the Red Sea. Africa's largest volcanoes, such as Kilimanjaro, are associated with the Great Rift. Other volcanoes in the region have left unmistakable evidence of their long existence in the ash falls that covered animal remains and tracks at Laetoli, near Lake Eyasi in Tanzania. An article in Scientific American¹⁰⁷ says about these ash beds, which contained so many animal tracks that they have become known as the Footprint Tuff, that fossils

.... are found mainly in the upper 45 to 60 meters of the beds, which at Laetoli are at least 130 meters thick.... All the ash, eolian and airfall, came from one volcano: Sadiman, about 20 kilometers east of Laetoli.... [The beds are] on the Eyasi Plateau, an uplifted fault block northwest of Lake Eyasi. The beds overlie ancient basement rocks of Precambrian age and are themselves bordered and overlain to the east by several large volcanoes. [Scientists] obtained potassium-argon dates that bracketed the Footprint Tuff. The samples from below it indicated that the tuff there was 3.8 million years old; the ages of samples from the Footprint Tuff itself and from above it clustered closely around 3.5 million years.... In general the animals preserved as fossils at Laetoli are similar in type to the animals found in the area today. Listed in order of their decreasing abundance, the commonest vertebrate remains are those of.... antelopes and related forms.... hares.... giraffes, rhinoceroses, horses, pigs and two kinds of proboscideans (elephants and dinotheres, a form now extinct).

Note that the great thickness of the ash, the radioisotope dates, the presence of fossils of extinct animals, the geologic faulting, and the fact that the ash is covered by extensive lava flows and is itself overlain by volcanoes, indicate that the ash falls were much older than the date of the Flood. The ash falls were able to be traced to a specific volcano, Sadiman, which still exists but has been eroded nearly to its base, and is part of a larger chain that includes Kilimanjaro, one hundred miles to the east and which is, at 19,500 feet, the highest mountain in Africa. Therefore the volcano must substantially predate the Flood, which again points up the problem of how the floodwaters could cover a high mountain. Also, Kilimanjaro was one of the few African mountains near the equator high enough to be affected by increased glaciation during the last ice age. Glaciers traveled halfway down the mountain, and there are only small remnants left today. How could such glaciation occur on a mountain that did not exist until after the Flood?

The Society's writers are not unaware of the facts that high mountains existed prior to the Flood, that plate tectonics explains their formation, and even that mountains have gone through many cycles of creation and destruction. When it suits his purpose, a writer will even emphasize it. The God's Word or Man's book says:¹⁰⁸

Perhaps even more remarkable is the Bible's insight into the history of mountains. Here is what a textbook on geology says: "From Pre-Cambrian times down to the present, the perpetual process of building and destroying mountains has continued.... Not only have mountains originated from the bottom of vanished seas, but they have often been submerged long after their formation, and then re-elevated." Compare this with the poetic language of the psalmist: "With a watery deep just like a garment you covered [the earth]. The waters were standing above the very mountains. Mountains proceeded to ascend, valley plains proceeded to descend -- to the place that you have founded for them." -- Psalm 104:6, 8.

The writer of the Watchtower article "The Unforgettable Flood"¹⁰⁹ seems to have forgotten about the shallow depth of the Flood, less than 8000 feet, implied in prior Watchtower publications. On page 3 he says:

Five months after the Deluge began, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat, situated in present-day eastern Turkey.... Since the 19th century, there have been numerous attempts to find the ark on the mountains of Ararat. These mountains have two prominent peaks, one 16,950 feet high and the other 12,840 feet.

The writer is not clear about what he means by "the mountains of Ararat," since the Bible is also unclear on this point, but the two elevations he cites apply to the two main peaks of Mount Ararat, an extinct volcanic massif.¹¹⁰ Mount Ararat is a type of volcano called a stratovolcano, like Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Vesuvius. A stratovolcano is built by a series of eruptions of ash, cinders, and lava into a layer-cake structure, usually over a period of at least several hundred thousand years. A typical eruption starts with fine-grained ash, grades into coarse pyroclastic flow deposits, and ends with a lava flow. Mount Ararat has been found by geological means to have begun erupting about two million years ago.¹¹¹ A stratovolcano cannot form underwater, because the water quenches the normal ash flow and forms distinctive lava formations called pillow lava. Pillow lava forms when water rapidly chills the outside of a lava flow, forming pillow-like segments. If an incipient volcano, which would have formed a stratovolcano on land, erupts underwater, it forms a structure quite different from that which would have formed on land. It forms a large pile of pillow-lava, like those formed at mid-ocean ridges, and no ash or pyroclastic deposits.¹¹² Mount Ararat's structure shows it formed on land.

Interestingly, pillow lava has been found on Mount Ararat, but only in small patches. It can form when lava erupts underneath a glacier, or flows into a lake on the mountain. In Iceland, large mountains of pillow lava formed underneath the glaciers of the last ice age, and can be seen today.

The Watchtower article's writer gives credence to the claim that Noah's ark may rest on Mount Ararat. In doing so he is forced to admit that Mount Ararat formed before or during the Flood -- otherwise the ark could not come to rest upon it. But the geology of the mountain shows it did not form underwater. Therefore it must have existed before the Flood. But this contradicts the Society's claim that the Flood was not more than 8000 feet deep, since Ararat is nearly 17,000 feet high. If the Flood was deeper than can be accounted for by all the water on earth today, we are back to the question, Where did the extra water go? The writer is unaware of these difficulties.

Given that one cannot logically believe two contradictory things at one time, what is the Society's position on these questions? Was the Flood deep enough to cover Mount Ararat at 17,000 feet, or does the Society believe that Noah's ark rests on the mountain?

The Watchtower's uncritical acceptance of the evidence that Noah's ark rests on Mount Ararat is a good example of the Society's poor scholarship on geological topics. Many books have been written about the search for Noah's ark, and most are the product of people who want to confirm their prior belief in the Flood. Some are the product of crackpots; others are written by people who have some respect for truth and the rules of evidence; hardly any are written in an unbiased manner. Most suppress evidence that tends to discredit what they desire to believe.

To see where the January 15, 1992 Watchtower article goes wrong, let's look at each paragraph of the sub-heading "Searching for the Ark." The first paragraph mentions that, beginning in the 19th century, there have been numerous attempts to find the ark on the mountains of Ararat. While this is true, the history of the search for Noah's ark goes back much further. People have been making claims of sighting the ark, or hearing of someone who sighted the ark, for thousands of years.^{113, 114, 115} In particular, "the mountains of Ararat" have referred to various territories at different times in history, from the large area encompassing parts of Turkey, Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the Middle East, to the much smaller area immediately surrounding the Mount Ararat massif.¹¹⁶ Also, many different mountains have been named as the site upon which the ark came to rest. The ancient evidence can be summarized thus:¹¹⁷

1. Which one of the various landing places mentioned in ancient sources is the "correct" one? At present any answer is pure guesswork. The biblical writer does not name a specific site; rather, a vast geographical area is given (Ararat/Urartu), within which several of the proposed sites fall. If the matter is ever to be decided definitely, it will have to be by means other than the ancient reports.

2. Many of the ancient sources not only say that the ark has survived to the present; they also introduce wood from the ark as evidence. Thus, such claims for Agri Dagi [the Turkish name for Ararat] (or any other site) are not unique; indeed, they are precisely what we would expect.

3. None of the ancient writers claims to have seen the ark or any part of it, or to have visited a landing site -- or even to have conversed directly with anyone who has. They only quote someone else, usually ending with the cliche, "It is said that the remains of the ark are to be seen to this day." This they report, even if centuries have passed since the original source.

4. Various groups, believing their area to have been the cradle of civilization, or the center of the earth, point to the most conspicuous mountain in the vicinity as the ark's landing place. For some Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula, it would be Jabal Judi in the 'Aja' range....; for Jews in Babylonia, Mount Nisir.... in the Zagros....; for Jews and Christians in upper Mesopotamia, Jabal Judi in the Gordian/Qardu Mountains.... In Armenia, after the introduction of Christianity and the translation of the Bible into Armenian, it would be Arach or the spectacular Masis -- Agri Dagi [Mount Ararat].

5. Among these ancient traditions, the one associated with Agri Dagi seems to be very late -- likely the latest, since it dates to the eleventh/twelfth centuries at the earliest.

Clearly the latest traditions of Noah's ark on a mountain are merely the newest in a long series of conflicting stories, and are not convincing evidence the ark has survived.

The next paragraph in the Watchtower article describes a claim by an Armenian immigrant to the United States, George Hagopian, as told in the book In Search of Noah's Ark. Various books give various dates, but Hagopian's claim was that sometime between 1902 and 1910, at about ten years of age, he, with his uncle, twice climbed Mount Ararat and saw the ark. He told his story about 1970, when he was about 80 years old. The paragraph says:

On the first visit, he said, he actually climbed on top of the ark. "I stood up straight and looked all over the ship. It was long. The height was about forty feet." Regarding his observation on his subsequent visit, he said: "I didn't see any real curves. It was unlike any other boat I have ever seen. It looked more like a flat-bottomed barge."

The trouble here is that the Watchtower leaves out comments Hagopian made that cast doubt on his recollections. Where Is Noah's Ark says about him:¹¹⁸

His observations, based upon two hours of exploring the ark, include: it was a thousand feet long, six to seven hundred feet wide, and maybe forty feet high; the wood was so hard that a bullet would not penetrate it; it was joined with wooden dowels, with no nails in evidence; no doors were visible, but one could ascend to the top by means of a ladder.

The following discrepancies with other accounts are immediately evident; (1) Others found the wood easy to cut (Navarra, Bryce, Knight); (2) Nouri observed that it was joined with nails, not dowels. Since both he and Hagopian claim to have spent hours inside the structure, such a difference can hardly be attributed to faulty observation or poor memory. (3) Previous visitors found a massive door laying beside the ark (Yearam) or entered through a hole in the side (the governmental expedition of 1883). (4) The dimensions are possibly twice those of Genesis, and thus twice the size of Nouri's find.

For obvious reasons the Watchtower does not present all of Hagopian's remarks. His recollection that the ark was a thousand feet long and six to seven hundred feet wide immediately casts doubt on what he saw, as Genesis indicates those dimensions as possibly four hundred fifty by seventy five feet.

Many other accounts can be found where people claim to have seen Noah's ark. Most can be characterized by this summary from Where Is Noah's Ark:¹¹⁹

Research into this type of evidence for the arks' survival is, like that of the other areas, fraught with difficulties. (1) The sources are often third- and fourth-hand. Years could be and have been spent in trying to verify some of them. (2) The original documents often cannot be found -- if in fact they ever existed. (3) Alleged eye-witnesses have died and thus cannot verify the reports attributed to them, or clarify critical details. (4) The reports are filled with discrepancies, some minor but others so substantial as to raise the question of credibility. (5) A few are expressed in such strident, polemical tones as to destroy any claim of objectivity. (6) Without questioning the integrity of some reporters, it appears that details have been added as their observations were retold.

Some searchers claimed to have brought back photographs of the ark. In every case, the photos proved to be natural formations, or were indecipherable, or disappeared before competent investigators could see them, or the searcher never produced them for evaluation.¹²⁰

The third and fourth paragraphs in the Watchtower article describe the efforts of Fernand Navarra, perhaps the most famous of the recent ark searchers. He wrote I Found Noah's Ark, among other books. The paragraphs say:

From 1952 to 1969, Fernand Navarra made four efforts to find evidence of the ark. On his third trip to Mount Ararat, he worked his way to the bottom of a crevasse in a glacier, where he found a piece of black wood embedded in the ice. "It must have been very long," he said, "and perhaps still attached to other parts of the ship's framework. I could only cut along the grain until I split off a piece about five feet long."

Professor Richard Bliss, one of several experts who examined the wood, said: "The Navarra wood sample is a structural beam and impregnated with bituminous pitch. It has mortise and tenon joints. And it's definitely hand-hewn and squared." The estimated age of the wood was set at about four or five thousand years.

These paragraphs again leave out important information. The dating methods that put the age of Navarra's wood samples at four to five thousand years are extremely poor.¹²¹ A lab in Spain estimated the age at five thousand years by the dark color of the wood, and by how much denser it was than originally. The problem is that wood can turn black in as little as a few decades, and the original type of wood, and therefore its density, is not known, but is at best another educated guess. A lab in France estimated the age by the degree of lignitization, or how far the wood had gone toward turning to coal. This estimate relies on knowing the complete environment of the wood from the time of formation to the time of estimation, which is clearly not possible for these samples. The lab did not give a specific date, but dated it to "remote antiquity." Another French lab, and a fourth lab in Egypt simply estimated the age at four to six thousand years, without publishing the reasons for their estimates.

There were some solid dates obtained through five different labs by radiocarbon dating of the specimens brought back in 1955. These varied from about 1300 to 1700 years old, with four out of the five clustered near 1300 years. Wood Navarra brought back in 1969 gave similar radiocarbon ages. The point is that whatever Navarra had found, it was most likely about 1300 year old wood, not five thousand. Allowing say, 200 years from formation of the wood to felling the tree, gives an age of about 1100 years for the wood structure.

The Society agrees that radiocarbon dating of artifacts less than about 3000 years old is fairly reliable, as shown by the recent dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and as reported in Awake!¹²² Interestingly, this Awake! article mentioned that

A piece of wood found on Mt. Ararat, and considered by some to be possibly from Noah's ark, proved to date only from 700 C.E. -- old wood, indeed, but not nearly old enough to predate the Flood.

So not only is there serious question about the age of Navarra's wood, but his story is not necessarily to be taken at face value. The Lost Ship of Noah said:¹²³

Navarra.... returned to his find several times after 1965. He brought back more wood but at times there remained an air of mystery about where he had found it. Some Ararat explorers and writers about the Ark have suggested that some of the wood he later found was brought from Spain, taken up the mountain and then "discovered" up on the slopes under the ice. It has also been pointed out by the competent Ark archivist and author Violet Cummings (Has Anyone Really Seen Noah's Ark?), wife of Eryl Cummings, climber of Mount Ararat and possessor of the most complete files on the search for the Ark, that on some subsequent climbs Navarra seemed to lead exploratory parties to other parts of the mountain, away from the area he had previously described.

Navarra himself was never clear on the exact location of his finds.¹²⁴

Much more could be said about finding Noah's ark on Mount Ararat, but the most reasonable summary is again found in Where Is Noah's Ark?¹²⁵

Where have our investigations led thus far? Are the remains of Noah's ark still hidden beneath the snows of "Mount Ararat" -- Agri Dagi -- in modern Turkey? If not, what is there on the mountain that excites present-day ark-searchers?

We have examined the accounts of the ancient witnesses -- and found there are none prior to the eleventh/twelfth century A.D..... Unquestionably genuine photographs of a boat-shaped object that is not a natural rock formation -- if any ever existed -- are not available at present.... Eye-witness reports have turned out to be unreliable, since they contradict each other in major details.... That leaves the question of the wood which has been brought down from the mountain, reportedly dating from the time of the biblical flood....

Whatever its origin, the twelve-hundred-year-old wood that Navarra recovered is a significant archaeological find, and it deserves further investigation in order to determine more precisely when, by whom, and why it was placed in such an unlikely spot....

What might it have been, if not Noah's ark? Until there is further investigation, certainty in this matter is impossible. In the meanwhile, several plausible conjectures have been, or may be, offered.

1. A chapel, perhaps to commemorate the ark's supposed landing site. We know definitely of two religious structures further down the mountain -- the Monastery of St. James...., located at 6,350 feet...., and the Chapel of St. Gregory, situated at 8,300 feet.... They seem to have been founded around the ninth to the eleventh century, and they were destroyed in the earthquake of 1840. While an additional chapel at the 13,000 to 14,000-foot snow line, where Navarra found his wood, would be more difficult to build, it is well to remember that the Byzantines, at roughly the same time, were erecting chapels at far more difficult spots -- for example, on the jagged rock peaks of islands in the Aegean Sea.

2. A replica of the ark, constructed some time after Agri Dagi came to be regarded by the local population as the landing place. "The industrious monks of the monastery, wishing to further their own livelihood by the tourist trade, may have built something up on the mountain that with great difficulty could be seen and shown to be the 'Ark'" -- so wrote the respected American archaeologist, G. Ernest Wright. This explanation would seem to rely upon the hearsay eye-witness accounts that there is a boat-shaped structure on the mountain....

3. A replica of the house which, says tradition, Noah built on the mountain after disembarking from the ark. The French Dominican Jordanus reports, in the fourteenth century: "In a certain part of the mountain is a dwelling which Noah is said to have built on leaving the ark." But since he goes on to talk of the vine which Noah planted, placed by tradition near the village of Ahora on the lower elevations of the mountain, it is not at all clear that he understood the "house" to be near the snow line.

4. A hut for the use of hermits or climbers on the mountain. Several of these are reported by the Dutchman Jans Struys in the seventeenth century....

5. Timbers carried up the mountain by recent ark searchers....

[It has been estimated that] "Navarra's sample came from a tree about five feet in diameter with a height of about 150 feet." If so, then the total age of the tree would be about 250 years....

If the radiocarbon tests were conducted from specimens at the center of the heartwood, then (using the Teddington [radiocarbon lab] test results as an illustration....) the tree began to grow about the year 780 A.D. +-90. Adding 254 years, it would have been felled about the year 1034 A.D. +-90. Only after that date could the structure on the mountain have been erected. This early eleventh century date would seem to agree very well with other relevant data: (a) the two chapels erected lower down on the mountain about the eleventh century; (b) the earliest literary evidence that Agri Dagi was regarded as the ark's landing place only after the eleventh/twelfth century.

It is curious that the wood was found precisely at the elevation that marks the upper limit possible for construction. It is thus at the precise height, and from the exact time period, which we would expect for an ark replica, Noah's house replica, or chapel on the mountain. And since the perpetual snow line fluctuates slightly from season to season, depending upon the intensity of the previous summers and winters, it is not unlikely that a structure erected just beneath the line would later become encased in ice and snow.

I might add that the eleventh century also corresponded to a so-called climatic optimum, when "Vikings settled and thrived in Greenland, before the cold of the Little Ice Age froze them out. (From about 1200 until the mid-1800s, world climate was colder than at any time since the last deglaciation.)"¹²⁶

It appears that the Society presents evidence that supports its position of the moment, such as a 5000 year age for Fernand Navarra's wood, but suppresses contrary evidence, such as the 700 C.E. date quoted in the Awake! article, even when it possesses both types of evidence. The Society's handling of this material is similar to what is described in The Noah's Ark Nonsense:¹²⁷

Ark enthusiasts, like fundamentalists in general, have difficulty in deciding whether they are for or against science, and for or against scientists. When a scientist makes a statement they can use to support their views, they gladly cite him as a scientist. They often regard their own views as "scientific." The Balsiger and Sellier book [In Search of Noah's Ark, Dave Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier, Jr., Sun Classic Books, Los Angeles, 1976. These authors also produced a film by the same name, broadcast by NBC in 1977, produced by Sun Classic Pictures.] furnishes examples. Genuine geologists do not believe there was a universal flood, but the book tries to connect geologists with the belief by using the expression "flood geologists." The book often states that "scientists" or "many scientists" believe things that would support the ark enthusiasts' view (whether any scientists in the field believe these things is doubtful, and it is certain that scientists generally do not). Thus in these statements science is held in honor and there is an effort to identify with it.

But when scientists disagree with their views, the ark people tend to disparage scientists in general. The film states that about a century ago science began to question Genesis by saying that it consists of myths and legends; then the film tries to refute that view by defending the historicity of the Flood and Noah's ark. The implication is that science was wrong.

Part 9: Subduction Zones

Subduction zones are areas where one tectonic plate plunges beneath another. Earthquakes cluster at the edge of the plunging plate, and its path into the mantle can be traced by the location of the earthquakes. The "ring of fire" around the Pacific is a giant earthquake zone, and coincides with a ring of subduction zones that produces the world's deepest trenches, such as the 36,000 foot deep Marianas Trench. It is striking evidence for the existence of these zones. So also is the fact that great chains of explosive volcanoes that form some island arcs, such as the one including Krakatau, occur along the edge of trenches. ".... the plate-edge volcanoes lie above great rising curtains of magma that parallel the trench marking the interface between two colliding plates."¹²⁸

Seismic images, made by bouncing sound waves off rock layers under the sea floor and recording the reflections with an array of detectors, show the existence of subduction zones directly. The smooth sediment layers lying well out into the ocean, the pile-up of sediments at the edge of a continental plate where the oceanic plate plunges beneath it, and the descent of the edge of the oceanic plate beneath the continental plate can be clearly seen in such images.¹²⁹ Deep drilling into these layers confirms the rock structure inferred from the seismic images. Since the descent of one plate under another can be clearly seen from seismic images, and the rock layering is still intact, the ocean basins could not sink within the one year allotted by the Society's Flood chronology. The rocks would be so broken up that seismic images would show only a blur.

The above information shows how the great trenches are produced -- they are simply the result of the plunging plate of necessity being deeper than the one under which it plunges. The trenches do not suddenly open, but take a long time to form.

All the information I've presented on plate tectonics shows that the ocean basins did not form by sinking in place. They formed by the process of seafloor spreading, which takes a great deal of time. The statement in the God's Word or Man's book on page 113 that it "is quite likely that -- perhaps triggered by the Flood itself -- the plates moved, the sea bottom sank, and the great trenches opened, allowing the water to drain off the land," demonstrates the writer's ignorance of the geological processes involved. The sea bottom did not suddenly sink. The trenches did not suddenly "open" -- they have existed for as long as oceanic plates have subducted under other plates.

It is difficult to conceive how all the geological phenomena so clearly explained by plate tectonics can alternatively be explained by a universal Flood, especially within the 48,000 year creative week chronology given by the Society. I presume the Society would not accept an explanation as in an anecdote where a little old lady, upon visiting Dinosaur Monument in Utah and being asked how she thought the buried dinosaur skeletons got there, replied that "the Lord put them there to fool you."

The Society has been strangely silent on the matter of plate tectonics. Except for one excellent summary of the subject, which appeared in the June 22, 1977 Awake!, I've not found any other significant references. Is the Society just ignoring the evidence, hoping no one will notice?

Part 10: The Mediterranean Was a Desert

In the past three decades convincing evidence has been found that the Mediterranean Sea has completely dried up at least once, and probably many times. The first solid evidence came in the summer of 1970, when geologists aboard the deep sea research and drilling ship Glomar Challenger brought up drill cores containing gypsum, rock salt, and various other minerals that could only have been formed by drying up of seawater. What was remarkable was that these minerals were found on the ocean floor, one to three kilometers deep, buried under as much as 200 meters of deep-sea oozes, which are the shelly remains of microscopic plankton that rain down on the ocean bottom. These oozes accumulate at a rate of about two centimeters per thousand years.

The story of the discovery is told in the fascinating book, The Mediterranean Was a Desert,¹³⁰ by one of the principle scientists on the expedition, Kenneth J. Hsu. Here are some extracts from this book. Speaking of another of the scientists aboard the ship, Hsu describes some of the early discoveries about the Mediterranean:

Ryan had worked with a 'continuous seismic profiler,' or CSP, which was a super echo sounder: besides recording sound echos bounced back directly from the sea floor, this instrument could send and pick up signals of acoustic waves that were able to penetrate the bottom and reflect off hard layers several kilometers below. The instrument had been developed in the late 1950s, and in 1961 Ryan sailed with his mentor, Brackett Hersey, on the American research vessel Chain from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to explore the Mediterranean with the newly developed CSP. They soon discovered an acoustic reflector 100 to 200 meters beneath the Mediterranean sea floor. They had no idea what it could be or why it should be there, but for the sake of easy reference they named this mysterious layer the M-Layer, and its top, the M-reflector. American and French scientists continued the CSP surveys of the Mediterranean during the next ten years, and wherever they sailed they could identify on their records the ubiquitous M-reflector. Furthermore, the geometry of this reflecting surface closely simulated the topography of the bottom of this inland sea; the sediments under the reflector covered the basement of the Mediterranean like a thick blanket of snow on a mountain plateau. Obviously the M-layer was deposited when the deep basin of the Mediterranean Sea had already been created and had almost the same bathymetry as it does today.¹³¹

Hsu describes the discovery of the key core:

.... we hit the jackpot in Hole 124. On the morning of August 28, the Challenger was drilling south of the Balearic Islands in almost 3,000 meters of water. Ryan and I had again stayed up into the early hours of the morning, when the drill pipe apparently hit the hard M-layer. The drilling rate dropped from several meters per minute to a meter per hour. Impatient with the slow progress, we went to bed just before dawn.

We were not to rest long. Soon we were awakened by John Fiske, a marine technician, who came to report: 'We found the pillar of Atlantis!' We dressed quickly and rushed to the ship's laboratory to see the new find. Lying on the long worktable was a beautiful core, which did indeed resemble a miniature marble column. That was the evidence I needed....

Our 'pillar of Atlantis,'.... consists of anhydrite and stromatolite. This type of sediment has been found only on arid coastal flats. Prior to the Challenger expedition, my associates and I at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, supported by a research grant from the American Petroleum Institute, had studied the sabkha sediments of the Arabian Gulf. We dug scores of trenches on the sabkhas of Abu Dhabi and found anhydrite, a calcium sulphate salt, only in those places where the saline ground water was sufficiently close to the surface to be heated to temperatures exceeding 30 degrees Celsius. Where the water table was deeper and the water cooler, gypsum, or hydrated calcium sulfate, would be precipitated out in place of anhydrite. This finding is in accordance with chemical studies in the laboratory, which reveal that the transition temperature for calcium sulfate precipitated from saline ground waters should be above 30 degrees Celsius, or almost 90 degrees Fahrenheit. We thus have good reason to believe that anhydrite is not likely to be found in any environment other than hot and arid sabkhas, because surface temperatures and ground water chemistry elsewhere rarely permit anhydrite precipitation. We are almost certain that anhydrite could not be settled out of a deep sea. Even the Dead Sea is too deep a body of water to be heated hot enough to precipitate anhydrite; on the bottom of this salt lake only gypsum crystals are found.

The anhydrite found under sabkhas was precipitated by ground waters like concretions in arid soils. Fine-grained anhydrite would accrete and grow together as nodules underground, replacing preexisting carbonate sediments. The nodules might range up to several centimeters in length. As the replacement proceeded toward completion, anhydrite nodules would coalesce to form a layer in which only wisps of preexisting carbonates could be discerned. The dark wisps of carbonate in a white background of anhydrite look like the wire mesh used by farmers to make chicken-wire fences. Thus petroleum geologists who first encountered such anhydrite in their study of borehole cores dubbed the rock type 'chicken-wire anhydrite.' We really do not know why anhydrite grows in this particular form. We can only rely on the repeated observations by sedimentologists during the last few decades that this variety of anhydrite is typical of Recent and ancient sabkha sediments. Until we find evidence to the contrary, we feel content to consider the chicken-wire anhydrite a signature of sabkhas.

Stromatolite is another distinct sedimentary structure. It had been considered a fossil or an inorganic structure of chemical precipitation until the 1930s when a British sedimentologist, Maurice Black, waded across the tidal flat of the Bahamas and found a dense growth of blue-green algae forming a thin mat on the flat shores. After a severe storm the mat would be buried under a thin cover of sediments, but the algal growth would persist and a new mat would be constructed. This alternation would ultimately result in the laminated sediment called stromatolite, which means literally 'flat stone.' Since the very existence of algae depends on photosynthesis, the presence of a stromatolite structure is considered evidence of deposition in very shallow waters, commonly less than ten meters deep. In fact, repeated observations have confirmed that algal mats are a characteristic feature of intertidal environments. In the coastal areas between low and high tides, or the intertidal zone, of Abu Dhabi we found the current crop of lush growth in algal mats as well as old algal mats formed a few thousand years ago and now buried under the windblown sand of the coastal sabkhas. Transpiration of ground water led to precipitation of gypsum or anhydrite in these fossilized intertidal sediments. That August morning when I was called in to admire the 'pillar of Atlantis,' I saw the same phenomena of a stromatolite partially replaced by nodular anhydrite. What could be a better indication that these sediments were formed on the tidal flat of a desiccated Mediterranean?

The 'pillar of Atlantis' was sampled from a layer of rock sandwiched between ocean oozes that contained abundant fossil skeletons of foraminifera and nannoplankton.... the plankton found here once swam in the near-surface water of the oceans. After they died, their calcium carbonate shells fell to the ocean bottom and were buried and preserved as microfossils.... The deep-sea floor is a cemetery for billions upon billions of these tiny dead plants; the skeletons of nannoplankton may constitute more than ninety percent of the bulk of an oceanic ooze. When these oozes are mixed with fine terrigenous particles of clay, as they are in the modern Mediterranean, geologists use the term 'marl oozes,' or simply 'marls.'¹³²

There is strong evidence that there were several cycles of desiccation and reflooding. Upon closely examining the above mentioned Hole 124 core, Hsu found that

The oldest sediment of each cycle was either deposited in a deep sea or in a great brackish lake. The fine sediments deposited on a quiet or deep bottom had perfectly even lamination. As the basin was drying up and the water depth decreased, lamination became more irregular on account of increasing wave agitation. Stromatolite was formed then, when the site of deposition fell within an intertidal zone. The intertidal flat was eventually exposed by the final desiccation , at which time anhydrite was precipitated by saline ground water underlying sabkhas. Suddenly seawater would spill over the Strait of Gibraltar, or there would be an unusual influx of brackish water from the eastern European lake. The Balearic would then again be under water. The chicken-wire anhydrite would thus be abruptly buried under the fine muds brought in by the next deluge. The cycle repeated itself at least eight or ten times during the million years that constituted the late Miocene Messinian stage.¹³³

The Mediterranean basin has been deep for a long time:

The first and most obvious support for the concept of a deep Mediterranean basin came from a study of the seismic records. The M-reflector had been discovered before the Leg 13 expedition, and everybody was then convinced that the sediment constituting the reflecting layer had been laid down in a Mediterranean basin whose topography was not much different from the bathymetry of the Mediterranean today. Except for some local disturbances the Mediterranean seabed 6 million years ago lay at about the same depth that it does now. In fact this was Ryan's reason for having once argued for a deep water origin of the evaporites. Other evidence was provided by.... shipboard paleontologists. The fossils in the sediments immediately underlying, immediately overlying, and interbedded with the evaporite beds all represented deep water creatures.

One final reason for our not accepting the shallow bottom hypothesis derived from our knowledge of the geological history of the Mediterranean.... During the last 5 million years, the eastern Mediterranean had not foundered, which would have required regional tension. On the contrary, the sea bottom had apparently risen under compression as Africa and the eastern Mediterranean seabed were pushed northward toward Europe.¹³⁴

The remains of many canyons have been found, which had been cut into the sides of the Mediterranean basin when it was dry:

Ryan, for his part, began to recall the gravels dredged up some years ago by Bourcart from submarine canyons in the Mediterranean. Apparently the French had been busy exploring the underwater topography of the western Mediterranean during the decade after the Second World War when Bourcart and his associates found many of these submarine canyons. The Mediterranean canyons seemed to be different from those found on the continental margins of the Atlantic and Pacific, however. They appeared to be drowned river valleys, whereas the Atlantic and Pacific canyons appeared to have been cut by submarine turbidity currents. Furthermore, many of the canyons off the Cote d'Azur had not eroded recently, or during the Pleistocene, as the Atlantic and Pacific canyons had; they had been cut during the late Miocene. They were partly filled with late Miocene river gravels and then covered by ocean oozes of Pliocene age. The heads of many of these large submarine canyons could be linked to the mouth of modern rivers in southern France, Corsica, Sardinia, North Africa, and Spain. The bottoms of the canyons could be traced to about the level of the Balearic abyssal plain.

The origin of the canyons and the gravels had constituted a puzzle. Bourcart was convinced that the canyons had been cut above sea level by late Miocene streams. Not aware of any good evidence to suggest that the Mediterranean might have dried up, he proposed the less outrageous hypothesis that European and African continental margins had been bent down, drowning the Miocene coastal streams.... As we sat in the core lab admiring the red and green desert sediments, we saw a new explanation to Bourcart's findings. The Mediterranean had been dry during the late Miocene, and we could envision a painted desert at the bottom of the present continental slope, stretching across the side expanse of what is now the Balearic abyssal plain. The desert floor then lay more than 2,000 meters below the level of the sea on the other side of the Gibraltar. Rivers in circum-Mediterranean lands were no longer emptying into an inland sea at sea level. Instead, they had to run a steep course down the newly exposed continental shelf and slope.... Rejuvenated streams made deep indentations on the edges of these plateaus and sculptured grand canyons on their way down to the dried up abyssal plain. Gravels were dumped in the canyons and variegated silts were piled up on alluvial fans at the foot of the escarpment. With this hypothesis, we not only explained the occurrence of red silts at Site 133 but provided at the same time a neat answer for Bourcart's canyons and gravels; we also resolved the long standing mystery of the down cutting of the Rhone in southern France.¹³⁵

.... Shortly after we returned to port, [Ryan] received a letter from a Russian geologist, I. S. Chumakov, who had learned of our findings through an article in the New York Times. Chumakov was one of the specialists sent by the USSR to Aswan to help build the famous high dam. In an effort to find hard rock for the dam's foundation, fifteen boreholes were drilled. To the Russian's amazement, they discovered a deep, narrow gorge under the Nile Valley, cut 200 meters below sea level into hard granite. The valley had been drowned some 5 million years ago and was filled with Pliocene marine muds, which were covered by the Nile alluvium. Aswan is about 1,200 kilometers upstream from the Mediterranean coast.

Concerning this canyon beneath the Nile at Aswan, another book said:¹³⁶

[Chumakov's] research had included the study of 15 holes drilled into the bottom of the Nile River just south of the Aswan High Dam.... Soviet engineers were helping build the new dam, and the holes were sunk to determine the depths to bedrock and the nature of the sediment on top of it. This revealed that under the relatively flat bottom of the present river the bedrock forms a canyon some 290 meters deep, now filled with sediment. The lowest part is a narrow gorge with almost vertical walls. Most remarkable, Chumakov found, is the nature of the sediment in the bottom 150 meters of this canyon. It proved to be filled with oceanic fossils of the Pliocene.

In other words this canyon 1200 kilometers (750 miles) up the Nile, was once flooded by a sudden incursion of the sea some 5.5 million years ago. The most likely explanation, Chumakov believed, was that the canyon was carved when the Nile flowed into a Mediterranean Sea 1000 to 1500 meters lower than today. Then rapid filling of the sea sent salt water up the canyon, and only when the latter silted up higher than the existing sea level did the accumulating fossils change to fresh water forms.

The Mediterranean Was a Desert continues:

In the Nile Delta, boreholes more than 300 meters deep were not able to reach the bottom of the old Nile canyon. Chumakov estimated that the depth of the incision there might reach 1,500 meters, and he visualized a deeply buried estuary under the sands and silts of the modern Nile Delta. Chumakov was right; a narrow 2,500-meter-deep canyon under Cairo was recently discovered during geophysical explorations for petroleum in Egypt.

Note that 2,500 meters is 8,200 feet. This is much deeper than Hell's Canyon of Idaho and Oregon, the deepest in the world today.

Chumakov was not the only one who found buried gorges. Petroleum geologists exploring in Libya described their surprises. First, their seismograms registered anomalies: there were linear features underground transmitting seismic waves at abnormally high velocities. Drilling into the anomalies revealed that they were buried channels incised 400 meters below sea level. The geological record tells the same story: vigorous down-cutting by streams in the late Miocene and sudden flooding by marine waters at the beginning of the Pliocene. Ted Barr and his coworkers in the Oasis Oil Company, based in Tripoli, Libya, concluded in a report that the Mediterranean Sea must have been a thousand meters or more below its present level when the channels were cut. They could not get their manuscript published in a scientific journal since no one would accept such an outrageous interpretation.

Still other buried gorges and channels have been found in Algeria, Israel, Syria, and other Mediterranean countries.¹³⁷

In 1975 another expedition of the Glomar Challenger was undertaken, with Hsu aboard.

.... We managed to do what we could not have done five years previously -- namely, to penetrate the Mediterranean evaporites so as to obtain a record of the earlier Mediterranean history. We found unequivocal evidence that the Mediterranean had been a deep sea, for 15 million years at least, prior to the Messinian dessication.¹³⁸

Interestingly, Hsu makes some comments about his initial skepticism and later acceptance of the revolutionary seafloor spreading hypothesis I've already mentioned in connection with plate tectonics. This hypothesis is strongly confirmed by the presence of symmetrical magnetic stripes on either side of spreading centers.

Correlating the width of the magnetic stripes with the duration of successive reversals of magnetic poles, the sea floor spreading hypothesis should provide a means of determining the age of the ocean floor: the farther away from the ridge axis, the older the ocean crust would be, and the ratio would measure the rate of sea floor spreading. The Leg 3 [Deep Sea Drilling Project] expedition to the South Atlantic was planned to test the hypothesis. By drilling, sampling, and dating the ocean crust, we should find out if the ocean floor at a number of chosen sites was indeed as old as the hypothesis predicted.

Working on Glomar Challenger during the Leg 3 drilling, I witnessed the most amazing confirmation of this concept of sea floor spreading. We bored ten holes, and the age of the sea floor at every site was almost exactly that predicted by the hypothesis. It is always hard for me to accept other people's brilliant ideas and admit my own errors in judgment, but faced with ironclad proof, I had no choice but to join the 'revolutionaries.'¹³⁹

The previous material on the Mediterranean's drying up contains abundant evidence that the Society's speculations on the geological events related to the Flood are incorrect. The most damaging is the finding that the Mediterranean basin has been deep for a very long time. Whether or not the 15 million or more year time spans mentioned above are correct, it is clear that all the described geological features could not possibly have been formed during and after a great Flood just 4400 years ago. If the "shallow sea basins," which would have included the Mediterranean, were deepened during the Flood, how were the buried gorges such as the Nile's formed? Especially so since the sea basin would have been filled with seawater? How could up to 200 meters (650 feet) of sea-bottom oozes, consisting of mostly the skeletons of plankton, have been deposited in such a short time span? Especially since the current rate of accumulation is only two centimeters per thousand years? If the Mediterranean were shallow prior to the Flood, when and in what manner did all the evaporites become deposited? Especially since there is clear evidence that there were a number of cycles of drying and flooding, that deep sea oozes were interbedded among the evaporites, and that the oozes have been shown to evenly blanket the basement rock of both shallow and deep regions.

The only logical conclusion is that the Society's explanations about the supposed "shifting of the earth's crust" during and after the Flood are erroneous.

Summary on Where Did the Water Go

I've presented fairly extensive evidence to show that the Society's explanation of where the floodwaters went has no basis in fact. The recent geological findings that led to the ideas of plate tectonics are compelling evidence that deep ocean basins have existed for hundreds of millions of years. They were definitely not formed 4400 years ago. Mountains did not form at such a late date, nor did the polar ice caps, nor were great gorges carved nor great drifts of debris left. Let us next examine the idea that geologists are misinterpreting evidence for the Flood as evidence for ice ages.

Part 11: Traces of the Flood and the Ice Ages

The Society has said that much of the physical evidence that geologists interpret as due to the effects of ice ages is really due to the Flood. The God's Word or Man's book says:¹⁴⁰

If we grant that a great flood could have happened, why have scientists found no trace of it? Perhaps they have, but they interpret the evidence some other way. For example, orthodox science teaches that the surface of the earth has been shaped in many places by powerful glaciers during a series of ice ages. But apparent evidence of glacial activity can sometimes be the result of water action. Very likely, then, some of the evidence for the Flood is being misread as evidence of an ice age.

The book goes on to quote a 1961 Scientific American article that says that when the ice ages were first recognized to have occurred, some of the evidence was later shown to be caused by the flow of water rather than ice. While this is true, please note that as geologists gained experience during the past two centuries they found and corrected their own errors. Also note that in the thirty years since 1961, a revolution has occurred in the earth sciences. A huge amount of evidence now exists that shows beyond all reasonable doubt that ice ages did occur.

Geologists have also found that large floods have occurred. But the evidence for them is quite different from the evidence that today is interpreted as due to ice ages. The largest documented flooding occurred at the end of the last ice age in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Its effects are clear and unambiguous, as I have seen for myself when flying over parts of Oregon and Washington. A line of hills along the Columbia River just west of Portland, Oregon was undercut by the water as it rounded the inside corner of a large bend. It looks like the undercutting of sand on a beach by a small stream, but on a far larger scale. The evidence becomes even more striking when one is flying at 25,000 feet over eastern Washington and Oregon shortly after sunrise. The early morning light adds sharp relief to the water carved features. Just as striking, these features are not evident in the high country outside the flooded area, nor are they evident across the rest of the United States, even in areas that were under continental ice sheets.

I next describe this flooding in detail, to show what the effects of a truly large flood are. While reading this, try to think of other places where these effects are seen. If you can document it, I'd certainly like to know about it.

Part 12: Documented Flooding in the Pacific Northwest

I describe here a series of floods which occurred thousands of years ago in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. These floods have been called the "Missoula" or "Spokane" or "Bretz" Floods at various times in the twentieth century. They occurred in parts of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, and drained through the valley of the Columbia, the major river of the region.

The best description of these floods is found in the book Cataclysms on the Columbia.¹⁴¹ Here are some excerpts.

It is now generally agreed that between 12,800 and 15,000 years ago more than 40 tremendous deluges [italics added] of almost inconceivable force and dimensions swept across large parts of the Columbia River drainage. They were the greatest scientifically documented floods known to have occurred in North America. Nearly 16,000 square miles were inundated to depths of hundreds of feet. Swollen by the flood waters, the Columbia grew to contain ten times the flow of all the rivers in the world today and 60 times the flow of the Amazon River.

More than 50 cubic miles of soft silt, sediment and hard lava were carved out into a network of scabland channels, whose bare and eroded basalt surfaces and dry falls now typify large parts of the Columbia Plateau. The Willamette Valley [in Oregon] was flooded as far south as Eugene, and where Portland lies today, the levels reached a height of 400 feet....¹⁴²

A geologist named J. Harlan Bretz, for whom the floods have been named, did much of the work of documenting the details of the floods. Here is Bretz's description of the above mentioned scabland channels, which are located mainly in eastern Washington State.

'No one with an eye for land forms can cross eastern Washington in daylight without encountering and being impressed by the "scabland." Like great scars marring the otherwise fair face of the plateau are these elongated tracts of bare, or nearly bare, black rock carved into mazes of buttes and canyons. Everyone on the plateau knows scabland. It interrupts the wheatlands, parceling them out into hill tracts less than forty acres to more than forty square miles in extent. One can neither reach them nor depart from them without crossing some part of the ramifying scabland. Aside from affording a scanty pasturage, scabland is almost without value. The popular name is an expressive metaphor. The scablands are wounds only partially healed -- great wounds in the epidermis of soil with which Nature protects the underlying rock.

'With eyes only a few feet above the ground the observer today must travel back and forth repeatedly and must record his observations mentally, photographically, by sketch and by map before he can form anything approaching a complete picture. Yet long before the paper bearing these words has yellowed, the average observer, looking down from the air as he crosses the region, will see almost at a glance the picture here drawn by piecing together the ground-level observations of months of work. The region is unique: let the observer take the wings of morning to the uttermost parts of the earth: he will nowhere find its likeness.' [italics added] (1928)¹⁴³

One of the scabland's most striking features is the braided pattern of the canyons, where they split and reunite and cross one another, carved into solid bedrock. This is in sharp contrast to a normal river drainage system, which forms a tree-like branching pattern where small tributaries flow into increasingly larger streams and rivers. A few rivers today form these braided patterns, such as the Platte River of Nebraska, or some of the Arctic tundra rivers. But these rivers braid through their own sediments, not solid bedrock as in the scablands.

A normal river system in rocky areas forms relatively slowly, the current deepening the channel and carrying away the eroded remnants of the banks. A branching network of more or less "V" shaped valleys is the result, as can be seen across much of the western United States. The scabland canyons fail to comply with this picture.

In the Scablands there is too much a look of 'gouging,' as though some sudden and short-lived force had spent all its strength in one tremendous impulsion and cut neatly (in a single gesture) through whatever lay in its path....

.... the Scabland channels must have been full-to-the-brim water conveyors, full-running trenches that had flowed over their tops in multiple locations making spillways and braidings between the larger channels and forming the Scabland's distinct and perplexing canyon network. There is no other way to account for these secondary, inter-connecting channels; the spillways show that water had clearly overtopped the rims of the primary canyons and spread out into secondary channels.¹⁴⁴

As a river cuts into bedrock it forms many "potholes," which are areas that have been gouged by the turbulent action of flowing sediments, and which normally range from a few inches to a few feet,

.... but they're insignificant compared to what one finds in [the scablands]. There the potholes are gargantuan -- giant, gaping hollows created by giant turbulence.¹⁴⁵

Another unusual feature of the Missoula flood area is the existence of huge gravel bars within the channeled scabland, first pointed out by Bretz.

What Bretz began to notice were certain immense elevated hills or ridges within the Scablands channels. Unlike the surrounding terrain, these hills were singularly smooth and rounded in shape, but what was most surprising about them was their location. They lay high up within the channel complex but still below the upper rim of the canyon walls, an unusual place for such formations to exist.... [Bretz] began to realize that the Scablands' intra-canyon 'hills' might just be larger-than-ever piles of river debris.... They lay precisely in those places where -- given an ancient flood -- backwaters, eddies, and side currents would have allowed gravel deposits to form. If this were the case, those immense ridges and mounds tucked back here and there throughout the Scabland coulees (and, for that matter, down through the Columbia Gorge and far into the Willamette Valley) were nothing more than overgrown gravel bars.¹⁴⁶

These gravel bars were the major source of the concrete filler for many of the dams and highways along the Columbia. They typically show an effect called foreset bedding, which occurs as a bar builds and moves downstream, the top material rolling and spilling over the steep lower end. Eventually, the bar is composed of beds that slope steeply in the downstream direction. Gravel bars also plugged the mouths of the rivers and streams that empty into the Columbia.

.... Consider what must have happened when vast amounts of debris swept down the floodway, through the Scablands, down the Columbia Gorge and into the valleys below. The strong current in the middle would flush the debris on through. On the sides, however, on the edges and in the backwaters, were slower currents; and here the debris dropped out and settled in the piles Bretz began to recognize as gravel bars. As these bars grew higher with the passing of the flood, they formed hill-sized mounds that created natural levees. These filled up the mouths of side valleys and barricaded drainage routes. Then, once the main floodwaters receded, a series of lakes came into existence within these now-barricaded side valleys. When a lake level topped its debris dam, it rapidly cut through the material, breaching the barricade and quickly draining the lake.¹⁴⁷

There is an excellent example of this side valley deposition near the mouth of Eagle Creek in the Columbia River Gorge, near the town of Cascade Locks, where I often hike. The hiking trail leads up the valley of Eagle Creek, hugging the steep valley wall. As one hikes higher into the valley, one can see and touch the debris left by the Missoula Floods. A notable feature is that the layers in the debris dip, or show foreset bedding, in the upstream direction, showing clearly that the debris came from downstream, i.e., the junction with the Columbia River. There is even a partially petrified tree stump embedded in the sediment. By about 750 feet elevation the debris is no longer evident, consistent with the depth of flooding in the Columbia valley as determined at many other locations.

Another unusual feature of the Missoula flood area is the number of misfit rocks.

These misfits, called 'erratics,' are rocks located a considerable distance away from their area of origin.

The Spokane Flood erratics -- as they would come to be known -- are by no means limited to the Columbia Gorge. They occur within the full sweep of the flood's path, from Lake Pend Oreille [in Idaho] to the sea and up Oregon's Willamette Valley as far south as Eugene. Altogether they're intriguing objects and easy enough to spot if one knows where to look. Some of the most eye-catching specimens (large, chalky-white boulders of granite) lie out on the farmland flats of Eastern Washington, near Ephrata and Soap Lake. The largest of these range (using rough comparisons) from the size of a pre-fab toolshed to that of a single car garage. There they sit -- plunk -- in the middle of fields, stolidly indifferent to the rerouting they cause in the otherwise straight and regular tractor furrows.

When geologists see large numbers of erratics, as Bretz did along the Columbia, and when some of these erratics are a thousand times larger than the river gravels transported by the Columbia today and are likely to be angular rather than smooth, they know something highly unusual has occurred. They know that these particular erratics have not been transported by the rolling, grinding, and polishing action of a river; [italics added] these boulders have clearly avoided the usual breaking up and smoothing down that occurs to river-tumbled rocks.

.... What is it that could move rocks up to 20 feet in diameter and weighing up to 200 tons and scatter them randomly over an area as large as the Columbia and Willamette Valleys, an area thousands of square miles in size?....

Bretz could think of only one feasible means of scattering such rocks randomly along this section of the Columbia river. They had floated in!.... They were moved by iceberg transport. Given a colder climate and higher waters than are now found in this part of the world, huge floating blocks of ice could have carried the rock material caught within their mass. When the icebergs melted, the rocks would drop out and settle by chance here and there, wherever water had been deep enough to support the drifting ice rafts.¹⁴⁸

The Willamette Valley, with Portland at its north end, was flooded to an elevation of nearly 400 feet, and a temporary lake was formed as far south as Eugene, about 200 miles away. The elevation of Portland above sea level is about 100 feet. All of the documented erratics in the valley have been found at elevations below 400 feet. Note the following concerning erratics in the Willamette Valley.

.... [As the icebergs would melt, their cargo] of rocks and solid debris would drop out, float off or sink to the bottom of the lake. In this way the Floods scattered their erratic boulders, and in doing so they created an excellent gauge for recording lake levels. In the Willamette Valley.... the greatest number of erratics are found below the 400 foot level, indicating that the waters went no higher [italics added] and that a large number of the drifting bergs were grounded in the shallows at the lake edges.¹⁴⁹

Many of the erratics bear scratches (striae), or grooves and faceted faces, an indication that while frozen in ice they had been ground against the bedrock as the glacier moved. Few of the rock types are found in Oregon. To find similar kinds of rock one must go to the Rocky Mountains in Montana and southern Canada. By 1935, [a geologist who documented the location of many erratics, Ira] Allison had noted over 300 localities where these erratics occur, in 249 different sections (square miles) of land....¹⁵⁰

.... A unique and significant cobble (6 inches in diameter) was found many years ago in the excavation on the southeast corner of SW 10th. and Morrison Streets in downtown Portland. It is composed entirely of large bladed blue crystals of the rare mineral kyanite. Richmond (1935) reported that 'massive slide boulders of kyanite have been found near Revelstoke, B.C....' This is very convincing evidence of its origin in the Purcell Trench of British Columbia; the cobble was surely floated down in one of the Bretz floods, frozen in an iceberg.

.... A group of several erratics were found on the top of a low hill at 308 feet elevation a mile northeast of Gladstone [just south of Portland]. One of them consists of a well-preserved six-inch section of Baculites, an extinct shellfish related to the ammonites, found in Cretaceous rocks. It too, can only have come from rocks of that age in the intermontane trenches of British Columbia.¹⁵¹

.... The largest erratic now known in the valley.... is an argillite boulder, lying at 306 feet elevation on the top of a low spur half a mile north of Oregon 18 between McMinnville and Sheridan. It would have taken an iceberg measuring at least 34.3 feet on a side to have floated the 160 ton boulder into place!¹⁵²

The nearest deposit of the mineral argillite is in southern British Columbia, consistent with the observed paths of the Cordilleran glacier and the Missoula flood waters. I've taken a look at this erratic boulder myself. Visible from the highway, on the top of a hill, the rock is a reminder that the spot was once under 200 feet of water, and the entire Willamette Valley was inundated. You can see photographs of some large erratics in Cataclysms on the Columbia.¹⁵³

Note especially two points: (1) The geological evidence shows the waters went no higher than a specific elevation, about 400 feet above sea level in the Willamette Valley. (2) Erratics are found thinly scattered in the Willamette Valley, very often on hillsides.

If these erratics were brought in by the Flood, which "covered the high mountains," they should be found at all elevations. The Valley floor should be covered with erratics, but it is not. Much of the area is covered by a blanket of silt, with erratics found here and there. This evidence shows the erratics must have been brought in by ice bergs. But ice bergs couldn't have been in the Flood, as the earth "was in a hothouse condition."

The source of the water for the Missoula Floods was a temporary lake in northwestern Montana, formed by an ice dam on the Clark Fork River and dumped out onto the plains of eastern Washington when the ice dam formed by the Cordilleran ice sheet gave way. This is similar to what happened with the Hubbard Glacier in Alaska in 1986 when it blocked the outlet of Russell Fiord for about four months, and then gave way after the fiord filled with about 80 feet of water.

It happened this way. The lobe of the Cordilleran ice sheet that occupied the Purcell Trench in British Columbia advanced southward down the trench to and beyond Pend Oreille lake. Each time it advanced up the Clark Fork several miles it formed an ice dam as much as 2500 feet high across the valley, impounding the waters behind the dam to form a great lake up to 2000 feet deep, covering 3000 square miles, and extending for 200 miles to the east in the intermontane valleys within the Rocky Mountains.

Each of this series of pre-historic lakes, now known collectively as Lake Missoula, contained over 500 cubic miles of water, one-fifth the volume of Lake Michigan. When the rising waters became deep enough to float the ice, they lifted up the dam and the ice was swept away. Within a few hours or days, up to 380 cubic miles of ice-choked water surged out at an estimated rate of 9.5 cubic miles an hour and swept southwesterly at speeds of from 30 to 50 miles an hour across the Columbia Plateau.

Each time Lake Missoula emptied, the ice lobe, continuing its southerly progression, would build a new dam and form a new lake, resulting in a new flood. This happened on an average of every 55 years or so for 2000 years!¹⁵⁴

There is direct evidence that Lake Missoula existed. Former beach lines, representing various stands of the lake level, are visible on the mountain slopes surrounding the city of Missoula, Montana. See for example, photographs in Cataclysms on the Columbia¹⁵⁵ and Landprints.¹⁵⁶

There is also strong evidence that there have been many of these floods.

The repeated flooding has been indicated by 'rhythmic bedding' of sediments laid down in areas where flood waters, over and over, backed up and laid down successive layers of sediment. The bedding is rhythmic in the uniform spacing of its stacked layers, each twenty to forty inches thick and changing from sand on the bottom of the layer (laid down at the start of the flood) to fine silt on the top. They are exposed at numerous sites along the Yakima and Walla Walla rivers in the Pasco Basin [in eastern Washington].... In Montana.... [on] the floor of Lake Missoula, rhythmic bedding can be seen in a [road] cut near Ninemile Creek. Between the flood deposits are lake sediments in which [Richard B.] Waitt [of the U.S. Geological Survey] has counted from twenty to fifty-five annual layers, indicating that the floods were spaced twenty to sixty years apart.¹⁵⁷

.... [sections of the Walla Walla valley] are underlain in part by the fine-grained layered sediments known as the Touchet Beds, deposited by the Bretz floods as it dropped its load of debris in this backwater.

Three miles south of Loudon (U.S. 12) an irrigation ditch broke many years ago. It washed out and excavated a narrow ravine widely known as 'Burlingame Gulch'. This gulch exposes 40 of the 62 layers.... described by Waitt and Bjornstadt in 1980. Each rhythmite is believed by most geologists to represent a separate flood.... The waters drained out after each flood through the narrows west of Touchet slowly enough to permit settling of the fine sand and silt into one rhythmite doublet.

A significant thin double layer of white volcanic ash between the 28th and 29th rhythmites in the Touchet Beds at Burlingame Gulch has been firmly identified as the 'Set S' ash from Mt. St. Helens. This has been dated at 13,000 years before the present....

A similar series of up to 40 rhythmites were discovered in 1965.... along the banks of the Willamette River on the 'Big Bend' between Dayton and St. Paul. They constitute the only evidence so far that multiple floods covered the Willamette Valley in Oregon.¹⁵⁸

See photographs in Cataclysms on the Columbia¹⁵⁹ and Landprints.¹⁶⁰

When the ice dam gave way there was a tremendous outflow of water. In 1942 a geologist named Joseph Pardee published an understated paper, entitled "Unusual Currents in Lake Missoula", concerning this outflow:

The nature of Lake Missoula's intra-valley layout created a number of narrow passes where the velocity of the out-rushing water, according to Pardee's calculations, 'reached a maximum of 9.46 cubic miles per hour.'....

.... where was the proof? How could Pardee be sure that 'a sudden great outrush of water' had in fact burst through the Clark Fork ice dam?.... Pardee, to put it simply, had discovered ripple marks left on the floor sediments of lake Missoula.

Ripple marks? We all know what those are, don't we? They're nothing but those small, wavy, configurations that show up along the shorelines of lakes, rivers, or oceans, wherever the water has retreated a bit. At the beach they're found in the shallow, sandy hollows that appear at low tide: lumpy, washboard-like formations, strange to walk on and pleasing in their smooth, patterned regularity. And what creates ripple marks? Currents -- it's all the result of currents flowing over the bottom and warping the sediments into smooth, parallel, ridge-rows.

This is where the 'unusual currents' in Pardee's title come in. Back in the valley basins, east of where the Lake Missoula ice dam had stood, Pardee had discovered ripple marks to end all ripple marks. And they could only have been formed by currents of an inconceivable size. In a sense, however, Pardee had not discovered anything 'new' at all. These ripple marks had been there since the Pleistocene. The catch was that no one, before Pardee, had truly seen the Lake Missoula specimens. They had been walked upon, measured, and described...., but they had not been recognized for what they were. Like Bretz's giant gravel bars, they had neatly disguised themselves as hills, rows of long, stretching, rounded hills, up to 50 feet high and spaced up to 500 feet apart.

In geology, viewpoint can be everything, and scale is easily deceiving. 'Ripple' is not a word that brings to mind something large. It's a word we use for configurations that allow an overview, that show us the whole pattern in a single glance. For Pardee overview came with flight. From the air, symmetry and form reveal themselves, topography shrinks down to a meaningful size, and what felt like a succession of rather undistinguished hills to the pedestrian is suddenly unmasked as a series of extraordinary ridges that have, as Pardee says, 'the form, structure, and arrangement of ordinary ripple marks but are so large that the term "ripple mark" seems inappropriate.'¹⁶¹

These ripple marks appear not only in the bed of Lake Missoula, but all through the channeled scablands of eastern Washington, the length of the Columbia River Gorge, and in parts of the Willamette Valley. Photographs of giant ripple marks can be seen in Cataclysms on the Columbia¹⁶² and in Landprints.¹⁶³ More than one hundred rippled areas have been found along the path of the flood in Washington and Montana. They are striking when seen from the air.¹⁶⁴

As the flood waters rushed over the land they stripped it of overlying soil and even cut deep into the underlying bedrock. The bedrock of the Columbia Plateau region was formed by tremendous floods of basalt which

.... originated between 16 and 6 million years ago, when the greatest outpouring of lavas recorded in the history of North America spread out across 80 thousand square miles of western Idaho and eastern Washington and Oregon. The lava flows swept westward down a succession of broad valleys into the sea off northwestern Oregon.... This up to two-mile thick pile of black basalt, consisting of nearly 200 separate lava flows, is collectively called the Columbia River Basalt Group. But the flows with which we are concerned in this book are called the Yakima Basalt....

During the .... last ice age, the great Continental Ice Sheet advanced from Canada into the northern United States and retreated again, .... [many] times.... During the melting and recession of the ice, long interglacial warm and dry periods intervened, some perhaps even warmer than at present.... During the interglacial warm periods, the climate was so arid that the glacial outwash sediments in the valleys and basins along the course of the river (mostly rock ground up by the ice) were picked up and swirled about by violent dust storms all over the Northwest. In the Columbia Basin these deposits of wind-blown glacial dust and silt (loess) created the Palouse Formation with deposits up to 150 feet in thickness. It forms the fertile farmland that makes the Columbia Plateau one of the great food-producing areas of the world....¹⁶⁵

The fertile soil of the Palouse Formation was stripped throughout the scablands, which are located

.... southwest of Spokane in eastern Washington. There a maze of interwoven channels has been carved out of the rolling Palouse country, the fertility of whose soil (a wind-deposited loess) has made its wheat fields among the nation's most productive. Even the underlying basalt of the Columbia Plateau has been deeply scoured. Between these channels are islands of undisturbed land, each tapering in the upslope direction as though carved by swift water.

.... [Bretz] pointed out that the whole plateau, covering most of eastern Washington, is tilted, forming a slope that drops off southwestward at about 20 feet per mile. It was down this slope, he said, that the flood raced, carving out such heroic features as Grand Coulee, racing through the Columbia Gorge, past Portland, and on to the sea, depositing a broad delta at the mouth of the Columbia and Willamette rivers. All the soil, 100 to 150 feet thick, was swept away from an area of 2,800 square miles, and the racing water cut deeply into the lava fields of the underlying basalt....

As evidence of the colossal rate of flow [Bretz] referred to the manner in which the surviving islands of soil, or loess, had been shaped. A striking feature, he said, is the way they taper at their northern ends, forming 'great prows, pointing up the scabland's gradient....'¹⁶⁶

See photographs in Landprints¹⁶⁷ and in Cataclysms on the Columbia.¹⁶⁸

The elevation above which the stripping stops decreases smoothly from the floodwater's source in Montana to the mouth of the Columbia River at Astoria, Oregon. See, for example, the chart on page 105 of Cataclysms on the Columbia. This chart shows that the floods had a maximum depth that is well documented throughout the area of flooding.

Remains of mammoth tie together several lines of evidence about the Flood. Cataclysms on the Columbia says:

Numerous partial skeletons of the mammoth, which became extinct about 10,000 years ago, have been found in the Willamette Valley, and more are being found every few years. Some of them were found during plowing or in shallow excavations; some were found buried beneath tens of feet of silt.

Clearly, some of the mammoths were buried by the Missoula floods. The Society's claims about extinctions of mammoths would indicate that these mammoth skeletons had to be laid down during or before the Flood. But the evidence shows the Missoula floods were local events. Also, the mammoth skeletons were found in deposits that were positively identified with the Missoula floods. Therefore, if the Society is correct, the mammoths must have been buried before the Flood. But that means that the Missoula floods must have also occurred before the Flood, and since the Missoula floods require glaciers to account for the observed geological phenomena, glaciers must have existed before the Flood. But according to the Society, the earth was tropical at that time. Obviously the Society's explanation of the Flood is inconsistent with the physical evidence.

A good summary of the features of abnormally great floods is presented in Cataclysms on the Columbia.¹⁶⁹

Both erosion and deposition of earth materials by abnormally great floods leave clear and long-lasting evidence of their passage. Twelve unique landforms and aspects of sediments left by the Bretz floods may be observed throughout over 16,000 square miles in the Northwest.

1. Relative scarcity of soil or soft sediment along floodways below the level of the highest flood crest....

2. Prominent high-water marks and shoreline features, cut into soil or rocks or deposited by waves and currents at heights hundreds of feet above present river levels.

3. 'Scabland' topography (mesas and intervening dry channels) resulting from the scouring and irregular plucking out of pieces of rock....

4. A braided.... pattern of the numerous dry channels, as well as divide-crossings where the floodwaters top their channels and spill over onto other channels or valleys producing.... hollows with no drainage outlets in the channel floors.

5. Widening and deepening of main valleys, forming steepened walls and cliffs (escarpments), faceted spurs (where a ridge, sloping down to the valley has had its lower end cut off) and hanging valleys (where the lower part has been cut away to form a waterfall) at the mouths of tributary streams.

6. Landslides or potential landslide areas, resulting from undercutting of valley walls or saturation of underlying soft sediments by water.

7. Presence of ice- (and tree-) rafted erratic boulders and smaller fragments of.... rocks which are not part of the natural rock formations where they are found.

8. Presence of originally round pebbles that have been broken into angular shapes, cracked by impact in high-energy torrents.

9. Longitudinal or eddy bars, perched high on the walls of the flood-scoured valleys. These are found below (downstream from) promontories or in reentrants (recesses or side valleys). Pendant bars are also common; they extend downstream behind the protection of a rock island or other such obstruction in the path of the floods. Expansion bars form where the water spreads out after passing through narrows and deposits some of its load.

10. Giant ripple ridges up to 50 feet high and 500 feet apart on the surface of both expansion and longitudinal bars below narrows. These 'giant ripple marks' require currents of up to 50 miles per hour and depths of up to 500 feet for their formation!

11. Foreset bedding in gravel bars.... These foreset beds are found along the sides of canyons tributary to the main river, and they dip in an opposite direction from what is normally the tributary stream's main current; in other words, they dip upstream, a clear indication that flood waters rushed up these tributaries and dumped part of their load.

12. Rhythmite sequences in tributary streams, composed of many layers, each one consisting of gravel or sand at the base, followed by silt and then clay at the top. Each rhythmite represents a separate flooding of the tributary stream. Within some of the rhythmites are sequences of annual layers called varves. These are much finer-grained, consisting of fine silt and clay deposited in a temporary lake in a side valley. By counting the number of varves between the larger and coarser flood deposits, one can estimate the number of years between successive floods.

The previous information shows some of the geological features to be found in extensively flooded areas. I'll let Cataclysms on the Columbia summarize the results so far:

Gravel bars, erratics, and channeling: in themselves there is nothing unusual in these features. All three are manifestations that normal streams are quite capable of producing, in small to moderate sizes; but Bretz's erratics were gargantuan, his channels beyond anything known on earth, and his gravel bars were the size of substantial hills.

The conclusion to all this should seem obvious. Something sudden and prodigious had carved out those Scabland channels. Something had moved those erratics; something had piled up those gravel hills. And what could that something be, other than a massive.... volume of water, rushing over the Columbia Plateau and leaving nearly 3000 square miles of scarred and denuded land behind?¹⁷⁰

The reader who believes that the Biblical Flood was a historical event will probably claim that all these things are manifestations of that Flood. If the Flood actually happened, all the lands of the world ought to resemble the channeled scabland of Washington. But they do not. The many great canyons of the world are often cited as evidence for the Flood, yet these canyons exhibit none of the distinctive characteristics of the canyons of Washington's channeled scabland. They show no giant ripple marks, no giant gravel bars, no stripping of soil up to but not exceeding a clearly defined elevation, no faceted spurs, no hanging valleys, no braided and crisscrossing channels, and no generally scoured topography. On the contrary, the canyons exhibit characteristics typical of normal stream erosion over a long period of time. Similarly, areas that should have been flooded show no evidence for it, such as ice-rafted erratic boulders and scabland characteristics. Areas that geologists say were glaciated have a topography very different from the channeled scabland. They show evidence only of local floods that were associated with the overflow of large ice-age lakes, and no evidence of overall large scale flooding.

Part 13: Summary of Ice Age Events

The previous section on the Missoula floods showed what kinds of geological features are found in extensively flooded areas. This section will document some of the evidence that ice ages actually occurred, and show why this evidence is not compatible with a Flood. Much material has been take from popular type sources. For more technical discussions, see references ¹⁷¹ and ¹⁷².

What has been called the "ice age" was actually several ice ages. Continental glaciers advanced and covered large areas of the northern hemisphere many times. Until the 1960s geologists thought there were four major glacial advances and retreats, but new evidence shows there may have been as many as thirty glacial cycles over the past three million years, some more extensive than others. Why the glacial cycles started about three million years ago is not known.

In the last glacial cycle, which peaked about 18,000 years ago, glaciers covered virtually all of Antarctica, Canada, Greenland and Scandinavia, much of northern United States, northern Europe and Britain, and parts of Siberia and Alaska. Glaciers became much more extensive than today in the Alps, Pyrenees, Urals, Himalayas, Rockies, and Andes mountains. They formed on the Hawaiian volcanoes and on some tropical African volcanoes, which are today ice free. Sea level dropped by up to 350 feet.

The ice sheets left scars on the land, scraping away soil, polishing and plucking bedrock, dumping gravelly debris, and cutting out U-shaped valleys. At the terminus, they formed end moraines consisting of unsorted silt, sand, gravel, and boulders. An extensive series of these terminal moraines can be traced almost continuously across the entire United States. Long Island's north shore is made of two of these end moraines, which can be traced all the way to Cape Cod.¹⁷³ Long Island's south shore is a glacial outwash plain.

In many places, such as New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, and much of Canada, distinctive features called eskers, kames, and drumlins were formed from debris left when the glaciers retreated. An esker is formed when melt water cuts a tunnel under a glacier and the resulting stream lays down a bed of debris. When the glacier retreats the debris is left as a long, sinuous ridge of gravel. Kames are piles of sand and gravel that look like the cone of sand in an hour glass, and are left when dirty melt water drains through holes in the retreating ice. Drumlins are long egg-shaped hills composed mainly of layered gravel deposits, with their long axes parallel to the direction of ice movement. It is not known how drumlins form.

Throughout much of the world extensive deposits of loess were formed. Loess is a deposit of wind-blown dust picked up from glacial outwash. During the ice ages, much of the world was more arid than it is today, although some areas received more moisture. Large lakes were formed in southwestern United States. Lake Bonneville, which covered parts of Utah, Nevada, and Idaho to depths of as much as 1000 feet, was nearly the size of Lake Michigan. Great Salt Lake is but a small remnant of that earlier lake.

Vegetation belts were shifted south of present day positions, so that a tundra belt covered southern Britain, northern France, Germany, Poland, and the United States about the latitude of New York.

After reaching a maximum, the ice sheets retreated by fits and starts, so that Scandinavia was ice free by about 8000 years ago, and Canada by about 6000 years ago.

Part 14: Evidence for Ice Ages Through 1960

During the 19th century, one of the most influential geologists in promoting the idea that ice ages had occurred was Louis Agassiz. Concerning the early discoveries of glacial deposition and behavior in the mid 1800s by Agassiz and others, the book Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery says:¹⁷⁴

What earlier geologists had not understood was that although the downhill edge of an equilibrium glacier is fixed, the rest of the glacier is constantly flowing downhill. In its uphill portions, where snowfall exceeds melting, the flow is rapid and eroded material is not deposited. Over the downhill portion of the glacier, however, where melting exceeds snowfall, the flow is slower and the glacier constantly deposits material on the surface underneath the ice. This material, lodged firmly in place and strongly compacted by the weight of the overlying ice, is called a lodgement till.

When the climate warms, the glacial margin seeks a new equilibrium position. In the case of a valley glacier, the equilibrium position is farther uphill. In the case of an ice sheet, the equilibrium position is farther toward the center of the sheet. But the lower part of the glacier then becomes stagnant. It ceases to flow and gradually melts away. Some of the stones, sand, and other material contained within this part of the glacier are thus released directly from the ice. This layer, called ablation till, is superimposed on the lodgement till. The rest of the sediment is carried away and deposited, as outwash, by streams of meltwater flowing within the stagnant glacier and along its margin.

Geologists in Victorian times were able to determine the extent of glaciers during the ice age by locating the thickest deposits of till. These consist of both lodgement and ablation layers and are known as terminal moraines. It was also discovered that some of the sediments that had been labeled "drift" were, in fact, outwash deposits that had been carried by meltwater streams and deposited in front of the glacier.

It took some time for geologists to discover that similar streams of meltwater operated in much the same way within the glacier -- filling crevasses, subsurface tunnels, and caverns with irregularly shaped deposits of outwash sediment. Small wonder then that Agassiz' friend, Reverend Buckland, had been confused by these deposits. The blanket of sediment that the glacier left behind when it finally retreated was a chaotic jumble of unstratified deposits (those that were transported by the ice and then dropped helter-skelter over the landscape) and stratified deposits (those carried away by water and sorted and deposited in neat layers).

With all of this new information about glacial action at their disposal, it was not long before geologists were able to chart the ice-age world and make a map that showed the extent of the great ice sheets. In North America, the terminal moraine was found to be a continuous ridge, up to 150 feet high, that extended from eastern Long Island to the state of Washington. North of this terminal moraine, the glacial deposits were found to consist mostly of till. South of the moraine was a flat landscape formed by a blanket of outwash deposits.

In addition to plotting the margins of the ice sheets, geologists found that they were able to determine the flow direction of the ice by recording the positions of scratches and grooves that had been incised in the bedrock by moving glaciers. Sample readings taken over a wide area were compiled to give a comprehensive picture of glacial flow. Another way of accomplishing the same objective was to trace erratic boulders to their bedrock source. Then, simply by looking at a map, geologists could see what path the glacier had taken.

All of these techniques were employed not only in North America, but also in Europe, Asia, South America, Australia, and New Zealand. By 1875 this effort had resulted in a global map that told the story of the great glaciers as they existed at the height of the ice age.

The Society would interpret these findings as the result of the Flood. The direction of bedrock scratches and erratic boulder movement indicate a flow generally from north to south in North America. So does the position of the "terminal moraine" across the continent. North of the terminal moraine, the deposits geologists interpret as glacial are a jumble of sorted and unsorted debris, but south of it they are highly stratified. How could this possibly be produced by massive flooding? Everywhere, one would expect to find mostly well sorted deposits, since that is what a flow of water produces, not a jumble of two kinds of deposits. One would not expect to find a pile of deposits in a nearly continuous line across the continent, a pile that looks just like the terminal moraines of Alpine and Alaskan glaciers, but much larger. One would not expect to see a sharp jump from a jumble of deposits north of the moraine, to highly stratified deposits south of it.

The striations in bedrock are evidence against a massive flow of water. Striations occur when something holds a hard object against the bedrock and scrapes it along, following the general contour of the bedrock and holding the orientation of the object fixed. Liquid water cannot do this, but solid ice can. Water tumbles rocks along, so that they crash into and bounce off the bedrock. The result is a chipped surface, like that produced by sandblasting, rather than a grooved surface. A look at the bedrock in any stream bed confirms this; you don't find striations. In fact, if striations existed at one time, water tumbling rocks and gravel across bedrock would obliterate them. Furthermore, striations are not found in the bedrock of Washington's channeled scablands.

Another line of evidence against a Flood is seen in the way flowing water drops a load of debris. A massive flow of debris-laden water drops its load whenever the flow velocity decreases. Can you think of what would cause a continent wide flow of Flood water to suddenly drop in velocity at roughly the same latitude all across North America, in such a way as to produce the observed deposits? A large flow of water can slow down for only two reasons -- it ceases traveling downhill or it enters an area where it can spread out. Did the Flood water suddenly stop going downhill or start spreading out somewhere at about the same latitude all across North America? If the Flood were global, where could the Flood water spread out to? The continent-wide terminal moraine, showing lobed features, is much more consistent with the glacial theory than the Flood theory. The morainal pattern is not consistent with debris dropping out of a continent-wide Flood.

What about all the features of a massive flood that I've shown previously in connection with the Missoula floods? Where are they found in Canada and the United States? Where are the giant ripple ridges that should have formed transverse to the direction of flow? If the moraines and other deposits were formed exclusively by flowing Flood waters, why is there no foreset bedding evident in the deposits? Why do they look like deposits you can see for yourself at the foot of retreating Alaskan glaciers?

In older publications, the Society explains the depositional features called kames, eskers and drumlins as features of Flood deposits. However, a careful analysis of these features shows they are produced by glaciers, and only by glaciers. Photographs of kames and eskers at the foot of retreating Alaskan glaciers, in Earth¹⁷⁵ and in Living Ice,¹⁷⁶ are unequivocal evidence that they are formed by glaciers. Landprints says:¹⁷⁷

While the origin of kames and eskers was long a puzzle, the processes apparently responsible for their production can be witnessed along retreating glaciers in Greenland and Alaska. In Alaska's Glacier Bay one can walk along an esker to the front of the glacier that made it and into the tunnel under the ice where it is still being formed.

Drumlins are hills with their long dimensions aligned parallel to the flow of ice. A striking photo of a drumlin field appears in Living Ice¹⁷⁸ on page 144. Associated with the drumlins are long striations in the ground, also parallel to the drumlin's long axes. Similar features associated with the retreat of a massive Alaskan glacier are shown in photos on pages 141 and 151 of Living Ice. I know of no process associated with massive flooding that could form such features, and form them in a such way that they look identical to features directly observed to be formed by glaciers. Actually, massive flooding would destroy them, and instead form features such as are found extensively in the Missoula flood region, such as transverse giant ripple ridges. The Missoula flood area contains no kames, eskers or drumlins.

While the origin of kames and eskers is well known and there are places where they can be seen forming today, no one has come up with a universally accepted theory of drumlin formation, nor have they been seen forming in association with present day glaciers. Some have pointed this out as a problem for the theory of ice ages, but it is even more of a problem for the Flood theory. Extensive laboratory studies have been made of what happens as water flows over sand and gravel. At increasing flow velocities, various forms of ridges come and go, always transverse to the flow. Drumlin shapes, with the long axis parallel to the flow, are never observed.

The lack of a theory for a mechanism of formation of one minor feature of continental glaciation is not much of an argument against the overall idea that glaciation has occurred. When Alfred Wegener proposed the theory of continental drift, many geologists refused to accept it because Wegener could not come up with a plausible mechanism to drive the drift, even though the theory explained other phenomena that no other theory could. "How could solid rock continents plow through ten mile thicknesses of ocean crust?" they said. Yet today the speed of continental drift is directly measured using astronomical techniques.

Erratic boulders, too, show evidence of transport by ice. In upstream areas of the Missoula flood region, huge rocks that were transported, not by ice rafting but by the floods, showed a combination of features -- much rounding and abrasion, as well as the angular features due to cracking in high speed impacts in the flood. Erratics in glaciated areas tend to show little or no rounding, even when house sized. Can house sized erratics be transported by glaciers? A photo on page 120 of Living Ice of one sitting on the Malaspina Glacier in Alaska proves they can.

Time-Life's Ice Ages¹⁷⁹ has an interesting comment on erratics and glaciation in general:

.... the last effective resistance to the glacial theory withered in the mid-1860s, after the Scottish geologist Thomas Jamieson published a persuasive paper that compared the observed effects of flooding and glaciation, and showed that only glacial action could account for the erratic boulders and striated bedrock found in Scotland.

The thickness of the ice-age ice sheets can be estimated. Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery tells how it was done in the 19th century:¹⁸⁰

Geologists accomplished this by determining which mountains bore evidence of glaciation during the ice age and which did not. If a mountain top had been covered with ice, then the ice itself must have been at least as thick as the elevation of that mountain. An even more accurate assessment could be obtained from mountains (such as Mount Monadnock, New Hampshire [3165 ft.]) that had been only partly submerged by the ice sheet -- their rocky, unglaciated summits protruding through the ice to form islands of rock in a sea of ice. Today, the landscape changes abruptly part way up such mountains. Below the critical point, the mountainside is smooth and even; above it, the topography is rough and uneven. The thickness of the ice sheet could be determined simply by finding the altitude of this critical point above the surrounding countryside.

This boundary line on some mountains is instructive. First, the existence of a boundary at all shows that if it were caused by the Flood, then the Flood was flowing at least that high. Since the boundary is found up to elevations of about one mile, the Flood must have been at least that deep. But this gets back to sticky problems about where so much water came from, whether high mountains existed before the Flood, and such, that I've already discussed. Second, the pattern of the landscape on either side of the boundary is reversed from what would be caused by a flood. The geological observations in the Missoula flood region showed that below the high water line, the bedrock was severely plucked and scoured, whereas above the line the previously existing soil was left untouched. But below the glacial boundary line, the bedrock shows glacial polish.^180a Above the boundary the bedrock is rough and uneven. Below the boundary are found the grooves and striations typical of Alpine glaciated regions. These features are never found on bedrock that has been polished by flowing water, such as on bedrock streambeds. Bedrock polished by water has a distinctive sandblasted look, different from the sandpapered look of glacially polished bedrock.

During the ice ages, mountain glaciers grew much larger than today, and glaciers were present on mountains that are today ice free. Their growth and retreat occurred simultaneously in both hemispheres. The evidence for this is explained in Earth:¹⁸¹

Much of the kind of rugged mountainous terrain that has been celebrated for its scenic beauty is the product of glacial erosion. The Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, the Rockies, and the Alps all have high valleys that were filled with glaciers just a little more than 10,000 years ago, as evidenced by the signs we have learned to recognize; striations, large blocks carried from high in the mountains, moraines, and cirques. In the mountains of northern California, Oregon and Washington, there are now only small relic glaciers left in the few places that receive enough snow and stay cold enough to preserve ice all year round. The rest of the terrain is exposed, and we can see the effects of Pleistocene glaciation. Farther north, in Canada and Alaska, glaciers become more numerous, but some of the ice-sculptured topography is still exposed.

As glaciers ate away at the mountains, the topography acquired a distinctive appearance. Cirques were formed at the heads of glaciers by ice plucking and undercutting the highest peaks and ridges. Adjacent cirques gradually met to form knife-sharp divides. The result is a jagged, serrated, linear crest. The valleys were excavated to a characteristic U-shape, with steep walls and a flat floor, as the glacier scraped and rounded off irregularities. As the ice retreated, hanging valleys of glacial tributaries were exposed. Lakes formed in depressions in cirques. Most spectacular are the fiords, arms of the sea that occupy U-shaped valleys that were cut below sea level by valley glaciers descending from coastal mountains.

Lakes sometimes offer clear evidence of glacial times in the annual sediments that form on the bottom. Time-Life's Ice Ages¹⁸² explains how a Swedish geologist, Baron Gerard de Geer, obtained the first data on this sedimentation:

During field work in the Stockholm region, de Geer was struck by the regularity of the laminations in the sediments at the bottoms of lakes fed by glaciers. When glacier ice melts during the summer, de Geer discovered, the meltwater carries off a load of debris that settles in the nearby lake to form a distinct profile for that particular year. The heavy material sinks first, forming a coarse layer, while the lighter material remains longer in suspension, eventually accumulating as a fine sediment on top of the coarse deposits.

Since glacial lakes are born as soon as the glaciers retreat, de Geer was able to estimate the age of each lake -- and thus the approximate date of the glacial recession from that locality -- simply by counting the pairs of sediments, called varves, on its bed. In addition, because varves vary in thickness according to the climate, being thickest in warm years when melting glaciers release large quantities of sediment, de Geer was able to plot the progress of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet's retreat by correlating the sediment patterns of different lakes. He calculated that the oldest lakes -- those nearest the margin of the ancient ice sheet -- had been formed approximately 12,000 years ago, while the youngest were little more than 6,000 years old. And the fluctuations in the thickness of the varves gave him a crude picture of the climatic record since the retreat of the glaciers.

Note that the dating of the varves is done by counting them. This dating method is independent of, and confirms, the dating of glacial features by radioisotope methods. The method does not suffer from some of the problems of tree ring dating, as the varves form a continuous sequence in many different lakes and give consistent answers.

After discussing radioisotope dating, The Innocent Assassins discusses dating with varves:¹⁸³

Radiometry has given us a firmly based time scale for the history of the earth.

Well and good. But the lay reader may object that this is an esoteric method and that it would be rather nice to see something simpler -- more obvious. For instance? I reply. Something I can see, the reader might say; something like tree rings.

Yes, why not? The earth does have annual rings, just like trees. And the interesting thing is that they give time scales that are in excellent agreement with the radiometric ones.

The first to be developed was the glacial clay "varve" or band chronology, which was introduced by the Swedish geologist Gerard De Geer.... At the beginning, it was a "floating" chronology -- that is, it was not connected with the present day. This has now been rectified, especially by studies in the valley of Angerman River in northern Sweden, where Ingemar Cato was recently able to close the last remaining gap. And so there is now an unbroken sequence of annual varves taking us nearly 13,000 years back in time.

The glacial varves, which may be a centimeter or more in thickness, are usually easy to observe. But there are also much thinner varves, perhaps only a fraction of a millimeter in thickness. Such varves, or lamellae, are formed in the bottom sediment of certain types of lake, which have been studied especially in Finland. This happens in "poor" lakes (technically termed oligotrophic) where there is no bottom fauna to poke about in the sediment. When studied microscopically, the varves are, again, seen to result from seasonal changes -- the spring flowering of microscopic plants called diatoms, changes in the chemistry of the water, and changes in the supply of inorganic sediment.

They too are annual "rings" that can be counted and used in a chronology (if the lake is still in existence, the chronology of course will extend all the way to the present). The difference is that all the varves are piled on top of each other in a single lake basin, so that you do not have to move from place to place to construct your time scale, as is the case when you track series of ice-dammed lakes that followed the retreating ice margin. In this case, certain lakes too give us a long chronology; Lake Valkiajarvi in central Finland, which was studied by Matti Saarnisto, carries us back almost 9,500 years in time, to the birth of the lake after the melting away of the inland ice in this area.

Another type of evidence for glaciation that geologists have extensively studied is the depression of sea level during an ice age. Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery¹⁸⁴ explains:

.... geologists in Scotland and Scandinavia found abandoned sea cliffs and other shore-line features indicating that sea level during the ice age was indeed much lower than it is today. And, in some places, they also found evidence that sea level immediately following the retreat of the glaciers was higher than it is today. This high shoreline is especially apparent in Scandinavia where, in the center of what is today a mountainous region, marine shell deposits are found at altitudes higher than 1000 feet. The Scottish geologist, Thomas F. Jamieson, was the first to interpret these marine deposits correctly. In 1865, he wrote that:

In Scandinavia and North America, as well as in Scotland, we have evidence of a depression of the land following close upon the presence of the great ice-covering; and, singular to say, the height to which marine fossils have been found in all these countries is very nearly the same. It has occurred to me that the enormous weight of ice thrown upon the land may have had something to do with this depression.

Jamieson went on to suggest why this depression would occur. He postulated that underneath the earth's outer, rigid crust was a layer of rocks "in a state of fusion," which would flow under pressure.

This bold and original speculation was supported years later by geophysical measurements. Just as Jamieson suggested, the upper portion of the earth's crust was shown by the measurements to be floating on fluid material. When a quantity of ice is placed on the earth's surface, the crust sinks down -- exactly as the addition of passengers in a rowboat causes it to ride lower in the water.

The shorelines of glaciated regions, therefore, tell a curious story of marine inundations. During the ice age itself, worldwide lowering of the sea level caused shorelines to move downward by about 350 feet. Simultaneously, the weight of the ice sheets depressed the land surface underneath them. When the ice sheets melted, there was an immediate response -- a rise in sea level -- and a gradual response -- a slow uplifting of the land surface. Thus, in new England, Scandinavia, and other glaciated areas, deglaciation was followed immediately by flooding. With the passage of time, however, the land surface rose to its original height -- causing the sea level to appear to drop. In some areas of the world, the land is still reacting to the removal of the ice. Around the shores of Lake Superior, for example, the land is rising at the rate of 15 inches per century. But, away from the heavily glaciated areas, the shorelines tell a much more straightforward story, reflecting only the general rise and fall of sea level as water was subtracted from, or returned to, the ocean reservoir.

The rise of the land around Hudson Bay in Canada is about 3 feet a century. See page 245 of Landprints¹⁸⁵ for a photo of the changing beachline. See also the footnote on page 16 of the section on the polar regions for further comments about changes in sea level.

A large area of the earth's surface is covered by fine sediment called loess. Some places such as China are blanketed by as much as several hundred feet. Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery¹⁸⁶ describes early discoveries about the nature of loess:

While some geologists confined their studies to areas that had actually been covered by ice sheets, others investigated land areas away from these regions. These geologists discovered that more than one million square miles of Europe, Asia, and North America had been blanketed during the ice age with a layer of fine, homogeneous, yellowish sediment. Borrowing an old term used by German farmers, they called this deposit "loess" (pronounced to rhyme with "bus"). In some areas, this layer of silt was found to reach thicknesses exceeding 10 feet. In other areas, it was found only in thin, discontinuous patches.

The attention of geologists had first been drawn to this peculiar deposit early in the nineteenth century, but its origin had remained a mystery. The fact that loess was composed of minute, uniform grains of silt suggested that it might have been deposited by moving water. But the horizontal layering that characterized other water-laid deposits is not present in loess. Moreover, marine fossils are absent. It was not until 1870 that geologists found an adequate explanation for loess. The explanation came from a German geologist, Ferdinand von Richthofen, who published his theory and later defended it to a skeptical colleague:

It is perfectly evident that no theory starting from the hypothesis of the deposition of loess by water can explain all or any single one of its properties. Neither the sea nor lakes nor rivers could deposit it in altitudes of 8000 feet on hillsides. Origin from water is perfectly unable to explain the lack of stratification,.... the vertical cleavage, the promiscuous occurrence of grains of quartz, the angular shape of these,.... the imbedding of land shells, and the bones of terrestrial mammals.

There is but one great class of agencies which can be called on for explaining the covering of hundreds of thousands of square miles.... with a perfectly homogeneous soil.... Whenever dust is carried away by wind from a dry place, and deposited on a spot which is covered by vegetation, it finds a resting place. If these depositions are repeated, the soil will continue to grow.

Von Richthofen's explanation of loess as a wind-blown deposit became universally accepted. Geologists were able to clarify their picture of the ice-age world, and a new piece of the ancient puzzle slipped into place. When melting occurred at the southern boundary of the ice sheet, great quantities of silt were deposited by outwash streams. Because the deposits were neither covered with snow, nor held in place by vegetation, they were easily blown away by the high winds that swirled in front of the ice sheet. Von Richthofen's ideas were confirmed by observations in Alaska, where glaciers melt rapidly during the summer months and the great quantities of silt deposited at their base dry up and are blown away to cover nearby grasslands with fertile loess.

The silt that the ancient glaciers drained from Canada in melt-water streams has proved to be a boon to American farmers in the Midwest. For that silt was blown southwards where it settled and eventually became the rich, easily cultivated, and well-drained soil of America's farm belt.

Another book, Landprints,¹⁸⁷ says concerning loess and its formation:

Winds that today blow across the Great Plains are normally (but not always) of modest intensity, painting patterns that sweep across ripening grain fields like flying shadows. During the ice ages the typical winds may have been considerably stronger. The westerlies of today are strongest in winter because that is when temperature differences between the tropics and high latitudes are greatest. The atmosphere itself attempts to equalize those temperatures, causing large-scale circulation, and during an ice age the temperature differences must have been greater and such circulation more intense. Analysis of layers laid down in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets during the last Ice Age indicate that the atmosphere then was one hundred times dustier than today.

.... As now occurs along some Alaskan rivers, enormous quantities of meltwater wove an ever-changing, braided pattern across the valley floors, forming broad bars of gravel, sand, and silt that, particularly during dry periods, provided an abundant source of dust for eastward transport by the prevailing westerlies. As a result accumulations of one hundred feet or more formed east of the Missouri and Mississippi river valleys.

The material thus deposited is known as loess.... which is easily tilled -- and easily eroded. The deep accumulations east of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers and closest to the loess sources are known as the Loess Hills.

Their erosion has produced a special kind of landscape found in China and to some extent in other regions of loess accumulation such as the Soviet Union, central Europe, and Argentina....

During the ice ages loess deposition occurred as far east as Ohio and also west of the Rockies in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Wind lifted silt from the basins of the Columbia and Snake rivers, leaving coarser material behind and depositing the silt on higher ground to the East. In the rolling Palouse Country of southeastern Washington the resulting loess, mixed with small amounts of mineral-rich volcanic ash, blown east from the Cascade volcanoes, forms a blanket commonly several tens of feet in thickness. Grain harvests there have made the Palouse farmers among the nation's most prosperous. Most of the deposit predates the last glaciation, since it was already there to be swept away when the ice dam of Lake Missoula collapsed.

Genesis 8:1 reads ".... and God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters began to subside." Some have speculated that loess was actually formed immediately after the Flood by this "wind of God" from flood debris. But note several items from the preceding accounts: (1) Dust layers were found in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica that showed that the ice age atmosphere was far dustier than today. These cores contain thicknesses of ice containing up to 160,000 years worth of accumulation in the case of one core from the Soviet Union's Vostok station in Antarctica. This core represents less than half the thickness of ice over the spot from which it was taken. (2) Loess from before the last ice age was already in place when the Missoula floods swept it away. Now, the ice caps with all their dusty layers, and the phenomena seen in the region of the Missoula floods, could have formed either before the Flood or after it. If they were formed after the Flood, 4400 years ago, one who believes the Flood occurred should be able to explain how the ice caps, up to 3 miles thick in places, formed in such a short time, and also how the numerous phenomena of the Missoula floods region came about. If these things were formed before the Flood, one must explain how ice caps, the ice dam that dammed Lake Missoula, and the loess deposits, were formed in the "hothouse" conditions of pre-Flood days. If one concedes that the earth was relatively cool before the Flood, and ice caps already existed, why did the Flood not break them up and float them away?

Large ice age lakes are another evidence of a very different climate during the ice ages. Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery¹⁸⁸ describes some observations:

Geologists working in the American West found evidence that parts of Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and southern California were wetter during the ice age than they are today. In 1852, Captain Howard Stansbury (a topographical engineer who was investigating the flatlands around Utah's Great Salt Lake) wrote these observations in his diary:

Upon the slope of a ridge connected with this plain, thirteen distinct successive benches, or water-marks, were counted, which had evidently, at one time, been washed by the lake, and must have been the result of its action continued for some time at each level. The highest of these is now about two hundred feet above the valley.... If this supposition be correct, and all appearances conspire to support it, there must have been here at some former period a vast inland sea, extending for hundreds of miles; and the isolated mountains which now tower from the flats, forming its western and southwestern shores, were doubtless huge islands similar to those which now rise from the diminished waters of the lake.

Subsequent research confirmed Stansbury's inference. During the 1870s, Grove K. Gilbert of the U.S. Geological Survey showed that the Great Salt Lake is only a remnant of a former and far more extensive lake, which he named Lake Bonneville.... during the ice age, this ancient lake was larger than any of America's Great lakes are today, indicating that the climate in the western part of the United States was not only colder but also significantly wetter than it is today.

Landprints says that through

much of the successive ice ages Lake Bonneville seems to have waxed and waned, as indicated by the steplike succession of its beach lines. Material extracted from a hole drilled more than 1,000 feet into the south shore of Great Salt Lake indicates more than a score of such cycles in the past 800,000 years.¹⁸⁹

The caption on a National Geographic photo¹⁹⁰ of terraces from Lake Bonneville says:

Ancient beaches behind Utah's copper-domed capitol reveal the lake's fluctuations in prehistoric times. During the past ice age, water began to rise but stalled 22,000 years ago at 4,500 feet creating the lowest terrace.... the Stansbury level.... By 16,000 years ago water had climbed to 5,090 feet, the Bonneville shoreline, before overflowing into the Snake River. The diversion lowered the lake to 4,740 feet, the Provo level, where it remained until 14,000 years ago. The lake has since declined as climate turned warm and arid.

Note that this evidence shows a succession of events -- not a single instance of flooding of a low lying area, as you would expect if the Lake was a remnant of the Flood. On page 700 the above National Geographic article says:

Lake Bonneville peaked at 5,090 feet above sea level. Then it burst its bounds at Red Rock Pass in Idaho, dropping within a year 350 feet to the second, so- called Provo terrace. By 8,000 years ago the lake had evaporated to its modern size.

This draining of Lake Bonneville by 350 feet produced a flood that drained through the Snake River and Hells Canyon, on into the Columbia River. Various books differ somewhat on the dating of this flood, but it was recorded in Snake River sediments in a most interesting way. Cataclysms on the Columbia says that the Missoula floods left deposits in the Snake River Canyon upstream of where the Snake joins the Columbia:¹⁹¹

Floodwaters surging up the Snake River Canyon helped to erode the late lava flows which had partially filled it, and deposited great mile-long gravel bars high up on its walls many miles upstream from the Palouse River junction. One bar a few miles south of Lewiston, over 100 miles from the mouth of the Snake, is exposed in a quarry, and shows the Bretz flood sands overlying coarse gravels previously deposited by the flood which came down the Snake River from Lake Bonneville in Utah.... The foreset bedding in the coarse gravels of the lower part of the bar south of Lewiston dips downstream, while the finer sand rhythmites in the upper part of the bar dips upstream, showing that the Bonneville flood traveled downstream, and the Bretz floods traveled upstream.

Landprints also describes the Bonneville flood on pages 170-171.

In addition to the above mentioned evidence, this sequence of deposits -- first the downstream flowing Bonneville flood deposits, and then the upstream flowing Missoula flood deposits, is strong evidence that the Flood did not occur. The Society claims that freshwater lakes that were at one time much larger than they are today, were remnants of the Flood.¹⁹² But the above evidence shows that some of the Missoula floods occurred after the partial draining of Lake Bonneville. Therefore some of the Missoula floods must also have occurred after the Flood. But we have seen that large scale glaciation was intimately involved with the Missoula floods -- Lake Missoula was blocked by a continental glacier, and ice-rafted erratic boulders are found throughout the Missoula flood drainage area. There is absolutely no physical evidence that glaciation on this scale came and went in the 4400 years since the Flood.

Direct drilling into Lake Bonneville salt deposits showed at least 20 cycles of filling and drying up. The drill hole depth of 1,000 feet in the salt is also fatal to the idea that only one flooding of the area occurred. There is no way that a 1,000 foot depth of basically fresh water could have deposited that much salt in under 4400 years. Even a one time filling with pure sea water would leave only a few tens of feet of salt.

Given all this evidence, you should be able to see how misguided is the The Bible: God's Word or Man's? writer's attempt at facetiousness on page 115:

".... there may well be an actual flood of gigantic proportions dating from one of the pluvial periods.... many thousands of years ago." The pluvial periods were times when the surface of the earth was much wetter than now. Freshwater lakes around the world were much larger. It is theorized that the wetness was caused by heavy rains associated with the end of the ice ages. But some have suggested that on one occasion the extreme wetness of the earth's surface was a result of the Flood.

There is plenty of evidence that glaciers have advanced and retreated many times. Concerning some of the early discoveries, Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery¹⁹³ says:

When the era of exploration began, there were already strong hints that the earth had been glaciated not once but several times. As early as 1847, Edouard Collomb reported two layers of till in the Vosges mountains of France. But these were separated only by stream deposits that could be interpreted either as a record of a short and minor retreat of the glacial terminus, or as evidence of a major and prolonged period of glacial recession. In the 1850s, similar evidence was found in Wales, Scotland, and Switzerland, but the conservative view -- that the intertill beds represented minor climatic fluctuations during a single ice age -- was generally preferred.

In 1863, Scottish geologist Archibald Geikie argued that plant fragments found between layers of Scottish tills were clear evidence that sustained intervals of warm climate intervened between different glacial ages. Finally, in 1873, Amos H. Worthen, Director of the Illinois Geological survey, showed that a humus-rich soil had developed on one till layer before being buried by another. Since soils of this kind can only develop when the climate is warm enough to support abundant plant growth, this was strong support for the supposition that warm interglacial ages had occurred. Only a few years later, John S. Newberry and W. J. McGee clinched the argument by showing that in the American Midwest, two sheets of till were separated by the remains of a former forest.

By the end of the 19th century geologists had gathered enough evidence to conclude that Agassiz had been right -- there had indeed been ice ages. Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery¹⁹⁴ says:

By 1875 geologists had completed their initial survey of what the world of the last ice age was like. They had mapped its glaciers; measured its sea level; and determined which areas had been cold and wet, which cold and dry. They had also discovered that the ice age was not a unique event -- that, in fact, there had been a succession of ice ages, each separated by warmer, interglacial ages similar to the present one. With all of this behind them, geologists were ready to turn their attention from facts to theories.

Part 15: Ice Ages Confirmed

Up until about 1960, many pieces of the ice age puzzle were unexplained. Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery¹⁹⁵ describes the situation:

Once they had accepted and enlarged upon Agassiz' glacial theory, geologists faced the challenge of explaining the ice ages. What agent stimulated the ice sheets to grow and expand? Why, having spread out to cover nearly one-third of the earth's land area, did those ice sheets then retreat? Most intriguing of all: would they return? These were the central questions of the ice-age mystery.

Many theories were advanced. Some that seemed at first to provide plausible answers were later rejected when fresh evidence proved them wrong. Others that were untestable had to be laid aside -- judged according the the Scottish verdict, "Not proven."

Several attempts to solve the ice-age mystery ran into difficulty because they focused too narrowly on the fluctuations of the ice sheets themselves, failing to see them as only one part of a global climate system -- a system that includes all of the mobile elements of the planet: ice sheets, ocean, and atmosphere. The three elements of this air-sea-ice system are interconnected in such a way that they behave like a huge machine. A change in one part brings about corresponding changes in the other parts of the system....

Any valid theory of the ice ages must take into account that the growth or decay of a large ice sheet would have a large effect on the other elements of the climate system. For example, if an ice sheet is to expand, water must be drawn from the oceans, carried through the atmosphere to the site of the ice sheet, and precipitated there as snow. Variations in the volume of global ice are therefore linked inextricably with variations in sea level. Furthermore, any change in the area of an ice sheet must bring about a change in the radiation balance of the globe. When an ice sheet expands, heat is lost through reflection, global temperatures drop, and more ice is formed. Conversely, when an ice sheet shrinks, temperatures rise, and further shrinkage occurs. This "radiation-feedback effect" plays an important role in several theories of the ice ages because it explains how a small initial change in the size of the ice sheet is amplified.

The main objective of most theories is to discover the cause of this initial change. Since Agassiz' 1837 "Discourse," literally dozens of explanations for the ice age have been suggested.

One theory proved resoundingly successful in explaining the ice ages. About 1911, a Yugoslavian professor of mathematics, Milutin Milankovitch, began work on a theory "capable of describing the climates of earth, Mars, and Venus -- today and in the past." To describe what Milankovitch did, I first must describe the earth's changing relationship with the sun. A good explanation of the changes is paraphrased from Time-Life's Ice Ages, which also contains a helpful diagram:¹⁹⁶

The 100,000 year stretch: The orbit of the earth gradually stretches from nearly circular to an elliptical shape and back again in a cycle of approximately 100,000 years. This is called the orbit's eccentricity. During the cycle, the distance between earth and sun varies by as much as 11.35 million miles.

The 41,000 year tilt: The earth's axis is never perpendicular to the plane of its orbit; over the course of about 41,000 years the angle varies between 21.5 and 24.5 degrees. Because of the tilt, the solar radiation striking any point on earth fluctuates during the yearly orbit, producing seasons. When the tilt is greatest, summers are hottest, winters are coldest.

The 22,000 year wobble: Even while the shape of its orbit and the tilt of its axis are changing, the earth wobbles slowly in space, its axis describing a circle once every 22,000 years. Because of this movement, known as axial precession or the precession of the equinoxes, the distance between the earth and the sun in a given season slowly changes. Today, for instance, the shape of the orbit places the planet closest to the sun in the Northern Hemisphere's winter and farthest away in summer. The combination tends to make winters mild and summers cool -- and favors ice-sheet growth. However, 11,000 years ago, the arrangement was just the opposite, setting the stage for the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets to decay.

These variations were calculated mathematically by several workers during the latter half of the 19th century. Milankovitch used the existing calculations of variations in eccentricity, precession and tilt to calculate how much solar radiation strikes the surface of the earth during each season and at each latitude. He published his first results in 1920, which contained a graph showing how summer radiation at latitudes 55Deg, 60Deg, and 65Deg North varied over the past 650,000 years. His next results were published in 1930, and included radiation curves for each of eight latitudes ranging from 5Deg North to 75Deg North. The curves calculated for high latitudes are dominated by the 41,000 year tilt cycle, while those for low latitudes are dominated by the 22,000 year precession cycle. By 1941 he had finished his calculations. The value of the Milankovitch theory¹⁹⁷

was that it made testable predictions about the geological record of climate. It predicted how many ice-age deposits geologists would find, and it pinpointed when these deposits had been formed during the past 650,000 years.

These predictions were contained in three nearly identical radiation curves that showed past changes in summertime radiation at latitudes 55Deg, 60Deg, and 65Deg North. In theory, each radiation minimum caused an ice age.

A number of findings up through the late 1950s threw much doubt on the Milankovitch theory. But eventually the theory was confirmed. Let's now look at the evidence. In the early 1950s,¹⁹⁸

One of the first American geologists to advocate the systematic use of the radiocarbon method in the study of Pleistocene drifts was Richard F. Flint at Yale University. After collecting a large number of datable materials from the Wisconsin drift of the eastern and central United States, Flint sent them off.... for radiocarbon analysis. Flint's results showed that the drift actually recorded at least two glaciations -- perhaps more. Previously, it had been supposed that a single glaciation was responsible for the Wisconsin drift, but the radiocarbon results made it clear that this hypothesis could no longer be maintained. The older tills in the drift were, for the most part, beyond the range of radiocarbon dating; but the youngest till was well within the datable range, and Flint and [others] were able to show that the great ice sheet had reached its maximum extent 18,000 years ago. Then, about 10,000 years ago it rapidly disappeared.

For a time it seemed that the results of the radiocarbon revolution were consistent with the Milankovitch theory. Although it was true that the 18,000-year date for the last glacial maximum was 7000 years younger than the 25,000-year date calculated by Milankovitch for the last radiation minimum, such a discrepancy could easily be explained as the time needed for a sluggish ice sheet to respond to a change in the earth's radiation budget. In fact, Milankovitch himself had predicted that just such a lag should occur, and estimated its duration as about 5000 years.

However, the discovery of a 25,000-year-old peat layer in Farmdale, Illinois, finally shattered belief in the Milankovitch theory. Such a deposit could only have been formed during an interval of relatively warm climate. Exactly how warm was uncertain, but the date for that warm interval coincided exactly with the date of a radiation minimum. When deposits of the same age and type were found at other locations in the Midwest, in eastern Canada, and in Europe, the geological evidence against the astronomical theory seemed to be overwhelming.

The program of radiocarbon dating allowed more and more geologists to fix their field observations on a firm time scale. This led to the development of a new method for constructing a climatic curve that could be directly compared with the radiation curve. Geologists accomplished this by finding dates for a large number of till and loess samples along some convenient north-south line. This till-loess boundary could then be graphically represented as a function of time. The resulting jagged line showed the position of the southern margin of the ice sheet as it advanced and retreated at that particular longitude over the course of thousands of years.... [One diagram along a line from Indiana to Quebec] indicated that major glacial advances occurred 60,000, 40,000, and 18,000 years ago.

Although evidence concerning ice ages continued to be gathered on land, it was fragmentary and piecemeal. But in the ocean, continuous sediment records going back hundreds of thousands of years were found. In 1872 the British research ship H.M.S. Challenger observed that tiny planktonic animals called foraminifera (informally forams)¹⁹⁹

are found in all the world's oceans -- some species only in warm waters, others only in cold waters. For those who would later seek to unravel the mystery of the ice ages, this was a highly significant finding; it meant that an examination of fossil foram sequences on the seabed could indicate whether the ocean was warm or cold at the time that the creatures died and sank to the bottom....

Studying cores taken in this way from the Atlantic floor in the mid-1920's, the German paleontologist Wolfgang Schott made a critical finding. He recognized in the sediments three distinct layers with different populations of forams. The uppermost layer, laid down in the recent geological past, continued a high concentration of warm-climate species, including Globorotalia menardii. The second, older layer was richer in cold-climate types, and menardii was completely absent. But in the oldest of the three layers, menardii was back again, together with a high proportion of other warm-climate species. Schott deduced that the layer devoid of menardii was deposited during the last ice age, when the Atlantic was cooler, while the other two strata were laid down during the preceding and present interglacials.

Lest the reader think this sequence of warm-cool-warm forams is consistent with the Society's view that a large influx of cold water inundated a tropical earth, note first that the sequence is wrong. There should have been warm species, then cold species, and nothing else. In addition, if the earth were in a hothouse condition, how could there be cold water species at all? If much water fell from a vapor canopy it would become extremely hot as it fell. Also note that the cores described above were about three feet long. Cores taken using newer techniques are up to 45 feet long, and contain many warm-cool cycles of forams, as well as other evidence showing multiple glacial cycles. I'll discuss the evidence for multiple cycles presently. Meanwhile, Time-Life's Ice Ages describes an outstanding correlation between events on the land and events in the sea:²⁰⁰

In the early 1950s.... David B. Ericson.... [and] Geochemists at [Columbia University's] Lamont [Geological Observatory] determined that the boundary between the topmost, menardii-rich layer and the second layer had been formed rapidly, some 11,000 years ago. Ericson noted that the timing of this rapid change from cold to warm climate coincided with the dates that had been deduced from radiocarbon dating of glacial debris on land. In a paper describing their findings, Ericson and his colleagues noted that "further correlation of events both in the ocean and on land during this interval may lead to an understanding of some of the factors causing glaciation."

Meanwhile, other scientists were conducting a parallel line of research that involved chemical analysis of fossil forams. The method they used had been suggested in 1947 by Harold Urey, a Nobel laureate at the University of Chicago. It consisted of measuring the ratio of two oxygen isotopes -- atoms that are virtually identical but different in atomic weight -- that are absorbed from sea water by the shells and skeletons of marine organisms. Urey and his associates had found that organisms from cold water contained a higher proportion of the heavier isotope, designated oxygen 18, or O-18, than did organisms living in warmer water. The remains of the warm-water creatures had a higher ratio of the lighter isotope, known as O-16.

In the 1950s, the Italian-American geologist Cesare Emiliani applied Urey's theories to eight deep-sea cores. After radiocarbon-dating the upper sections of the cores and then estimating the rates of sedimentation, Emiliani decided that there had been no fewer than seven complete glacial-interglacial stages during the past 300,000 years and that they had occurred in a time sequence that agreed fairly well with the variations predicted by Milankovitch. In its broad outlines, Emiliani's work also agreed with Ericson's findings, although there were some major differences; certain periods that Ericson's foram analysis had identified as warm were shown by Emiliani's methods to have been cold.

So spirited was the debate over the contradictory findings that in 1965 the National Science Foundation held a special conference to try to settle the dispute. John Imbrie, then a professor of geology at Columbia University, attended the meeting, and later told the story of the controversy and its aftermath in his book, Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery. At the conference, Imbrie pointed out that Ericson and Emiliani had all but ignored the possibility that factors other than temperature may cause variations in foram concentrations. Imbrie decided then and there to develop an analysis technique that took into account such things as water salinity and the amount of food available, as well as water temperatures in winter and summer.

In his book, Imbrie says that he and his assistant²⁰¹

.... developed a multiple-factor method for climatic analysis that took into account abundance variations in all 25 species of planktonic forams. In many respects, their approach was a computerized extension of the technique used by Wolfgang Schott in 1935.

At a meeting held in Paris in 1969, Imbrie announced the results that he had obtained when he studied a Caribbean core with this multiple-factor technique. Whereas Emiliani's research indicated that surface water temperatures in the Caribbean had dropped by almost 11Deg F. during the last ice age, Imbrie's multiple factor method showed a drop of only 3.5Deg F. When the core was analyzed for oxygen-isotope ratios, the zones that Ericson had identified as cold were shown to be warm by both the isotope and multiple-factor methods. Imbrie said:²⁰²

Apparently, some environmental factor other than surface water temperature (but often correlated with it) caused Globorotalia menardii to appear and disappear cyclically in deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

At the Paris meeting Imbrie talked after the lecture with a British geophysicist named Nicholas Shackleton. They²⁰³

realized that their independent work on the problem had led them to the same answer: Changing ratios of oxygen isotopes in marine fossils are caused primarily by fluctuations in the size of ice sheets, not by variations in sea temperatures. Their tentative conclusion was based on the fact that because O-18 is heavier than O-16, water molecules containing O-18 do not evaporate as readily; therefore, water rising from the oceans in the form of vapor and subsequently falling as precipitation contains a smaller proportion of O-18 than do the oceans themselves. If water deficient in O-18 were to be locked up on land in the ice sheets, the proportion of the heavy isotopes in sea water would rise, and this increase would be reflected in the ratios of the oxygen isotopes present in forams and other marine organisms.

This type of enrichment process using differences in the weight of two isotopes has had practical application. In the purification of uranium for atomic bombs one process uses a gas centrifuge to separate molecules of uranium hexafluoride gas containing the lighter, bomb grade U₂₃₅ isotope from the heavier U₂₃₈. I hardly need comment on how effective this process is.

Evidence confirming the Milankovitch radiation curves continued to appear. In 1965²⁰⁴

geochemist Wallace S. Broecker reported some interesting findings that he and some colleagues had made when they dated fossil coral reefs in the Florida Keys and the Bahamas. Since coral can grow only at certain depths, it provides an accurate record of former sea levels. Broecker's studies indicated that the sea had stood much higher 120,000 and 80,000 years ago, presumably during periods of warm climate when vast amounts of water had been released from the melting ice sheets. Noting that present sea levels are also considerably higher than they have been at times of great glaciation, Broecker observed that these three known periods of high sea levels closely correspond to the warm periods calculated by Milankovitch in his radiation curve for lat. 65Deg N.

Soon, other researchers were reporting similar findings elsewhere. Brown University geologist Robley K. Matthews, for example, investigated the terraced coastlines of Barbados and determined that the steplike terraces had been formed by the growth of coral reefs at former sea levels. According to his calculations, the age of one terrace reef was 80,000 years, that of another was 125,000 years -- a near-perfect match with the findings of Wallace Broecker. But Matthews found something quite different, too: a middle terrace that indicated a time of high sea level about 105,000 years ago.

Sadly for believers in the astronomical theory, the Milankovitch curve did not show a radiation maximum in that time period -- not, at least, at lat. 65Deg N., where the effects of axial-tilt variations space the radiation peaks at intervals of some 41,000 years. But when Broecker -- curious about the seeming anomaly of the 105,000-year-old Barbados shoreline -- examined additional Milankovitch curves, he found that those for lower latitudes showed peaks corresponding to all of the dates assigned to the three Barbados terraces. At these latitudes, it seemed, the precession cycle's 22,000 year period -- the time it takes for the earth's axis to wobble in a complete circle in space -- was influential enough to modulate the effects of axial tilt. Reef terraces in Hawaii and New Guinea yielded similar data, indicating that past periods of high sea level could indeed be explained by application of the astronomical theory of ice ages.

A striking photo of the New Guinea terraces appears on page 145 of Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery. These terraces are compelling evidence, as well, for the theory of plate tectonics. The island of New Guinea is being uplifted by the Australian tectonic plate plunging under the island arc of which New Guinea is a part. This uplift is seen in the terraces, and shows how well geological evidence in the fields of ice age research and plate tectonics correlate.

Sunken reefs were found as well. These sometimes contain caves that could only have been formed when the reef structure was above sea level. In "Jamaica a series of drowned and overgrown ridges can be seen at 25, 40 and 60 meters below the present sea level. These drowned reefs were formed during periods of intensive glaciation 8,000, 11,000 and 14,000 years ago, when the sea level was considerably lower than it is today."²⁰⁵ Time-Life's Ice Ages continues with the evidence:

On a different scientific front, researchers were seeking to refine geological chronologies by matching switches in the magnetic polarity of undersea sediments. Tiny iron particles in most rocks become permanently magnetized in alignment with the earth's magnetic poles at the time the rocks are formed, and scientists had recently found that the same process occurs in ocean sediments. The phenomenon of magnetic reversal -- which is probably caused by disturbances in the earth's molten core -- had first been noted in 1906 by Bernard Brunhes, a French geophysicist who discovered that the iron-rich particles in an ancient lava flow had been magnetized so that the north and south magnetic poles were interchanged. During the 1960s, scientists using the recently developed potassium-argon dating technique -- which measures the rate at which a radioactive potassium isotope found in rocks changes to an isotope of argon -- determined that the earth had reversed its magnetic polarity a number of times during the past four million years. The last switch took place about 700,000 years ago. All deposits laid down since this occurrence, which marked the start of the period called the Brunhes Epoch, have "normal" magnetic polarity; strata laid down during the 300,000 years prior to the event show reverse polarity; and before that the orientation was normal.

Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery says on page 148, concerning the geologists who established the magnetic reversal time scale:

Cox and his colleagues proved that the field-reversal theory was correct by showing that each reversal had been a globally synchronous event. They argued that it would be unreasonable to suppose that lava flows all over the world had undergone self-reversal simultaneously. To demonstrate synchroneity, they dated lava flows occurring just above and just below a large number of reversals. This dating effort, carried out by a group of investigators at the University of California.... was based on the potassium-argon method -- a technique that worked particularly well with lava flows. The results not only established the synchroneity of magnetic reversals, but also focused attention on the reversal dates themselves. These dates proved to be the long awaited fixed points around which a firm Pleistocene chronology could be constructed.

Time-Life's Ice Ages continues:

Since deposits from land and sea and from all parts of the world contain the same magnetic records, the identification of the times of the reversals is a means of correlating the geological chronologies estimated by different methods in different regions. Older deposits revealed that a magnetic switch took place about two million years ago. This is a significant date, for it corresponds roughly to the time that geologists assign to the beginning of the Pleistocene epoch and the start of the glacial-interglacial cycle that has continued to the present.

Now, armed with a way to date sea-floor sediment cores that contained evidence of past climate changes, scientists would be able to determine whether previous cold and warm periods coincided with the cycles predicted by Milutin Milankovitch. But such proof would also have to explain the fact, deduced from continuing studies of sediments on land and on the sea floors, that the 22,000- and 41,000-year cycles -- which Milankovitch had believed to be most critical to radical changes in climate -- seemed to be superimposed over longer cycles of 100,000 years, a figure reminiscent of [19th century geologist James] Croll's theory that variations in the earth's orbital eccentricity are paramount in bringing about climate changes. It appeared that the great Pleistocene ice ages had developed slowly in cycles of about 100,000 years; after a number of oscillations, each ice age had come to an abrupt end. Only if Milankovitch's shorter cycles could be related in some way to these 100,000-year periods could his astronomical theory be accepted as an explanation of the cause of the ice ages.

By about 1968, research on loess deposits shed more light on the pulsebeat of climate. It turned out that loess deposits are not the result of just one glaciation. They sometimes contain a record of many glacial cycles. Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery²⁰⁶ describes the investigations of a geologist name George Kukla in 1968 at a brickyard quarry on Red Hill near the city of Brno in Czechoslovakia:

Kukla's interest in loess was an outgrowth of his fascination with Czechoslovakian caves. In many of these caves, thin layers of loess blown in during Pleistocene ice ages have been found to contain the bones of Neanderthal and other Stone Age people. By tracing these layers of loess outside of the caves, and correlating them with the thicker sheets that cover the sides of nearby hills, archaeologists could place the human artifacts in an historical sequence.

The Pleistocene ice sheets that flowed outward from centers in Scandinavia and the Alps never reached the Red Hill region, yet the climate there changed drastically. As early as 1961, George Kukla and his colleague Vojen Lozek had explained why the nonglaciated areas of Czechoslovakia and Austria were ideally located to record the fluctuations of Pleistocene climate. When the ice sheets were large, Central Europe was a polar desert -- dry, treeless, and swept by bitter winds that deposited layers of loess. But when the glaciers were small, Czechoslovakia had a climate even warmer and wetter than today's: broad-leafed trees grew in forests, fertile soils were formed, and Stone Age hunters lived under temperate conditions. Thus, as the Scandinavian and Alpine ice sheets alternately expanded and contracted, the boundary between prairie and forest marched back and forth across the nonglaciated corridor of Central Europe.

Long before they were aware of the magnetic time scale, Czechoslovakian geologists had demonstrated that at least ten repetitions of the soil-loess cycle were recorded in the region of Brno alone. But it had not been possible to determine how long each cycle was. In 1968, Kukla and his colleagues at the Czechoslovakian Academy of Science returned to their brickyards, examined each layer of soil and loess, and found five magnetic reversals. With the time scale now fixed, the average length of each cycle could easily be calculated: the main pulse of late Pleistocene climate was a steady beat of one cycle per 100,000 years.

Investigations carried out over the preceding decade had established that the sedimentary cycle was not really a simple repetition of soil (layer 1) and loess (layer 2) in a symmetrical pattern (1-2-1-2). Instead, it was a four-fold cycle made up of three kinds of soil (1, 2, and 3) and loess (4), forming a sawtoothed, asymmetrical sequence (1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4). The first soil in the sequence formed in a warm, moist climate. The second layer was a black soil, identical to that forming now in the moister parts of the Asiatic steppe, and containing fossils indicative of a climate somewhat cooler and dryer than that of the preceding forest phase. Above the black soil was a layer of brown soil, typical of the more temperate parts of Arctic regions today. This soil, the third layer in the sequence, contained fossils indicative of a climate colder and dryer than the steppe, but not as cold and dry as that which accompanied the deposition of the overlying loess sheet that formed the fourth and final phase of the cycle.

These observations led Kukla to an important conclusion: the cooling phase of the climatic cycle lasted much longer than the warming phase. Moreover, transitions from dusty, polar desert phases to deciduous forest phases were so abrupt that they appeared in the quarry walls as distinct lines. These lines, named "Marklines" by Kukla, were useful in distinguishing one sedimentary cycle from another, and in correlating the cycles between widely separated regions.

In the Soviet Central Asian republic of Tadzhikistan an extensive loess area was excavated. The loess deposits are as much as 200 meters deep in some places. According to a Scientific American article,²⁰⁷

They contain evidence of an apparently continuous sequence of warm-to-cold climatic oscillations that span the past two million years.... One immediately apparent feature of the Tadzhikistan loess exposures is the alternation of thick layers of unaltered loess and distinct "horizons" of soil. The soil horizons were formed when the surface of the loess was altered in periods of relatively moist and warm climate. In many places the soil structure is complex.... The plant pollen and snail species found in the loess.... indicate that it accumulated when the climate was considerably cooler and drier than it is today. Thus the alternating layers of loess and soil are evidence of major climatic oscillations in the region....

Various paleomagnetic events are detectable in the loess of Tadzhikistan, the most important one being the transition some 690,000 years ago between the Matuyama [previous reversed magnetic period].... and the Brunhes period of today. In the Tadzhikistan loess sections currently being studied the total number of buried soil complexes varies, the maximum being 37. In the six sections where the Matuyama-Brunhes boundary has been detected, however, nine of the soil complexes consistently lie above it. The number of soil complexes above the.... boundary.... corresponds fairly closely to the number above the boundary in the loess of central Europe. The number of soil complexes is also in agreement with the record of climatic oscillations preserved in deep-sea sediments.

Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery describes what was happening on another front. As Kukla was doing his research,²⁰⁸

Jan van Donk at Lamont was completing isotopic measurements of forams in Caribbean core V12-122. Along with Broecker, van Donk was attempting to improve the geological time scale. Because the core did not extend to the base of the Brunhes Epoch, the magnetic time scale could not be applied directly. However, the core did contain the U-V boundary -- which Ericson had dated as about 400,000 years old by interpolation in cores long enough to contain the last magnetic reversal. This estimate, falling as it did in the middle of the rather broad range of dates obtained by uranium and thorium methods, became the cornerstone of Broecker and van Donk's chronology, and led them to conclude that the major cycle in the isotopic record was 100,000 years. Moreover, they noted that this primary climatic cycle had an asymmetrical, sawtoothed shape: "Periods of glacial expansion averaging about 100,000 years in length were abruptly terminated by rapid deglaciations." They labeled these episodes of rapid warming, "terminations."

Not until September 1969, when Broecker and Kukla met at the international scientific congress in Paris, did they realize that their separate lines of research had led them to many of the same conclusions: the major ice ages of the Pleistocene were spaced about 100,000 years apart, developed slowly, and terminated abruptly. The marklines in the Czechoslovakian brickyards corresponded to the terminations in the Caribbean cores.

More evidence was found in the Atlantic Ocean. Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery describes what was found:²⁰⁹

While Broecker and Kukla discussed the shape of Pleistocene cycles -- and Imbrie and Shackleton exchanged views on Pleistocene temperatures -- William Ruddiman and Andrew McIntyre were hard at work at the Lamont Observatory, developing a new method for studying the history of the ocean. By selecting cores along a north-south line, and recording the changing distributions of temperature-sensitive species along that line, they were able to trace the shifting course of the Gulf Stream. During interglacial intervals, the current had flowed northeast across the Atlantic from Cape Hatteras towards Great Britain. But during the ice ages, it had taken an easterly course towards Spain. As the ice sheets expanded and contracted, and forests and prairies swept back and forth across Europe and Asia, the Gulf Stream swung back and forth like a gate hinged on Cape Hatteras. By counting the number of "swings" of the current, and keying these into the magnetic time scale, Ruddiman and McIntyre found that there were eight climatic cycles within the Brunhes Epoch. Like the Arctic ice sheets and the Eurasian forests, the ocean's currents marched to a 100,000-year beat.

But up until this time most scientists were not yet convinced of the Milankovitch theory. Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery describes the situation:²¹⁰

By 1969, the magnetic time scale had proved its value as a basis for studying the history of the ice ages, and had made it possible to identify the dominant pulsebeat of climate as the 100,000-year cycle. But the advent of that time scale had so far done little to generate much support for the astronomical theory. On the contrary, it was something of an embarrassment that the 100,000 year cycle had not been predicted by that theory. Not until after the facts were in had Kukla and [others] suggested how the Milankovitch theory could be modified to account for that cycle.

Most scientists, therefore, would only be convinced that the astronomical theory was correct if it could be shown that the small oscillations superimposed on the 100,000-year cycle were those that Milankovitch had predicted. If these shorter climatic cycles turned out to correspond to the 41,000-year cycle of axial tilt, and to the 22,000-year cycle of precession, then the astronomical theory of the ice ages would be confirmed. To demonstrate such a correspondence, however, parallelisms between astronomical and climatic curves must be demonstrated in records sufficiently detailed to exhibit the 22,000-and 41,000-year cycles. Once more, the problem of testing the astronomical theory of the ice ages hinged on increasing the accuracy of the geological time scale.

Time-Life's Ice Ages continues its narrative:

In the spring of 1971, as part of the International Decade of Ocean Exploration, a group of scientists and researchers organized a series of studies known as CLIMAP -- the Climate Long Range Investigation, Mapping and Prediction project. One of their first missions was to analyze sea cores and deduce the climate changes that have taken place during the 700,000-year Brunhes Epoch.

To achieve the goal, investigators needed a core rich in forams that could be analyzed for oxygen isotopes. In December, CLIMAP scientists located such a specimen -- it had been raised from the western Pacific early in the year -- and after confirming that it dated back beyond the magnetic reversal that marked the start of the Brunhes Epoch, they shipped samples of the core to Nicholas Shackleton at Cambridge University.

Shackleton, an expert at analyzing the isotopic contents of marine fossils, studied the core samples and plotted two isotopic curves, one showing the ratio of light and heavy oxygen isotopes in the remains of surface-dwelling forams, and the other plotting isotopic variations in forams that lived on the sea floor. If, as Cesare Emiliani had theorized some years earlier, the proportion of oxygen isotopes in marine fossils is governed by sea temperatures, the second curve should have shown much smaller deviations than the first: No matter what the climate, the temperature of the water at the bottom of the ocean remains close to freezing. In fact, as Shackleton showed the CLIMAP team in mid-1972, the two isotopic curves were nearly identical.

It was just as Shackleton and John Imbrie had surmised in Paris three years before. Imbrie said that both of Shackleton's curves²¹¹

reflected changes in the proportion of light isotopes in the ocean -- not changes in water temperature. And, because sea water was mixed rapidly by currents, any chemical change in one part of the ocean would be reflected everywhere within a thousand years. All along, Emiliani's curve had been a chemical message from the ancient ice sheets. When the glaciers expanded, light atoms of oxygen were extracted from the sea and stored in the ice sheets -- altering the isotopic ratio of oxygen in sea water. When the glaciers melted, the stored isotopes flooded back into the ocean, returning it to its original composition. The effect of local variation in temperature was too small to be detected.

In short, the two curves were not directly indicating changes in climate; instead, they documented a consequence of climate change -- the waxing and waning of glaciers, the comings and goings of the ice ages. Time-Life's Ice Ages continues:

Shackleton's painstaking analysis yielded additional revelations. The core showed a definite sequence of 19 stages of warming and cooling over the past 700,000 years, making it possible for scientists to estimate the duration of each stage. More significantly, there were clear indications that major climate changes had occurred at intervals of some 100,000 years, the same time period suggested by the notion that climate was affected primarily by changes in the eccentricity of the earth's orbit around the sun.

The eccentricity of the earth's orbit is important to climate because²¹²

the intensity of radiation during any particular season is largely controlled by the precession cycle -- the amplitude of which is exactly proportional to eccentricity. When the orbit is unusually elongate, the winters are colder than average and summers are warmer. Therefore, if the temperature during one particular season is critical to the expansion or retraction of ice sheets, it follows that the 100,000-year cycle must be reflected in the climatic record.

Back to Time-Life's Ice Ages:

This 100,000-year cycle was so dominant on Shackleton's curve that he could not determine whether the less-pronounced fluctuations reflected the 41,000-year axial-tilt cycle and the 22,000-year-old precession cycle. Milankovitch's astronomical theory of the ice ages remained unproved. Before long, however, another CLIMAP researcher, James D. Hays of Columbia University, clarified the situation by looking at two sediment cores from the southern Indian Ocean -- one that had been raised in 1967 and one that had been brought up in 1971. While the cores' records did not extend all the way back to the start of the Brunhes Epoch, they went far enough -- 450,000 years -- to provide a sufficient time span for valid analysis. Moreover, the sediments had built up more rapidly than those in Shackleton's Pacific core, providing a thicker accumulation for each cycle -- and thus a more detailed account of the climate changes that had occurred.

When Hays and Shackleton examined the evidence from the Indian Ocean cores, they found clear imprints of the 100,000-year cycle. They also saw unmistakable signs of the shorter cycles of 41,000 and 22,000 years. "We are certain now," they announced, "that changes in the earth's orbital geometry caused the ice ages. The evidence is so strong that other explanations must now be discarded or modified."

Earlier conclusions drawn from radiocarbon dating -- which at first seemed to invalidate the Milankovitch theory -- had already been modified considerably. As geological knowledge expanded, researchers realized that a slight waning of the ice sheets occurred some 25,000 years ago, indicating that climates would have been warm enough to produce such apparent anomalies as a 25,000-year-old peat layer in Illinois.

Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery gives a more detailed account. Researchers were having difficulty in showing conclusively that the 41,000-and 22,000-year cycles were actually represented in some of the sea cores.²¹³

Why was it proving so difficult to find out what the higher frequencies in the climatic curves were? Reviewing this problem in the fall of 1972, Hays thought he knew the reason: the cores that had so far been analyzed spectrally^213a had accumulated too slowly.

He argued that when accumulation rates were as low as one or two millimeters per century -- as they were in most Pacific and Caribbean cores -- the burrowing activities of animals living on the sea floor would blur the record of the higher frequency cycles. To make a valid test of the Milankovitch theory, therefore, it would be necessary to analyze an undisturbed core whose accumulation rate had exceeded two millimeters per century.

Hays and his CLIMAP colleagues were already studying all of the available cores as part of their effort to map the ice-age ocean. After some reflection, Hays decided that they would now search for a particular type of core: one that had a suitably high sedimentation rate -- that was located in the high latitudes of the southern hemisphere -- and that contained shells of both forams and radiolaria. Such a core, Hays reasoned, would provide more information than one located in the northern hemisphere. Variations in the isotopic composition of foram shells would provide a record of ice-sheet fluctuations in the northern hemisphere -- for nearly all of the glacial expansion and contraction that influenced the isotopic composition of the ocean took place there. At the same time, changes in radiolarian populations could be analyzed by the multiple-factor technique and made to reveal what the history of water temperature had been over the coring site. By comparing the two signals -- isotopic and radiolarian -- Hays hoped to be able to answer a question that had first been raised by [19th century geologist] James Croll: do climatic changes in the southern hemisphere coincide with those in the northern hemisphere?

In January 1973, Hays located a core in the Lamont collection that seemed to meet his requirements. Core RC11-120 had been raised from the southern Indian Ocean six years earlier by Geoffrey Dickson aboard the Robert Conrad. After counting the radiolaria and sending samples to Shackleton for isotopic analysis, Hays was gratified to find that the deposition rate was high enough for his purposes (three millimeters per century). When the data were plotted, the answer to Croll's question was immediately apparent: climatic changes in the northern hemisphere were essentially synchronous with those of the southern hemisphere. Although this result alone was important enough to justify his efforts, Hays was disappointed to find that the core only extended back about 300,000 years, to the base of Stage 9 in Emiliani's isotopic scheme. To provide a suitable record for spectral analysis, a core extending back at least 400,000 years would be needed.

When it became clear that the needle Hays was looking for was not to be found in the Lamont haystack, he decided to search elsewhere. In July, he went to Florida State University in Tallahassee, where an extensive collection of Antarctic cores was maintained. There, he continued the search for cores taken near the site of RC11-120. Soon he came upon several cores taken by Norman Watkins aboard the Eltanin in 1971. With the assistance of two graduate students, Hays began to open the Watkins cores. Later he would recall: "The cores were kept in cold storage, and we were all shivering in our parkas. But when core E49-18 was opened, we stopped shivering. I knew right away we had something interesting because the color-banding matched perfectly with the oscillations in Shackleton's oxygen curve for V23-238." Counting down, Hays found that the core extended to Stage 13 -- giving it an age of 450,000 years. He had found his needle at last.

Hays's off-the-cuff stratigraphic analysis turned out to be correct. Core E49-18 did indeed extend back to Stage 13. Unfortunately, the top three isotopic stages had been lost when the core was taken; but with the isotope stratigraphy now available, these could be patched in from the nearby core RC11-120. Together, these two cores contained a detailed and undisturbed record of climate extending back 450,000 years -- and their accumulation rate was high enough to have preserved cycles as short as 10,000 years.

When the radiolarian and isotopic data had been graphed, Hays and Shackleton were elated. For the isotope curves in the Indian Ocean matched the general pattern that Emiliani had established for Stages 1 through 13 in a number of other cores. But now, as Hays had anticipated, frequencies higher than the 100,000-year cycle were clearly visible (Figure 40). Realizing that an opportunity to make a definitive test of the Milankovitch theory was at hand, he asked Imbrie to carry out a spectral analysis.

The first objective was to find out exactly what the frequencies of variation in tilt and precession had been over the past 450,000 years (Figure 41). These frequencies, rather than the frequency of the eccentricity cycle, would be crucial to the coming test -- because they alone were unambiguously predicted by the Milankovitch theory. Imbrie knew that Anandu D. Vernekar, at the University of Maryland, had recently recalculated the astronomical curves, and Imbrie obtained copies of the calculations from him. After processing Vernekar's information statistically, Imbrie found that, as expected, the tilt curve showed a single cycle of 41,000 years. But the spectrum for the precession curve contained not one, but two distinct cycles -- a major precessional cycle of 23,000 years, and a minor cycle of 19,000 years. Concerned that his calculations had been wrong, Imbrie laid his results before Belgian astronomer Andre Berger. After examining the trigonometrical formulas from which the precession calculations were derived, Berger announced that the double cycle that Imbrie had found was not a statistical error: variations in earth-sun distance do in fact occur as 23,000-year and 19,000-year cycles.

Berger's endorsement set the wheels in motion. According to the expanded version of the astronomical theory developed by Mesolella and Kukla, climatic oscillations should occur as four distinct cycles: a 100,000-year cycle corresponding to variations in eccentricity; a 41,000-year cycle corresponding to variations in axial tilt; and 23,000- and 19,000-year cycles corresponding to variations in precession. In the summer of 1974, Imbrie performed the long-awaited test. Spectral analysis indicated that, as expected, the dominant climatic pulse was a 100,000-year cycle, which appeared on both the isotopic and the radiolarian spectra as a large peak. But three other peaks -- smaller but nevertheless distinct -- also appeared on the spectra (Figure 42). On the isotopic spectrum these cycles were 43,000 years, 24,000 years, and 19,000 years long. On the temperature-radiolarian spectrum, they were 42,000 years, 23,000 years, and 20,000 years long.

These results were everything for which Imbrie and his colleagues had hoped. Each of the cycles found in the Indian Ocean cores matched the predicted cycles within five percent. That such a coincidence might occur by chance alone seemed highly unlikely. Before long, Nicklas G. Pisias provided additional evidence in support of the astronomical theory. Using a more powerful spectral method, he found a statistically significant 23,000-year cycle in core V28-238. CLIMAP investigators -- realizing that their isotope records from the Pacific and Indian oceans matched the corresponding parts of isotope records already known from other oceans -- felt justified in concluding that the succession of late Pleistocene ice ages had indeed been triggered by changes in the earth's eccentricity, precession, and tilt.

If the astronomical theory were correct, it should be possible to do more than demonstrate by spectral analysis that the astronomical frequencies appeared in climatic curves. It should also be possible to discover how rapidly the ice sheets had responded to each type of astronomical variation. For example, if the ice sheets responded instantly to a change in axial tilt, then the fluctuations of the 41,000-year climatic cycle should have occurred simultaneously with variations in tilt. But if, as seemed more likely, the ice sheets were slow in responding to a change in radiation caused by changes in tilt, the 41,000-year cycle of climate should follow regularly behind the orbital curve.

Discovering that a statistical technique called filter analysis was available to examine the 41,000-year and 23,000-year frequency components of a climatic curve separately, Imbrie applied this method to the records from the two Indian Ocean cores. The result showed clearly that the 41,000-year climatic cycle did lag behind variation in axial tilt by about 8000 years. And, for at least the major portion of the record under study, the 23,000-year climatic cycle lagged systematically behind variations in precession. Moreover, these lags were regular enough to confirm the inference that variations in tilt and precession set the pace for climatic change.

Convinced now that major climatic changes were caused by astronomical variations, and that the 41,000-year and 23,000-year climatic cycles followed systematically behind variations in tilt and precession, Hays, Imbrie, and Shackleton announced their findings in an article in Science, which appeared on December 10, 1976: "Variations in the Earth's Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages."

A century after Croll published his theory and 50 years after Milankovitch mailed his radiation curves to Koppen and Wegener, two cores from the Indian Ocean confirmed the astronomical theory of the ice ages. At last, geologists had clear evidence that the motions of the earth in its orbit around the sun triggered the succession of late Pleistocene ice ages. Exactly how this triggering mechanism operated, and why the 100,000-year cycle of orbital eccentricity appeared to be so strongly impressed on the climatic record of the last half-million years were still unknown. But, for the moment, it was enough to know that Milutin Milankovitch, traveler through distant worlds and times, had led the way to solving a major part of the ice-age mystery.

In March 1941, looking back on a lifetime devoted to finding the cause of the ice ages, Milankovitch had reflected that:

These causes -- the changes in insolation brought about by the mutual perturbations of the planets -- lie far beyond the vision of the descriptive natural sciences. It is therefore the task of the exact natural sciences to outline this scheme, by means of its laws ruling the universe and by its developed mathematical tools. It is left, however, to the descriptive natural sciences to establish an agreement between this scheme and geological experience.

The spectral, or Fourier analysis used to obtain frequency components from the sea core isotopic measurements, the temperature-radiolarian measurements, and the Milankovitch theory's mathematics, is a mathematical technique taught to all undergraduate physics and electrical engineering students. The technique has been reduced to a rather simple algorithm called the Fast Fourier Transform that can be easily programmed on a small computer. The technique is completely straightforward. When properly applied, it correctly extracts frequency component information from a signal in an objective manner. The technique has no more room for subjective judgement than the simple algorithms for multiplication or long division we all learned in beginning arithmetic. The point is that all a geologist has to do is put his data into a computer programmed to do Fourier analysis, and out comes the frequency components.

The way this applies to the preceding discussion is that once the base measurements were made, Fourier analysis extracted the frequency components. There was no subjective judgement in figuring out the frequency components. The frequencies that the analysis said were in the data were really in the data.

It is amazing that Milankovitch's mathematical theory, first published about 1920, could be so accurately confirmed 50 years later by two independent geological phenomena. This theory was further confirmed in a most unusual way. The Innocent Assassins described how lake varves of two types form -- see Part 14 of this essay. The book then describes what was found in similar ancient lakes:²¹⁴

It might reasonably be expected that such lakes existed in time past too -- having vanished long ago but leaving a fossil lake bed perhaps protected by other, covering sediments. And so it is; the number in fact is legion, and we can take note of only a few examples. Let us start with a look at the lakes that existed during the Ice Age, or more precisely, during the interglacial periods -- times when the climate was as warm as it is now. (We, of course, live in another such interglacial period, the warmest part of which is already long past -- and which, as Angerman River and Lake Valkiajarvi teach us, has lasted for about 10,000 years.)

Fossil lake bottoms of the same type -- but overlain by "cold" sediments laid down during a glacial age -- are known in various parts of the world. In Germany the annual varves of one of these lake bottoms were counted, while at the same time, by analysis of the fossil plant pollen in the sediment, it was shown that the entire history of the interglacial was recorded there. The record starts with a tundra vegetation, shows the immigration of birch and pine, attains a culmination with oak and other broad-leaved hardwoods, and then returns by stages to the tundra. All this, as shown by the Quaternary geologist H. Muller, was enacted within 11,000 years -- a length of time comparable with that of our current interglacial.

Compare this sequence with the sequences seen in the previously described stages of loess formation in Czechoslovakia and Tadzhikistan.

The chronology, of course, is again a floating one. All we can say on this basis is that it dates back some considerable time, because it was followed by a cold climatic oscillation, which in turn gave way to the present interglacial period. Radiometric dating, however, indicates that the interglacial occurred about 120,000 years ago.

Based on still earlier interglacial lake beds in Germany and England, similar studies indicated durations of from 16,000 to well over 20,000 years. Yet all the interglacials appear as relatively short episodes in the long, cold-dominated history of the Ice Age.

With such rapid climatic changes, lakes tend to have had a rather short life, just a few tens of thousands of years -- short, that is, when we start looking at lakes that existed before the Ice Age. We are then well back in the Tertiary period, when climatic change, as a rule, seems to have been slower, or at any rate, not at all extreme. And we meet with chronologies on another scale entirely.... [In many ancient lakes] annual varves prove the lakes to have existed for hundreds of thousands of years.

Still, there are longer sequences. During the Eocene epoch, a lake basin formed in North America, covering large parts of what are now the states of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. The area had previously been traversed by rivers flowing east, but in connection with the rise of the Rocky Mountains a barrier was formed to the east. Thus arose Fossil Lake, and waxed greater and greater, finally to cover an area of about 13,000 square kilometers, with a depth of up to 100 meters. It was thus about half the size of Lake Erie, and twice that of Great Salt Lake.

Judging from the sediments that lie beneath and above those of Fossil lake, it existed for about one-third of the Eocene epoch. The lake-bottom sediments show a fine lamination with alternating light, lime-rich bands and dark ones containing a great deal of organic matter. There is also rich fossil flora and fauna (especially fish and insects). The flora indicate a climate of a subtropical type with two annual rainy seasons, and if the varves are interpreted on that basis (two dark bands to a year), it can be seen that the entire pile of sediments was formed during a time period of 6.5 million years.

According to radiometric dating, the Eocene epoch started about 55 million years ago, and ended about 35 million years ago. Its total duration would then be about 20 million years. One-third of that is 6.7 million years, or very close to the number of years that can be counted in the lake-bottom silts of Fossil Lake. The agreement is almost too good to be true, but there you are. Radiometric dating is supported by the chronology based on annual varves.

The longest consecutive sequence of annual varves that I have happened upon, in a far from systematic search, comes from eastern North America and constitutes about 40 million years. It dates from the later part of the Triassic period and the early part of the Jurassic period, and so has an age of about 220-180 million years before the present. My authority is Paul E. Olsen.

The geography of the earth at the beginning of the Triassic period was very unlike that of the present day. All continents were then collected into a single supercontinent, called Pangaea ("all land"). Then began the birth of the Atlantic: a great rift valley running in a northeast-southwest direction started to form. It has its counterpart in the present-day Rift Valley of East Africa, which also marks the place of a future ocean. The Triassic valley, a string of at least thirteen elongated basins, extended from Nova Scotia to North Carolina. In the basins, very fine-grained lake sediments were deposited (forming the so-called Newark Supergroup) with annual laminae, totaling some 40 million. Parts of the rift valley are now covered by the sea, but the southern part is dry, as are patches further north.

The sediments preserve a record of climatic changes, especially an alternation between dry periods, when the water was low, and times of high precipitation and high waterlines. During the former, annual varves tend to be very thin, drying cracks are formed, and there are numerous footprints of reptiles, in some cases so perfectly preserved that you can count the scales on the soles. At high water, the drying cracks are absent, and the sediments contain a great amount of organic matter, especially fish remains.

As it happens now, these climatic changes are cyclical: they tend to return at regular intervals. Their periodicity is complicated, however, because it is a combination of several cycles differing in length. (Each cycle represents a sequence from low through high to low water.) The most important periods are about 25,000, 44,000, 100,000, and 400,000 years in length, respectively. These are figures that cause the geochronologist to smile in recognition. They have to do with changes in the rotation of the earth around the sun,

(is this sounding familiar?)

known from astronomical calculations, and have turned out to drive the climatic changes during the Ice Age as well -- that is, during the last two million years or so of earth history. Now the analysis of the Newark Supergroup sediments proves that the same factors affected climates as long as 200 million years ago.

And so the geological time scale, originally dated by radiometry, is corroborated by two additional and completely independent methods of study: from analysis of annual varves, and from astronomical observations.

I consider the preceding descriptions -- of the confirmation of the Milankovitch theory and its correlation to ancient lake sediment layers -- to be unequivocal evidence that the ice ages really occurred. The burden of proof that they did not occur, and that the Flood produced all the observed evidence, is on whoever disagrees with this conclusion.

In the following section I present more evidence that ice ages occurred. If the reader is able to show that this is actually evidence for the Flood, I would like to hear about it.

Part 16: More Evidence for the Ice Ages

Another line of evidence confirming that ice ages occurred is contained in sea cores from the North Atlantic. As discussed previously, the oxygen isotope ratios in these cores suggest that the cooling of the oceans lagged behind that of the land by some 3,000 to 5,000 years. This means that at the start of an ice age the North Atlantic was much warmer than at the end. The finding that the Gulf stream wandered north and south during the ice ages is consistent with this. Evidence of this wandering is further described in Time-Life's Ice Ages. Two geophysicists, William F. Ruddiman and Andrew McIntyre, focused on two periods -- the start of the last ice age, some 115,000 years ago, and a particularly frigid episode about 40,000 years later.²¹⁵

A particular kind of sediment Ruddiman and McIntyre found in the cores documents the warmth of the North Atlantic at the onset of glaciation. These deposits consist of sand and clay particles larger than those carried to sea by ocean currents or wind. The debris was scraped from the surface of the earth by the ice sheets, carried to sea by icebergs that broke free from the glaciers' edges, and then released when the icebergs succumbed to warm water. The location of the deposits, called ice-rafted detritus, shows that when the ice sheets were in the early stages of growth, the icebergs that calved from them melted near the coasts of Greenland and Newfoundland. In later periods, icebergs drifted as much as 1,000 miles farther south, to the latitude of Spain, before meeting water warm enough to melt them....

Oxygen-isotope profiles and the fossil content of ocean cores indicate that when the last two ice ages terminated -- the earlier one some 127,000 years ago and the most recent about 10,000 years ago -- the oceans were still remarkably cold. Just as they had lagged behind the continents in growing cool, they took longer to warm as the ice sheets began to melt....

Sediments deposited while the ice sheets were in retreat disclose that the ocean surface was almost barren of microscopic plankton. Ruddiman and McIntyre think this may have been due to a deluge of fresh water -- the runoff from ice sheets melting rapidly in the summer. Floating on the heavier salt water, the layer of fresh water changed the salinity of the Atlantic's surface so much that plankton were obliterated; they did not return until the meltwater had dispersed, several thousand years later.

"Aha!," a reader might say; "A deluge of fresh water! This is evidence for the Flood." Not at all. This deluge of fresh water wiped out plankton only in the North Atlantic -- they obviously survived elsewhere. But if a deluge of fresh water had inundated the entire earth, where would the plankton have survived? A little thinking on all the other points I've covered will show that this deluge of fresh water is no evidence of The Deluge, but is entirely consistent with the requirement that a huge amount of melt water be released into the oceans at the close of an ice age.

The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets contain a wealth of information about the ice ages, which has been obtained by drilling cores. Time-Life's Ice Ages explains:²¹⁶

Although sediments deposited on the sea floor contain some hints about the composition, temperature, and turbulence of the earth's atmosphere during ice ages and interglacials, cores drilled from the great ice sheets that survive in Greenland and Antarctica provide much more detailed information. These sheets -- composites of annual layers of snow compressed and transformed into ice -- provide an unbroken record stretching hundreds of thousands of years into the past. The age of the oldest of this ice has not yet been determined, but scientists think that just above the bedrock of East Antarctica lies ice that was formed 500,000 years ago.

Perhaps most important to understanding the mechanics of ice ages are the ice sheets' component water molecules, which contain the oxygen isotopes that indicate past changes in temperature. But the ice sheets also contain airborne particles -- dust, volcanic debris, sea salts, and various isotopes formed in the atmosphere -- that fell on the snow when it was fresh. In addition, the layers of ice are riddled with tiny air cavities -- remnants of the atmosphere just as it was when the snow fell. These ancient air samples and the other constituents of the ice sheets (with the exception of radioisotopes, which decay with time) remain perfectly preserved as long as they are frozen.

Much as the isotope content of a layer of sea-floor sediment does, the ratio of the heavy O-18 isotope to the lighter O-16 in a layer of ice indicates the temperature at the time it was formed, but with a very important difference. A large proportion of O-18 in sea sediment indicates a colder climate, but just the opposite is true in ice. Since more heat energy is required to vaporize water molecules containing the heavier isotope, a higher proportion of O-18 in an ice layer means that the air temperature was relatively high when that water evaporated from the ocean and later fell as snow. Thus, snow that falls in summer has a higher O-18 content than winter snow. On a much longer time scale, the snows of an interglacial are richer in this isotope than snows deposited during glaciation.

Ice cores have one very significant advantage for scientists trying to establish and refine the chronology of climatic shifts. The top inch or so of sea-floor sediment is frequently stirred by bottom-dwelling creatures; consequently, the layers cannot be dated with precision. But ice layers are not likely to have ever been disturbed by living creatures. Because the concentration of the O-18 isotope generally peaks in summer, declines in winter, then peaks again, the ice between two peaks represents a single year's snowfall. Painstaking measurements of O-18 levels -- in areas where the temperatures are so low all year that the ice layers have not been muddled by melting -- have identified the ice formed each year as far back as 1000 B.C.^216a

Of all the cores removed from the Greenland Ice Sheet, the one containing the most ancient ice is the Camp Century core.... The deepest, and hence oldest, layer.... once lay 4,600 feet below the surface of the ice sheet and was probably laid down some 125,000 years ago, before the advent of the Ice Age.... analysis of the O-18 content of the bottom 1,000 feet of the core yielded details of the climatic history of Greenland -- and, by inference, of the earth -- from the end of the last interglacial to the end of the subsequent Ice Age, some 10,000 years ago. The temperature trends signaled by the O-18 levels parallel the changes indicated by sea-floor cores from the Indian Ocean and the North Atlantic.

Here is more recent information on ice cores from National Geographic.²¹⁷

In 1970 Soviet scientists began drilling at Vostok Station, high on the inland ice cap in East Antarctica.... since 1980 the Vostok ice drillers have bored through more than 2,080 meters of the 3,700 meters (12,140 feet) of the ice under the station.

"The Vostok core is the first to cover, completely and unambiguously, the entire last 150,000 years of earth's ice-age cycle," French glaciologist Claude Lorius reported in 1985, after working with Soviet scientists on the ice core. "It clearly goes back through earth's previous interglacial warm period, called the Eem or Sangamon, and well into the ice age before that.

"That previous interglacial was similar but markedly warmer than our present warm spell, the Holocene,".... "The beginning of the previous warming was as sharp and extensive as was the opening of the Holocene, between about 10,000 and 8,000 years ago."

The Vostok core, somewhat surprisingly to Professor Lorius, does not hold evidence of more volcanic activity on earth during the past glacial age and previous interglacial than in modern times. But the volcanic dust seen there, as in cores taken from the Greenland ice cap, has given a precise and dramatic record of many great volcanic events of the distant past.

In 1980-1981 Danish, Swiss, and American scientists penetrated more than a mile deep at a point named Dye 3 in southern Greenland. From winter-summer variations in the preserved frozen core, the drillers can read year-by-year weather for the past 11,000 years.

The massive eruptions of the volcanoes Laki in Iceland in 1783 and Tambora in the East Indies in 1815 are clearly identifiable near the top of the Dye 3 core. The latter produced the notorious "Year Without a Summer" in New England in 1816, when crops froze and snow fell in July and August.

Sequences of heavy summer melting from A.D. 950 to roughly 1200 confirm the world's warmth during the time that Vikings settled and thrived in Greenland, before the cold of the Little Ice Age froze them out. (From about 1200 until the mid-1800s, world climate was colder than at any time since the last deglaciation.)

Even deeper in the core, volcanic acids show that an eruption must have darkened skies over Rome the year Julius Caesar was killed in 44 B.C. A blast in 1390 B.C. may have been one of several that spelled the end of the volcanic isle of Thera in the Aegean.

On back through time, the Dye 3 core gives absolute dates to unwritten events:

• 4401 B.C. Explosion of Mount Mazama in Oregon created Crater Lake.
• 7911 to 7090 B.C. Seven different great eruptions occurred somewhere on earth.
• From 25,000 down to 10,000 years ago, high amounts of wind-blown continental dust marked the last glacial maximum in the Northern Hemisphere, before the start of global warming in the Holocene.

While some of these dates have been updated since this article was written,^{218, 219} they have not changed much. Time-Life's Ice Ages says about ice cores:²²⁰

The Camp Century core shows that the climate of Greenland became sharply colder, and the Ice Age began there, about 120,000 years ago. The onset of the cold was soon followed by heavy annual snowfalls for the next 5,000 years. ([One geologist, Willi] Dansgaard thinks the heavy snowfalls account for the rapid build-up of the ice sheets and the consequent drop in sea level.) But these Ice Age snow samples contain almost as much O-18 as snow that had fallen thousands of years before, when the climate was milder. Thus the Camp Century core confirms that the North Atlantic near Greenland did indeed remain warm, as Ruddiman and McIntyre concluded from their research, long after the ice sheets had begun to grow.

The Camp Century core also records another drop in temperature and an ice advance some 75,000 years ago. This timing coincides with that calculated by Ruddiman and McIntyre from North Atlantic sediments -- and with the period when, according to the astronomical theory, the Northern Hemisphere was having the cool summers needed for ice-sheet growth.

Particles of clay, volcanic dust and sea salts embedded in ice cores indicated that during the last glaciation, especially toward its end, the atmosphere was turbulent and dirty. In the Camp Century core, Ice Age layers contain 12 times as many such particles as do layers formed during the interglacial that followed....

Besides being stormy and dirty, the Ice Age seems to have had scant snowfall. Around 15,000 years ago, the annual accumulation at Camp Century, as shown by chemical analyses, was only one third to one half the average winter's snowfall there now. This evidence supports the picture developed by Ruddiman and McIntyre after their study of sea-floor sediments -- of a cold, ice-covered ocean from which little moisture evaporated.

Geologists Chester C. Langway and Michael M. Herron have turned up evidence that when the Ice Age finally ended, the climatic transition came about very rapidly -- within a few decades or even less. Segments of two cores, one from Camp Century and the other from the Dye 3 research station in southern Greenland, reveal that the concentration of windborne sea salts fell by about 75 per cent in no more than a century. Apparently, the harsh winds that characterized the Ice Age for thousands of years had died away in the moderating climate of the interglacial.

Another fascinating change that accompanied the end of the Ice Age involved the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.... it is a key component in the so-called greenhouse effect.... Analysis of air bubbles trapped in three ice cores -- from Camp Century in Greenland and from Antarctica's Byrd Station and Dome C -- has provided a chronology of atmospheric changes from 40,000 years ago up to the present. During the last major glaciation, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fell drastically, by about 25 per cent, reaching its lowest level during the last 2,000 years or so of the Ice Age. Why this occurred is not known for certain, but the decline may reflect a reduction of plant life on the icy continents and in the surface waters of the ocean. Then at about the time the interglacial began, carbon dioxide became more abundant.... During the centuries-long transition from glacial to interglacial climate, average global temperatures rose about 4Deg F....

The average global temperature continued to rise for thousands of years.... Temperatures peaked around 4000 B.C. and remained stable for about 2,000 years. During this period -- called the climatic optimum, for its benign conditions -- many regions were about 5Deg F. warmer on the average than they are today, according to calculations based on pollen distribution and the oxygen-isotope ratios in the Greenland ice cores.... Civilizations were flourishing in regions of the world that today are deserts.... After 2000 B.C., temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere began a slow decline. Drought struck in tropical and subtropical areas.... In Egypt, winds piled sand and soil in the dried-up beds of Saharan streams and lakes that for millennia had supplied farmers with water, and the Nile's annual flood level dropped sharply.... While the lower latitudes were experiencing drought, Europe north of the Alps became increasingly cold and wet. Glaciers advanced in mountainous regions, and forests were transformed into bogs. In North America, the Paleo-Eskimos abandoned their high-latitude Arctic hunting grounds and migrated south to Labrador and the Hudson Bay, while glaciers formed in the Rockies south of what is now the Canadian border, for the first time since the Ice Age. Around 450 B.C., temperatures began to rise again, reaching a peak around 1000 A.D. Ever since that time, although they have oscillated up and down, the overall trend has been toward cooler temperatures. The most extreme downward turn occurred around 1500, when a cold period known as the Little Ice Age set in. This neoglacial event, as climatologists call it, persisted into the 19th century.

Perhaps the most significant finding in decades has come to light in ice core drillings completed in the summers of 1992 and 1993. At an ice divide called Summit, in central Greenland, European and American teams of scientists drilled two holes in two-mile-thick ice. There is little flow of ice at such a divide, so the accumulation of snow records climate changes much further back than where the flow rate is higher. The drill sites were calculated to yield ice layers at least 200,000 years old, but have actually yielded 250,000 year old ice.

The European Greenland Ice-core Project (GRIP) hit bedrock July 12, 1992, while the United States Greenland Ice-Sheet Project II (GISP2) hit bedrock July 1, 1993. Workers have directly counted annual layers marked by summer dust and other markers as far back as about 40,000 years ago. During the coldest parts of the last glacial period, snow accumulation was low enough that annual layers are indistinguishable further back than 40,000 years, but they reappear in the Eemian interglacial period which lasted from about 135,000 to 115,000 years ago.

The climate record of the last 40,000 years brought to light by these ice cores is extremely detailed. Preliminary results mostly confirm what has been garnered from earlier ice cores, although anomalies exist. The most surprising results were summarized in a recent Nature article, which said:²²¹

At a time when superlatives are routinely used to describe the mundane, it is difficult to express the importance of two papers in this issue which present results from the new GRIP ice core in central Greenland. The GRIP Project Members and Dansgaard et al. (pages 203 and 218, respectively) give us our first detailed look at the last interglacial period, and it is not what we expected.

As an uncertain climate lies before us, we have been looking warily over our shoulders to see how the climate system has behaved in the past. For 10,000 years, the Earth has enjoyed an interglacial period, a time of steady and dependable climate. Further back, during the last ice age (which lasted about 100,000 years), and in the transitional period, it is now accepted that the climate 'flickered' rapidly. But we could take comfort from the thought that dramatic changes occurring in decades or even years were probably triggered in some way by the massive glaciers or huge extensions of sea ice present at the time.

Now the Greenland Ice-core Project (GRIP) team have removed this sense of security. Using a variety of evidence drawn from the ice core -- stable isotope ratios, chemical and physical properties, and greenhouse gas concentrations in trapped air bubbles -- they demonstrate that very rapid shifts in temperature and greenhouse gases are also possible in interglacial periods.

Our view of climate on the timescale of glacial cycles is shaped by the tools we use to construct that view. Up to now, our ideas of interglacial periods have come from three sources. First and foremost is our knowledge of our own Holocene interglacial, drawn from sources such as tree rings, historical records and pollen samples, to name but a few. Then there are the ocean sediment cores which document numerous interglacials over the past million years. Third, there is the Vostok ice core, until now the only deep core to have yielded easily datable ice from the previous interglacial period (known as the Eemian) which stretched from about 135,000 to 115,000 years ago.

In ocean cores the stirring of the sediment surface by benthic life homogenizes the oceanic record so that the minimum resolution is not better than a thousand years. In the Vostok core, the low accumulation rate of snow and thinning of the annual layers with depth means that climate changes of a century or less are difficult to resolve; flickers may have occurred that cannot now be detected. (There is a compensation: the Vostok core should take the record back to about 500,000 years ago, twice the age of the oldest Greenland ice, and covering several glacial to interglacial cycles.)

The new Greenland ice cores GRIP and GISP2, in contrast, were drilled in regions of high snow accumulation near the centre of the Greenland ice sheet. With these cores, designed to concentrate on the past 200,000 years, we can see climate changes on the timescale of decades or less, even though they occurred a hundred thousand years ago. The indicators of climate change range from local (for example, temperature, deduced from its effect on stable isotope ratios), to regional and hemispheric (such as airborne dust concentrations and chemical composition), to global (greenhouse gas compositions).

The Eemian period falls in the interval from 2,780 to 2,870 m down, well above bedrock. Blurred in the Vostok core, it now comes into focus and it is strikingly different from the Holocene [most recent geological period]. Holocene climate appears to have one, and only one, state, whereas the new results show that the Eemian had three. The middle state matches our own Holocene climate. A significantly colder state and a significantly warmer state existed in the Eemian. On average, temperatures were 2 DegC higher than at present. It apparently took very little time, perhaps less than a decade or two, to shift between the states, and the states appear to be stable sometimes for thousands of years and sometimes for only decades. We don't know which is the norm for interglacial periods: the stable, one-state Holocene or the multiple-state, rapidly changing Eemian. We do know that answering this question will be a priority for global change research.

When evidence from the sister core of GRIP, the GISP2 core, showed earlier this year that aspects of the climate system could shift from glacial conditions to interglacial conditions in a few years, there was always the solace that such changes were characteristic of glacial times, and not really analogues of the future. In our interglacial age, we do not expect the polar front in the North Atlantic rapidly to dip down to Spain with sea ice expanding in behind it, plunging adjacent land, particularly Northern Europe, into glacial-like cold. We do not have massive lakes formed by retreating glaciers, lakes which may catastrophically drain into the North Atlantic, disrupting deep water formation and the transfer of heat northward.

The new ice core results bring rapid climate change to our doorstep: changes of up to 10 DegC in a couple of decades, or perhaps in less than a decade, appear possible in interglacials. Given our ongoing 'global experiment' of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations via fossil fuel burning, is the Eemian warm state a glimpse at our future climate? Whatever the answer to that question, the speed with which the climate system can shift states gives us pause. Adaptation -- the peaceful shifting of food growing areas, coastal populations and so on -- seemed possible, if difficult, when abrupt change meant a few degrees in a century. It now seems a much more formidable task, requiring global cooperation with swift recognition and response.

How unusual is the climate stability of the Holocene? Dansgaard and colleagues investigated one of the possible tracers, the oxygen isotope ratio (a proxy for atmospheric temperature) along the whole of the GRIP core (see figure). Throughout the last glacial period, the Eemian interglacial and the glacial before that, they found rapid oscillations in the isotope ratio. Because of the way that ice thins with age, they could look in detail at the Holocene, and found that the swings have been much smaller, by a factor of 3 to 4, than those earlier flickers. At no time during the Holocene has Eemian-like climate change occurred.

We humans have built a remarkable socio-economic system during perhaps the only time when it could be built, when climate was stable enough to let us develop the agricultural infrastructure required to maintain an advanced society. We don't know why we have been so blessed, but even without human intervention, the climate system is capable of stunning variability. If the Earth had an operating manual, the chapter on climate might begin with a caveat that the system has been adjusted at the factory for optimum comfort, so don't touch the dials.

An accompanying technical article²²² contained a graph plotting the oxygen isotope ratio derived from the GRIP core. For all but the last 12,000 years the ratio is quite unstable, but for the latter period makes a sudden large jump, gradually approaches a final value, and then just sits there. The article mentions that the timescale back to 14,500 years ago was derived by direct count of annual layers, and for earlier periods was derived from a mathematical ice-flow model. It said that, apart from a minor deviation, "the record indicates a remarkably stable climate during the past 10 kyr."

Other articles appearing in Nature^{223, 224, 225, 226} and Science^{227, 228, 229, 230} during the past few years contain fascinating discussions of technical features of ice core data. This is a very active area of research and there are many more articles, too numerous to mention, appearing in the literature. The articles listed here should give an entry point for further research.

Peat bogs provide more evidence of ice ages. Time-Life's Ice Ages says:²³¹

Additional evidence of the abruptness of the transition from an interglacial to a glacial climate has been found in a peat bog in Alsace, in northeastern France. The bog has remained undisturbed for 140,000 years -- a span that includes all of the last interglacial, the Ice Age and the present interglacial. Genevieve Woillard, a Belgian botanist, examined the pollen in the layers of peat formed some 115,000 years ago, in the final three centuries of the last interglacial. In the oldest layers she found the pollen of trees that flourish in a temperate climate, with firs, oaks, alders and hornbeams especially plentiful. During the next 125 years or so, spruces, which are cooler-climate trees, gradually gained ground over the temperate-forest species and became dominant. In the century that followed, the climate cooled further, the temperate-forest trees became less numerous, and pines began to grow alongside the spruces.

Then, in a very short period -- perhaps no more than 20 years -- there was a radical change in the vegetation. The temperate-climate trees disappeared altogether, along with companion plants such as mistletoe, which requires summer temperatures higher than 60Deg F. to survive, and English ivy, which cannot endure winters during which the temperature stays below 30Deg F. for long periods of time. At the end of the rapid transition, the forest was very much like that of modern-day northern Scandinavia, which lies some 1,400 miles north of the site of the Alsatian bog.

England contains a surprising record of ice age phenomena. The rise and fall of sea level with the glacial cycles is recorded in extensive deposits along the coast of England, especially in alluvial deposits along the River Thames.²³² Remains of arctic animals living at the edge of glacial advances shows that ice ages occurred. Polar bear remains were found in upper Thames River deposits,²³³ along with reindeer, woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and saiga antelope. These remains are often found interbedded with warmer climate species, showing an extreme alternation in climate.

Accompanying the stages of cold climate that caused the falls of sea-level described above were repeated episodes of intensive gelifluction [slow mud flows that subsequently froze].... and some loess deposition. In the estuary [of the Thames] these periglacial deposits commonly rest upon or are interbedded with interglacial terrace deposits and can sometimes be traced down into the buried channels [formed when the Thames cut deep into its channel during low sea-level stages and then buried under alluvium when sea-level rose again].

[At a site 50 kilometers from London] commercial excavations in the early 1980s for chalk .... exposed an overburden of stratified Pleistocene deposits containing a unique sequence of mammalian faunas. The youngest of these, situated only just below ground level, contained remains of hippopotamus, narrow nosed rhinoceros...., elephant, giant deer, bison and water vole. This is a typical Ipswichian [the name of an interglacial period in England] assemblage.... and is referred to that interglacial. Underlying this was a thick deposit of Coombe Rock [gelifluction deposits], interpreted as evidence of periglacial and thus of very cold conditions; and underneath this yet another fossiliferous horizon with mammalian, insect, molluscan, and plant remains, indicating an earlier temperate episode.

During the periods of lowered sea levels, a broad tract of land joined eastern England to Europe, upon which lived a rich community of animals. The area is now covered by the English Channel and the North Sea. Animal remains are pulled up from time to time as a result of fishing and diving operations.

Mammals whose remains have been trawled from the North Sea include woolly mammoth...., woolly rhinoceros, horse, red deer, giant ox, bison, reindeer and giant deer. Bear, spotted hyaena, wolf and beaver are represented by single specimens. The fishing area now known as the Dogger Bank.... has been an especially fruitful source of such finds.

The recovery by trawlers of blocks of Holocene peat, one of them containing an approximately 9000-year-old Mesolithic antler harpoon head.... shows that there was a time lag after the melting of the Devensian ice, when the exposed land was colonized by man, before the sea returned once more to its present level. By this time tundra had been replaced by oak forest. Soon afterwards the Dogger Bank became an island and finally disappeared beneath the sea.²³⁴

Another evidence of extremely cold climate at the former margins of ice sheets is

that wide variety of phenomena known as patterned ground. Frost heaving and the annual contraction and expansion of the ground may lead to the most remarkable sorting of rock fragments; often arranged on the surface as polygonal structures. When viewed in section these polygons are seen as a series of vertical wedges, sometimes ice filled.... Collapsed ice wedges are a common feature in many former periglacial areas.²³⁵

Several series of ice ages have also occurred in the remote past, as far back as the Paleozoic and Precambrian eras. Time-Life's Ice Ages describes how research in the theory of plate tectonics led to the discovery of one series:²³⁶

The theory of continental drift led to one of the most remarkable discoveries in ice age studies. During the 1960s, scientists analyzed the magnetic orientation of rocks from many parts of the world and concluded that North Africa had been located over the South Pole during the Ordovician period, about 450 million years ago. If they were correct, there should be traces of ancient glaciation in the Sahara. At about the same time, French petroleum geologists working in southern Algeria stumbled on a series of giant grooves that appeared to have been cut into the underlying sandstone by glaciers. The geologists alerted the scientific world and assembled an international team to examine the evidence. The team saw unmistakable signs of an ice age: scars created by the friction of pebbles incorporated into the base of glaciers; erratic rocks that had been transported from sources hundreds of miles distant; and formations of sand typical of glacial outwash streams.

One of the scientists, Rhodes Fairbridge of Columbia University, described the effect on the team as "electrifying," and went on to observe: "Here we were privileged, beneath the hot Sahara sun, to see the detailed record of a giant glaciation, precisely dated, and just where it had been predicted to be by the evidence of the paleomagnetists. Our French hosts were not unprepared for the occasion. There was a refrigerator on our supply vehicle, and out of it miraculously emerged a bottle of the finest champagne, ice cold. And so we drank to the health of the discoverers, to the visitors, and to the Ordovician ice age!"

A series of photographs is also presented, showing some of the typical ice age features. A particularly striking one shows the remains of an esker, snaking about 30 miles across the Sahara. Lest the reader think that this is evidence similar to what is being misinterpreted in the most recently glaciated areas of the world, note that these features are not recent. They are not lying on top of everything else in the region, as are the features in North America. Instead, these features have been eroded out of several thousand feet of hardened sediment in which they were buried for hundreds of millions of years. The esker is not composed of sand and gravel, as are eskers in New England -- it is composed of sand and gravel that have turned to stone.

Could the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps have formed after the Flood, 4400 years ago? Evidence from fossil animals in Arctic Ocean sediments show "that at no time over the past several million years has the Arctic Ocean been ice-free."²³⁷ A large part of the Antarctic continent is below sea-level, with the rock floor of some ice-buried valleys more than 8200 feet below sea level.²³⁸ The Antarctic ice is up to 15,000 feet thick; Greenland ice up to 12,500. How could such a thickness of ice build up in less than 4400 years? How could the ice contain layers that correspond to a year by year accumulation going back hundreds of thousands of years and show detailed evidence of climatic change? How could the build-up be done in such a manner as to depress the Antarctic continent by an average of two thousand feet in such a short time? Remember that, although the earth's crust is ductile, it will flow only over a long time scale, like window glass. Scandinavia and the Hudson Bay area are still rising at significant rates after 7000 to 10,000 years of being ice free. On the other hand, Antarctica is neither rising nor sinking, showing that it is in equilibrium with the rest of the earth's crust. This is consistent with its very low rate of accumulation of snow, which would not have been all that different during an ice age, so that there would not have been much change in ice volume after the ice age had ended and therefore little change in the load on the land. But Canada and Greenland, which are in relatively more temperate regions, would have had a much larger change in total ice volume, and so the load on the land would change a great deal.

Much evidence, some of which I've already presented, shows that continents respond to loading over periods measured in tens of thousands of years. A good account of crustal response to loading by ice is given in Scientific American, February, 1984, "The Earth's Orbit and the Ice Ages." If all the ice in Antarctica formed in less than the time since the Flood, how could the continent come to be in equilibrium? There is no way it could get into equilibrium after 4400 years, after having accumulated up to 3 miles of ice. If you claim the ice caps were around before the Flood, how could they have survived it, given that ice floats? Surely a floating, continent sized ice sheet would break up and the pieces would float all over. Then there should be evidence in the form of ice-rafted erratics and sediment all over the world that this took place. Yet such evidence is not found. And what does this mean for the idea the earth was under hothouse conditions?

Recent findings show that glaciation changed more or less simultaneously all over the world. The caption for an illustration in a recent Scientific American article says:²³⁹

Timing of glacial retreat was identical in the Northern Hemisphere and in the Southern Hemisphere. The graphs give the extent of mountain glaciers and ice sheets from the source regions.... and show that in every case dramatic retreat began 14,000 years ago.

The main article uses the term "seasonality" for the astronomical cycles I've already described, and says that

glaciers grew and retreated in the Southern Hemisphere as well. Studies by geologists.... show that during the last ice age, climate changed at the same times and by comparable amounts in the middle latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere -- even though seasonality there varies on a different schedule.

They.... have found, for example, that during the last ice age the earth's mountain glaciers also expanded. The evidence -- from the heaps of debris plowed up by the glaciers, known as moraines -- is as clear in the tropics (New Guinea, Hawaii, Colombia and East Africa) and the southern temperate latitudes (Chile, Tasmania and New Zealand) as it is in northern temperate latitudes (the Cascades, the Alps and the Himalayas). On all the mountains studied so far, regardless of geographic setting or precipitation rate, the snow line descended by about one kilometer, corresponding to a drop in temperature of about five degrees Celsius. [A graph appears on page 51 of the article.]

Where organic material was trapped in the moraines, radiocarbon dating shows that the glaciers advanced and retreated on the same schedule. They fluctuated near their maximum extent between about 19,500 and 14,000 years ago, about the same time as the glaciation of northern continents peaked. Then, just as the northern ice sheet began to shrink, the mountain glaciers underwent a dramatic retreat that sharply reduced their size by about 12,500 years ago.... Isotopic studies of the Greenland and Antarctic [ice] cores show that during the last glaciation both poles cooled -- to as much as 10 degrees C below today's temperatures -- and warmed in step.

This article proposes that a major shift in ocean circulation, caused by the astronomical cycle and interacting with atmospheric circulation, was a major factor in triggering the ice ages. The evidence marshalled in support of this proposition is relevant to our present discussion. Like the north-south swings of the Gulf Stream that were mentioned earlier, there was a jump in the circulation pattern of the North Atlantic. Concerning this circulation the article says:²⁴⁰

The first indications that the ice-age ocean did operate differently came from fossil evidence: changes in the populations of microorganisms that inhabit water masses of specific temperature and salinity.... More recently a geochemical technique pioneered by Edward A. Boyle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provided dramatic and direct confirmation that the ocean circulated differently during the last glaciation.... Boyle discovered that.... foraminifera in the present-day ocean.... incorporate cadmium in a constant proportion to its abundance in seawater. He then measured cadmium in sediment cores. The result was exciting: a key signature of the Atlantic's present-day circulation was missing during glacial time, until about 14,000 years ago....

Every winter at about the latitude of Iceland, water of relatively high salinity, flowing northward at intermediate depths...., rises as winds sweep the surface waters aside. Exposed to the chill air, the water releases heat, cooling from 10 degrees C to two degrees. The water's high salinity together with the drop in temperature makes it unusually dense, and it sinks again, this time all the way to the ocean bottom.

The formation of the North Atlantic deep water, as it is called, gives off a staggering amount of heat. Equal to about 30 percent of the yearly direct input of solar energy to the surface of the northern Atlantic, this bonus of heat accounts for the surprisingly mild winters of Western Europe. (The warming is often mistakenly ascribed to the Gulf Stream, which ends well to the south.) The magnitude of the vertical circulation is also immense, averaging 20 times the combined flow of all the world's rivers. Indeed, much of the deep water in the world's oceans ultimately originates here. From its source the water floods the deep Atlantic, curves around the southern tip of Africa and joins the deep current that circles Antarctica and distributes deep water to the other oceans....

[Several microfossil studies showed that the] Atlantic "conveyor," which releases vast quantities of heat to the North Atlantic and sends immense volumes of water into the abyss, was shut down until the last ice age ended 14,000 years ago. In the absence of this key component, worldwide ocean circulation must have looked very different.

The sea and land evidence together points to a simultaneous change in the operation of the ocean and the atmosphere 14,000 years ago. The pattern of ocean circulation shifted dramatically; glaciers in both hemispheres began retreating, signaling global warming; and the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere started to rise to interglacial levels. We think these events indicate a major reorganization of the joint ocean-atmosphere system -- a jump from a glacial mode of operation to an interglacial mode. Indeed, we believe that abrupt jumps among several ocean-atmosphere modes may underlie glacial cycles in general.

We propose that changes in seasonality are the ultimate causes of these mode shifts. Although we can suggest no simple mechanisms linking seasonality, the ocean-atmosphere system and global climate, we can offer some insights....

.... a gradual shift in atmospheric circulation, by changing salinity in regions such as the North Atlantic, could dramatically alter the global circulation pattern. Indeed, the Atlantic conveyor appears to be the most vulnerable part of the [circulation] system, which may explain why it is Northern Hemisphere seasonality that drives global climatic changes.

A climatic event called the Younger Dryas, which took place several thousand years after the glaciers started to retreat, provides a smoking gun for this part of our case. It vividly illustrates the link between the transport of fresh water -- in this case liquid water and not vapor -- and ocean circulation. About 11,000 years ago the retreat of the glaciers was well under way, and temperatures had risen to their interglacial levels. Suddenly, in as little as 100 years, northern Europe and northeastern North America reverted to glacial conditions. Pollen records show that the forests that had colonized postglacial Europe gave way to arctic grasses and shrubs (including the Dryas flower, for which the period is named), and the Greenland ice core records a local cooling of six degrees C. About 1,000 years later, this cold spell ended abruptly -- in as little as 20 years, recent work by Willi Dansgaard of the University of Copenhagen suggests.

Boyle's cadmium measurements, together with the record of surface-water foraminifera in the North Atlantic, tell what happened. Both indicators return to their glacial state at the onset of the Younger Dryas. The conveyor belt had shut down once again. Deep-water formation had stopped, and so the warm intermediate-depth water that supplies Europe's bonus of heat could no longer flow northward. The chill over the region was dispelled only when the conveyor began running again 1,000 years later.

A massive influx of fresh water from the melting North American ice sheet seems to have killed the conveyor and precipitated the Younger Dryas. The ice sheet started shrinking 14,000 years ago; for the 7,000 years it took to melt away, it must have released fresh water at about the same rate as today's Amazon River. At first nearly all the meltwater from the southern edge of the massive ice sheet flowed down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. About 11,000 years ago, however a major diversion sent meltwater in torrents down the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic.

A vast clearinghouse for meltwater, known as Lake Agassiz, had formed in the bedrock depression at the edge of the retreating ice sheet in what is now southern Manitoba. Until 11,000 years ago the lake, larger than any of the existing Great Lakes, had overflowed a bedrock lip to the south and drained down the Mississippi. Then the retreat of the ice opened a channel to the east. The water level in lake Agassiz dropped by 40 meters as water flowed across the region of the Great Lakes and down the St. Lawrence.

Foraminifera from surface waters of the Gulf of Mexico record this diversion. Their oxygen 18 content had been anomalously low, reflecting the oxygen 16-rich meltwater discharging from the Mississippi. About 11,000 years ago the isotopic ratio increased abruptly as the Lake Agassiz diversion shut off the meltwater flow to the Gulf.

The meltwater, meanwhile, poured into the North Atlantic close to the site of deep-water formation. There it reduced the salinity of surface waters (and hence their density) by so much that, in spite of severe winter cooling, they could not sink into the abyss. The conveyor belt stayed off until 1,000 years later, when a lobe of ice advanced across the western end of the Lake Superior basin and once again blocked the exit to the east. Lake Agassiz rose again by 40 meters, diverting the meltwater back down the Mississippi. The conveyor belt was reactivated, and Europe warmed up again.

The Younger Dryas links freshwater flow, ocean circulation and climate -- but only regional climate. Only around the North Atlantic did the episode bring a sharp cooling; elsewhere its effects were slight or absent. Unlike the glaciations, the Younger Dryas affected only the transport of heat (from low latitudes to the North Atlantic) and not the global climate. How could a change in ocean atmosphere operation during the ice ages have cooled the world as a whole?

The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores suggest part of an answer.... carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that warms the earth's surface by trapping solar energy.... Two other changes recorded in the ice cores must also have contributed. Ice-age air contains only half the post-glacial level of methane. Methane, too, is a greenhouse gas.... In addition, dust is about 30 times as abundant in glacial-age ice as in more recent layers, confirming evidence from other sites that the ice-age atmosphere was exceedingly dusty.... The dustiness and low methane content of the ice-age air do suggest that the glacial mode of ocean-atmosphere operation had imposed a dry climate. Dust, after all, blows from areas where vegetation is sparse, whereas methane is produced in swamps. Dry conditions (which are also recorded in ice-age landforms, such as sand dunes, and in pollen deposits) would have had their own effect on global temperatures. Temperature falls more rapidly with increasing altitude in a drier atmosphere; hence, the drying could have contributed to the depression of mountain snow lines....

Clearly, our account of how changes in ocean-atmosphere operation could have cooled the planet is incomplete.... Still, much recent evidence favors our basic proposal: transitions between glacial and interglacial conditions represent jumps between two stable but very different modes of ocean-atmosphere operation. If the earth's climate system does jump between quantized states.... all climate indicators should register a transition simultaneously. In this regard, the evidence from the end of the last ice age is most impressive. The warming of North Atlantic surface waters, the onset of melting in the northern ice sheets and the mountain glaciers of the Andes, the reappearance of trees in Europe and changes in plankton ecology near Antarctica and in the South China Sea -- all took place between 14,000 and 13,000 years ago.

In addition to what this article mentioned, other changes took place at the same time: as recorded in polar ice cores, carbon dioxide and methane increased and dust decreased in the atmosphere; in sea cores oxygen isotope ratios and foraminifera populations changed to indicate that much water that had been tied up in ice was being released into the oceans; sea levels, as recorded all over the globe, increased; loess formation was much reduced worldwide; ice-age lakes such as Lake Bonneville in southwestern United States began to dry up; pollen sequences found in lake varves in Europe and North America showed a radical change in vegetation to warmer climate types.^240a All of this is tied together by the Milankovitch astronomical cycles, which together with other evidence, indicates that all these changes happened many times. None of these things can be satisfactorily explained by the Flood.

Final Summary on Ice Ages

Many lines of evidence have been presented, to show that the notion of ice ages is not based on a few flimsy observations. All the lines of evidence give similar answers, both qualitatively and quantitatively. A mathematical theory, based on Newton's laws of motion for the solar system, explains and ties together many of the observations. The notion of The Flood is unable to explain the evidence, and the evidence shows that no Flood occurred -- at least, not one with geologically observable consequences.

The Society's latest attempt to deal with the problem of ice ages, in The Bible: God's Word or Man's?, pages 113-114, is a very incomplete and misleading presentation of evidence. It speaks in sweeping generalities, focusing on only one specific point -- the possible misinterpretation of water activity as glacial. In view of the extensive evidence I've presented, you can see that glacial land forms are only a small part of the picture, but the book ignores all the other evidence. Older publications do no better. I think the Society owes it to its readers to do better. Otherwise, its arguments hold no more weight than those of "scientific creationists," who think that the entire universe was created in six days, and to prove their position use tactics of misdirection, obfuscation and ignoring of evidence they don't want their readers to see.

Part 17: Other Problems With the Flood

If the oceans were always shallow, why does there exist life specifically designed to live at extreme depths?

The present distribution of animals cannot be explained in the context of the Flood except by another miracle. For example, why are marsupials so common in Australia compared to the rest of the world? Why is this also true of the fossil animals of Australia?

If the animals were dispersed from the "mountains of Ararat" after the Flood, how could they have differentiated into so many different forms, in just four thousand years? The biochemist J.B.S. Haldane once remarked that God must have an inordinate fondness for beetles to have created 250,000 species. Do you think Noah took that many beetle species on board the ark?

If the present oceans are the remnants of the Flood, then most fresh water life would have died, as it cannot endure even brief immersion in sea water. On the other hand, if the Flood were mostly an influx of fresh water, as would be the case if the floodwaters came from a great vapor expanse suspended above the earth, then most sea life would have died, as it cannot endure immersion in fresh water. Corals in particular do not tolerate low salinity.²⁴¹ The fact that some species of fish, such as salmon, live part of their lives in fresh water, and part in salt, means nothing as regards other sea life, including plants. If the Flood were mostly an influx of fresh water, and the influx had the volume implied by the Society, the previous ocean water must have been far saltier than today. How could sea life have survived the radically changed conditions? Also, the fossil record shows no extinction of sea or fresh water life during the past 10,000 years. One would expect a major extinction of either salt or fresh water varieties.

If hothouse conditions existed prior to the Flood, why is it that many animals are specifically designed to live in extreme cold? Polar bears have structures called heat exchangers in their circulatory systems to help them deal with cold. These do not exist in other bear species. Antarctic fish contain sophisticated antifreeze chemicals. Many insects are genetically programmed to manufacture antifreeze chemicals at the start of the cold season.

A large number of cave paintings have been found all over Europe. These paintings often depict extinct animals, such as mammoths, that clearly must have existed shortly before the Flood. If there really had been all the crustal shiftings, mountain building, and other upheavals the Society claims happened during or shortly after the Flood, then how could all the cave paintings have survived? They are often found in the same mountainous regions the Society claims were uplifted after the Flood. These regions contain individual mountains more than 14,000 feet high. If these mountains came through the Flood intact, the Flood had to cover them. Then where did the water go, since there is only enough water to flood the earth to 8000 feet today?

Part 18: Rain Prior to the Flood

The Society has long contended, based on Genesis 2:5, 6, that there was no rain prior to the Flood. This is not borne out by fossil evidence. Concerning a rich bed of fossils found in a region named Montceau-les-Mines, in central France, a Scientific American article said:²⁴²

The final part of the Paleozoic era, some 300 million years ago, was a time of transition. The Carboniferous period, when the continents were gathered in several landmasses near the Equator and a hot, humid climate sustained the swamp forests that gave rise to the major coal reserves of today, was drawing to a close....

.... fossil plants and animals were unearthed during the 19th century at Montceau-les-Mines, a coal basin situated northeast of the Massif Central, a mountain range formed during the Paleozoic at about the same time as the Appalachians....

Note that these statements are consistent with the plate tectonic theory I've already described. North America, Africa, and Europe had collided, forming part of a large continent called Pangaea, and raising mountain ranges. Much continental area was near the equator.

[The animals left] numerous footprints, which are preserved in the shales. Such footprints record the location of shores: riverbanks and the edges of lakes and lagoons.

Animals were not the only makers of fossil prints. Our team also often found imprints of falling rain [italics added], ripple marks left by running water and the cracked pattern of drying mud.

Another Scientific American article about fossil footprints found at Laetoli, Tanzania, said:²⁴³

Near Lake Eyasi in Tanzania is a series of layers of volcanic ash notable for having yielded the remains of early hominids that are among the oldest known: they date back between 3.5 and 3.8 million years. The layers of ash hold an even more unusual example of preservation: fossil footprints. Several tens of thousands of animal tracks have now been discovered in these ash deposits....

The extensive formation known to geologists as the Laetolil Beds is exposed over some 1,500 square kilometers.... The beds overlie ancient basement rocks of Precambrian age and are themselves bordered and overlain to the east by several large volcanoes....

Fossils are found mainly in the upper 45 to 60 meters of the beds, which at Laetoli are at least 130 meters thick. About three-fourths of the upper part of the formation consists of eolian tuffs: beds of volcanic ash that was redeposited by the wind after it had fallen. Most of the other ash beds, which alternate with the eolian tuffs, are 'air fall' tuffs, that is, deposits of ash that remained essentially undisturbed after it had settled out of the eruptive cloud.... the eolian ash buried animal bones and teeth, bird eggs, land snails and other objects exposed on the ground. All the ash, eolian and airfall, came from one volcano: Sadiman, about 20 kilometers east of Laetoli....

In 1976 Andrew Hill of Harvard University first came on animal tracks in a bed of tuff that since then has been called the Footprint Tuff.... in 1978 Paul I. Abell of the University of Rhode Island discovered an unmistakably hominid footprint in the tuff at another place. Clearing of the surface layer there revealed more hominid footprints in two long parallel trails.

See page 51 of the article for a photograph of these footprints. There are tracks to the right of the footprints that belong to an extinct three-toed horse, Hipparion. In general the animals preserved as fossils at Laetoli are similar in type to the animals found in the area today, but also include extinct types. The inclusion of extinct species is evidence these fossil beds must be pre-Flood. The Footprint Tuff is subdivided into a number of layers:

.... Most of the layers cover surface irregularities such as footprints with little change in thickness. This shows that they remained essentially undisturbed where they were deposited.

The surfaces of five layers are widely pockmarked by the impact of drops of rain [italics added]; three others are only locally rainprinted. The rainprints are close together and well defined. They were evidently made by showers that were heavy enough to dampen the ash but not heavy enough to erode it.

The article goes on to describe the further extensive deposition of volcanic ash, the development of new volcanoes on top of the old ash falls, the faulting and uplifting of parts of the area, and the resulting extensive erosion.

Various books on fossils display photographs of fossilized rainprints. The above evidence shows clearly that the rainprints could not have occurred after the Flood. There are simply too many geological events that have happened between their formation and exposure. Note that this does not depend on any dating methods other than the assumption that a huge number of geological events cannot be compressed into a timescale of just one year, at least, not without invoking miracles. As just one example, the Montceau-les-Mines fossils were laid down in an era that much other evidence shows was prior to even the age of dinosaurs. Since dinosaurs clearly did not exist after the Flood, the rainprint fossils must have been laid down before the Flood. Genesis 2:5, 6 says:

Now there was as yet no bush of the field found in the earth and no vegetation of the field was as yet sprouting, because Jehovah God had not made it rain upon the earth and there was no man to cultivate the ground. But a mist would go up from the earth and it watered the entire surface of the ground.

Based on this scripture, the Society said in the Aid book:²⁴⁴

With the canopy, there was no need for it to rain, 'but a mist would go up from the earth....' Not until after the Flood does the Bible first mention the lightning and thunder.

If this interpretation of Genesis is correct then it is a clear case where the Bible contradicts a demonstrable fact. If this is unacceptable, then what is the correct interpretation?

Apparently recognizing this difficulty, Insight²⁴⁵ said the "time referred to is evidently early on the third creative 'day,' before vegetation appeared."

If Genesis 2:5, 6 actually refers to the third creative day, and not the entire period before the Flood, why does Genesis not explicitly state this? The rest of Genesis chapter 2 gives a history of man's creation, so a reference to the lack of rain in verses 5-6 makes no sense unless it describes conditions existing at the time referred to in verses 7 to 24. For example, verse 7 says:

And Jehovah God proceeded to form the man out of dust from the ground and to blow into his nostrils the breath of life....

How could verses 5-6 make sense unless they directly relate to what follows? Why does Insight say the time referred to is evidently early on the third day? Evidently because the Society recognizes the fossil evidence. We seem to be left with the conclusion that Genesis 2:5, 6 either contradicts fact or makes no sense.

Barnes Notes on the Old Testament gave an explanation of Gen. 2:5 that may make sense but still has major difficulties. It said:²⁴⁶

Verse 4 b takes us back into the time of the work of creation, more particularly to the time before the work of the third day began, and draws our attention to certain details, which, being details, could hardly have been inserted in chapter one: the fact that certain forms of plant life, namely the kinds that require the attentive care of man in greater measure, had not sprung up. Apparently, the whole work of the third day is in the mind of the writer. When verdure covered the earth, the sprouting of these types of vegetation was retarded, so that they might appear after man was already in full possession of his domain and in a position to give them their needed care. That is why it is remarked in the double causal clause 5 b: God had not yet caused rain to descend upon the earth; also, man did not exist as yet to till the ground. The fact that not the whole of vegetation is meant appears from the distinctive terms employed, neither of which had as yet appeared in the account. They are siach hassadheh, well rendered by Meek "field shrubs"; we render above: "shrub of the field"; and 'esebh hassadheh, also well rendered by Meek, "field plants"; our rendering: "plant of the field." For the word sadheh means tillable ground, arable fields, the ground "yielding plants and trees" (B D B). That at least must be the meaning in this connection where man's cultivation is referred to. It is not important to the author to mark the point of time within the creation week when this condition prevailed.

Note that Barnes Notes ignores the geological problem raised by the reference to the lack of rain before the Flood. If Genesis' use of "shrub of the field" and "plant of the field" really is limited to the plants in the immediate vicinity of the Garden of Eden, part of the difficulty is resolved. But Barnes Notes' disingenuous speculation on what "shrub" and "plant" really mean here has only marginal support in the original language.

A check of how the original Hebrew words are translated in other places in the Hebrew scriptures shows that they are often used to refer to all sorts of vegetation, not just the kinds that man cultivates. The New World Translation generally renders the words as "bush" and "vegetation" rather than "shrub" and "plant." Gen. 21:14, 15 tells how Abraham sent Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness, where Hagar "threw the child under one of the bushes." This "bush" was growing in the wilderness, not a cultivated field. Job 30 describes Job's bewailing of his condition, and verse 7 says: "Among the bushes they would cry out; Under the nettles they would huddle together." This is clearly a reference to bushes (note with nettles) in uncultivated land. Gen. 1:29, 30 shows that "vegetation" refers to all sorts of plants: "Here I have given to you all vegetation bearing seed which is on the surface of the whole earth.... I have given green vegetation for food."

There are also difficulties with how Barnes Notes explains the original word for "field." While it is often used in the sense of tillable field, it has a much wider sense. It can be used in the sense of "ground," "open country," "territory," "the wild," "land," etc., not just in the sense of a tillable field. For example, the New World Translation renders Gen. 27:5 as "Esau went on out into the field to hunt game." Did he go into his barley field to hunt game? Probably not; the New International Version renders it as Esau went out into the "open country" to hunt. Gen. 32:3 speaks of the "field of Edom" (NWT) or "country of Edom" (NIV). Gen. 2:19, 20; 3:1; and 3:14 speak of "the wild beasts of the field" (NWT). Again, are these wild beasts of a barley field, or the wild beasts of the earth?

Clearly there is no compelling argument from the Hebrew language that Gen. 2:5 refers to the time of creation of Adam rather than some time on the third creative day.

Part 19: Rise of Continents Due to Flooding

Regarding the Flood, the Society has made the general claim that "under the added weight of the water, there was likely a great shifting in the crust. In time new mountains evidently were thrust upward, old mountains rose to new heights, shallow sea basins were deepened...." The Good News to Make You Happy book is a bit more specific, and says on page 82:²⁴⁷

The tremendous pressures involved would bring about great changes on the surface of the earth, pushing up mountain ranges and forming depressions to receive the waters. Within the space of about one year these had receded into the oceans as we know them today.

It should be noted that under the weight of the water, which would produce a downward force but no horizontal force, there would be no reason to think that continents would be forced sideways. The only effect should be a tendency for the continents to rise. We shall now examine, using the physics of floating bodies, how the continents would actually rise under the influence of a sudden influx of enough water to flood them significantly deeper than their average height above sea level.

First we need some data to calculate the average density of continental crust. The average density p of both oceanic crust and the magma on which it sits is about 3.0 gm/cm³, and the volume of continental crust is about 7 x 10⁹ km³.²⁴⁸ The formula for the volume of a sphere is

V = 4/3 PI r³.

The mean radius of the earth is 3982 miles, or 6,408 kilometers.

First let's calculate the average thickness of the continental crust using this data. Let the thickness of this crust in kilometers be T and the radius of the earth in kilometers be R. A spherical shell with the radius of the earth and the thickness of this crust has a volume of

V_s = 4/3 PI [ R³ - ( R - T )³].

The continental area is approximately 29% of the earth's surface, so we have an approximate expression relating the volume of the crust, V_c, to the volume of the shell, V_s:

V_c = 0.29 V_s.

Using the above data for V_c = 7 x 10⁹ km³, we solve and find that V_s = 2.4 x 10¹⁰ km³. Then using this number for V_s, we solve for T in the above formula, and find T = 47 km. So the continental crust averages about 47 km thick.

Now according to the God's Word or Man's book,²⁴⁹ the average height of land above sea level is 0.84 km and the average depth of the oceans is 3.79 km. So the average height of the continents above the sea floor is

0.84 + 3.79 = 4.63 km.

Then the average depth of the continental crust below the ocean floor is

47.00 - 4.63 = 42.37 km.

To calculate the average density of the continental crust we use Archimedes' principle for a floating object, which essentially says that the weight of liquid displaced by the object is equal to the weight of the object. The continents are floating on magma, which is in turn covered by the oceans. The situation can be modelled in a simple manner by the following diagram, where I've modelled the continent as a rectangular box floating on a high density magma layer and surrounded by a lower density water layer. The exact dimensions of the box are unimportant, as they cancel out in the course of the calculations. Also note that I'm freely using the most convenient units for the various quantities without necessarily specifying what they are, as they also cancel out in the end.

                    p1 = 0                                 
       ---  ---------------------  ---                     
        ^   |                   |   ^                      
        |   |                   |   | h1                   
        |   |                   |   v                      
 -------|---|-------------------|--------- water surface   
        |   |                   |   ^                      
   p2   |   |                   |   | h2                   
        |   |                   |   v                      
 -------|---|-------------------|--------- seafloor surface
        |   |                   |   ^                      
        |   |      pm   M       |   |                      
      h |   |                   |   | h3                   
        |   |       Area A      |   |                      
        v   |                   |   v                      
       ---  ---------------------  ---                     
                    p3                                     

The magma in the lower layer has density p₃ = 3.0 gm/cm³, the water in the middle layer has density p₂ = 1.0 gm/cm³, and the upper layer is air with negligible density p₁ = zero. The thickness of the box below the seafloor is h₃, the thickness in the water is h₂, and the height above the water is h₁. The total height of the box is h. We have already found these thicknesses above. The box has density pm, which is to be determined, mass M, and horizontal cross sectional area A.

An elementary principle of physics is that the pressure at a given depth in a fluid is equal to the acceleration due to gravity times the density of the fluid times the depth: P = gpd. The force on a floating object is zero in the horizontal direction, since all the forces due to pressure cancel out, but the upward force is equal to the pressure at the bottom of the object times the area of the bottom: F = PA. The net force on a floating object is zero, since it is in equilibrium, so the sum of all the individual forces acting on it must be zero. These include the force due to pressure and the force due to gravity (the weight of the object). The force due to gravity is the mass times the acceleration due to gravity:

F = Mg.

In equation form we have the net upward force

F_net = 0 = PA - Mg,

where the minus sign is used because the weight acts downward while the pressure acts upward. The pressure at the bottom of the box is due to the weight of the water and the weight of the magma. Putting all this in equation form we have the net upward force:

F_net = Agp₂h₂ + Agp₃h₃ - Mg.

Setting this equal to zero, and letting the area A be 1, we can solve for the mass M:

M = p₂h₂ + p₃h₃

We already know the densities and the depths, so we find that

M = 1.0 x 4.0 + 3.0 x 42.37 = 131.1

Dividing by the volume (height of box h x area A) we get the average density of continental crust:

131.1 / 47 = 2.79 gm/cm³.

Now we can proceed to find how much the box could rise if it became completely covered by water. The changed situation is shown in the following diagram.

  ----------------------------------------------           
   ^                                                       
   |                                                       
 d |                p2                                     
   |  ---  -------------------------  ---                  
   |   ^   |                       |   ^                   
   |   |   |                       |   | h2                
   v   |   |                       |   v                   
  -----|---|-----------------------|-------seafloor surface
       |   |                       |   ^                   
       |   |     pm   M            |   |                   
     h |   |                       |   | h3                
       |   |     Area A            |   |                   
       v   |                       |   v                   
      ---  -------------------------  ---                  
                    p3                                     
  ----------------------------------------------           

The symbols are as before, but now there is only the water and magma that surround the box. As before, the total upward force minus the total downward force is zero in equilibrium. There is an extra component of downward force due to the pressure of the water on top of the box.

This component is F = Agp₂ x (d - h₂), since the top of the box is at depth d - h₂. The equation for net upward force becomes:

F_net = Agp₂d + Agp₃h₃ - Agp₂ x (d - h₂) - Mg

Again setting area A equal to 1, using the facts that the mass of the box M is equal to its volume times its density (M = Ahpm) and h = h₂ + h₃, and solving for h₂ we find:

        p3 - pm  

h2 = h ----------
        p3 - p2  

All the numbers on the right have already been found, and plugging them into the equation we find the result is

h₂ = 4.94 km.

Subtracting the original height above the sea floor, 4.63 km., we find the net increase in height:

4.94 - 4.63 = .31 km.

So the height could increase by 310 meters, or about 1000 feet.

Using reasonable assumptions I've shown that the Flood could have caused continents to rise by no more than about 1000 feet. But note that due to the response time of the earth's crust, which is measured in tens of thousands of years, as we've seen elsewhere, there would be only a tendency to rise. The flooding for one year could not have produced much rise at all, because of the slow response time. Since the water would have been distributed evenly over the earth, there is no location that should have received significantly more disturbance due to the water pressure than anyplace else. Therefore I must conclude that there was little tendency either for continents to rise significantly or for mountains to be pushed up in any particular place. If you disagree with this conclusion, then please show why, using quantifiable arguments.

Part 20: Flood Legends

Many cultures around the world have Flood legends. Most of them contain the basic elements that the earth was flooded, and that only a small number of people were saved. The Society claims that

the only explanation for such a widespread acceptance is that the Flood was a historical event.²⁵⁰

The fact that there are not merely a few but perhaps hundreds of different stories about that great Deluge, and that such stories are found among the traditions of many primitive races the world over, is a strong proof that all these people had a common origin and that their early forefathers shared that Flood experience in common.²⁵¹

What can we conclude from these many Flood legends? Though they differ greatly in details, they have some common features. These indicate an origin in some gigantic and unforgettable cataclysm. Despite vivid colorations over the centuries, their underlying theme is like a thread that ties them to one great event -- the global Deluge related in the simple, uncolored Bible account.²⁵²

However, there are reasonable alternative explanations. In no case is the evidence for any view, including the Society's, compelling. The following material presents some reasonable alternatives.

In making the above claims, the Society discards the possibility that the common legends are not based on a historical event, but are merely a common myth. Some Watchtower writers are aware of this possibility. A quotation from The Biblical Archaeologist Reader in Awake! said:²⁵³

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that many of [the accounts] are recollections of a common event, or at least are diffused from a common tradition.

Note that according to the Bible, the Flood was a common event, not for various peoples and cultures, but for just eight people. The Society therefore cannot claim that the Flood was an event common to many peoples.

One possible explanation for widespread Flood traditions is, as the above quotation mentions, diffusion or transmission from a common tradition. Ancient people seem to have had more contact with each other than they are usually given credit for. Often people incorporate stories they hear from travelers into their own body of legends and, in time, the source is forgotten. Modern anthropologists have repeatedly proved this happens.

For example, in discussing the source of myths and legends of primitive or ancient peoples, and how some people interpret these as evidence for extraterrestrial visitors, Carl Sagan tells a story²⁵⁴ of one Dr. Gajdusek, who visited the primitive Fore people of New Guinea in 1957 to study the rare disease kuru, which is spread by cannibalism. While stuck inside a communal longhouse during two days of intense rain, Sagan says the

hosts sang their traditional songs all through the first night and on through the following rainy day. In return, "to enhance our rapport with them," as Gajdusek says, "we began to sing songs in exchange -- among them such Russian songs as 'Otchi chornye,' and 'Moi kostyor v tumane svetit' ..." This was received very well, and the Agakamatasa villagers requested many dozens of repetitions in the smoky South Fore longhouse to the accompaniment of the driving rainstorm.

Some years later Gajdusek was engaged in the collection of indigenous music in another part of the South Fore region and asked a group of young men to run through their repertoire of traditional songs. To Gajdusek's amazement and amusement, they produced a somewhat altered but still clearly recognizable version of "Otchi chornye." Many of the singers apparently thought the song traditional, and later still Gajdusek found the song imported even farther afield, with none of the singers having any idea of its source.

We can easily imagine some sort of world ethnomusicology survey coming to an exceptionally obscure part of New Guinea and discovering that the natives had a traditional song which sounded in rhythm, music and words remarkably like "Otchi chornye." If they were to believe that no previous contact of Westerners with these people had occurred, a great mystery could be posited.

Another example from Carl Sagan is the²⁵⁵

remarkable mythology surrounding the star Sirius that is held by the Dogon people of the Republic of Mali.... [who have] been studied intensively by anthropologists only since the 1930s.... The most striking aspects of Dogon astronomy have been recounted by Marcel Griaule, a French anthropologist working in the 1930s and 1940s. While there is no reason to doubt Griaule's account, it is important to note that there is no earlier Western record of these remarkable Dogon folk beliefs and that all the information has been funneled through Griaule.... In contrast to almost all prescientific societies, the Dogon hold that the planets as well as the Earth rotate about their axes and revolve about the Sun....

More striking still is the Dogon belief about Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. They contend that it has a dark and invisible companion star which orbits Sirius.... once every fifty years. They state that the companion star is very small and very heavy, made of a special metal called "Sagala" which is not found on Earth.... The remarkable fact is that the visible star, Sirius A, does have an extraordinary dark companion, Sirius B.... [which is] the first example of a white dwarf star discovered by modern astrophysics. Its matter is in a state called "relativistically degenerate," which does not exist on Earth, and since the electrons are not bound to the nuclei in such degenerate matter, it can properly be described as metallic....

At first glance the Sirius legend of the Dogon seems to be the best candidate evidence available today for past contact with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. As we begin a closer look at this story, however, let us remember that the Dogon astronomical tradition is purely oral, that it dates with certainty only from the 1930s.... The hypothesis of a companion star to Sirius might have followed naturally from [other] Dogon mythology.... but there does not seem to be any explanation this simple about the period and density of the companion of Sirius. The Dogon Sirius myth is too close to modern astronomical thinking and too precise quantitatively to be attributed to chance. Yet there it sits, immersed in a body of more or less standard prescientific legend. What can the explanation be?....

The Dogon have knowledge impossible to acquire without the telescope. The straightforward conclusion is that they had contact with an advanced technical civilization. The only question is, which civilization -- extraterrestrial or European? Far more credible than an ancient extraterrestrial educational foray among the Dogon might be a comparatively recent contact with scientifically literate Europeans who conveyed to the Dogon the remarkable European myth of Sirius and its white dwarf companion, a myth that has all the superficial earmarks of a splendidly inventive tall story. Perhaps the Western contact came from a European visitor to Africa, or from the local French schools, or perhaps from contacts in Europe by West Africans inducted to fight for the French in World War I.

In 1862 the companion of Sirius was telescopically discovered, and by the end of the 19th century it was widely speculated that it was a white dwarf. By 1915 astronomers had confirmed that it was, and by 1928 the idea of extremely dense matter had been popularized. All this

was covered in the scientific press and was accessible to the intelligent layman. All this was occurring just before Griaule encountered the Dogon Sirius legend.... In my mind's eye I picture a Gallic visitor to the Dogon people, in what was then French West Africa, in the early part of this century. He may have been a diplomat, an explorer, an adventurer or an early anthropologist. Such people.... were in West Africa many decades earlier. The conversation turns to astronomical lore. Sirius is the brightest star in the sky. The Dogon regale the visitor with their Sirius mythology. Then, smiling politely, expectantly, they inquire of their visitor what his Sirius myths might be. Perhaps he refers before answering to a well-worn book in his baggage. The white dwarf companion of Sirius being a current astronomical sensation, the traveler exchanges a spectacular myth for a routine one. After he leaves, his account is remembered, retold, and eventually incorporated into the corpus of Dogon mythology -- or at least into a collateral branch (perhaps filed under "Sirius myths, bleached peoples' account"). When Marcel Griaule makes mythological inquiries in the 1930s and 1940s, he has his own European Sirius myth played back to him.

So people do incorporate other stories into their own body of legends. If this were done by many peoples, with a Flood legend that originated over four thousand years ago in an influential civilization like the Sumerians, why should this be surprising? The Society says the Sumerians, or ancient Babylonians, had a tremendous effect on all mankind religiously, and if so this would logically apply to Flood legends.

Historians attribute the earliest Flood legends to the Sumerians. The generally accepted idea is summarized in In The Beginning:²⁵⁶

Sumeria was a flat land between two large rivers. As is true of any large river...., unusual rises will bring about flooding conditions. In a land as flat as Sumeria, it would not take much of a flood to cover large portions of the entire region.

A particularly bad flood would live on in the memory of later generations, and particularly bad floods undoubtedly occurred. In 1929, the English archaeologist Sir Charles Woolley reported finding water-deposited layers as much as ten feet thick in excavations near the Euphrates, and Sumerian records speak of events as happening "before the Flood" and "since the Flood." [This was later dated to about 2800 B.C.]

Naturally, a particularly bad flood would destroy records, especially in a primitive situation where writing had, at best, barely come into use. For that reason, events "before the Flood" would quickly take on a legendary and, very likely, highly exaggerated nature. The Sumerians listed kings who reigned for tens of thousands of years before the Flood; they made no such reports of kings who reigned after the Flood. And, of course, this reflected itself in the ages given of the antediluvian patriarchs in the Bible.

The dramatic tale of the Sumerian Flood was included in the epic of Gilgamesh, which must have been popular all over the ancient world and which couldn't help but influence the myths of other nations.

.... there is no sign of.... a universal deluge in the third millennium B.C. Egyptian history, for instance, carries right through the entire third millennium B.C. without any sign of a break or any mention of a flood.

On the other hand, if we consider the flatness of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, and consider the Flood to have been a local phenomenon of the region, we might well imagine twenty-two feet to be a sober estimate of the depth to which the elevations of the region were covered.

Isn't it remarkable that a local flood happened in Sumeria at just about the time the Bible says there was an earthwide Flood? Its deposits cover an area of thousands of square miles in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, but are not evident beyond the valley. If there was a Flood, why are such deposits not continuous throughout the earth? Jacquetta Hawkes said in The First Great Civilizations:²⁵⁷

.... although silt deposits have been discovered at Ur and several other Sumerian cities they belong to different dates and it has proved impossible to establish a single great inundation affecting the whole land. Presumably floods were a familiar dread that produced in men's minds the myth of the great flood.

I am well aware of everything the Society has written about the improbability of the Sumerian flood legend being incorporated into the Genesis account. The above is presented, not to prove any particular point of view, but to show that archaeologists and Bible scholars have a variety of opinions about the Flood legends, and that explanations other than the Society's are reasonable. Note that what I have said about the possible spread of the Flood story is very nearly the same as what the Bible and the Society say -- that this is the way false religion spread. The major difference is in whether the Flood was local or global. The geological evidence I've presented shows this is not unreasonable.

Is the fact that the Flood tradition is widespread significant in itself? Not necessarily. Perhaps at least as widespread as Flood traditions are creation stories. Often they incorporate the idea that the earth rests on some large animal, or is supported by a god. Obviously these are not based on some common observation. Why should the Flood story be different?

Another fact which escapes the notice of some Bible commentators is that floods are universal phenomena. As Legends of the Earth explains:²⁵⁸

.... the universality of flood traditions can be explained very easily without requiring a widespread flood of cosmic or any other origin, if we bear in mind that floods, plural, are a universal geologic phenomenon.... [In a previous chapter we] have seen how volcano legends of peoples widely separated in time and place have many features in common. If active volcanoes were found everywhere, volcano legends no doubt would be so common that someone would look for a universal eruption as the underlying cause. As it is, active volcanoes, and with them volcano legends, are restricted to certain belts on the face of the earth. On the other hand, there is virtually no part of the globe where there could not at some time have been a flood potentially dangerous to humans in the vicinity. A river anywhere can overflow if its waters are rapidly augmented by heavy rains, or even more suddenly augmented by the bursting of a natural dam. Even the deserts have their floods, for when the infrequent rains do fall, they commonly come as cloudbursts and there is no vegetation to retard run-off. (However, desert dwellers are too knowing to be caught in one of these very temporary but incredibly awesome "flash floods.") ...

At all times up to and including the present, there has been one source of frightful flooding of coastal areas in all parts of the world -- but particularly on all Pacific shores -- which would be particularly memorable to those fortunate enough to survive: tsunamis, or seismic sea waves [commonly referred to in English as "tidal waves"]. Although by no means universal individually, tsunamis can and often do wreak havoc in very widely separated places, within hours. Since tsunamis are important not only as possible sources of flood legends but also in connection with matters of paramount importance in the chapters yet to come, a detailed look at these formidable waves is necessary at this point.

Tsunamis as a rule are associated with submarine earthquakes. They are generated either directly, if earthquake faulting displaces the sea floor, or indirectly, by submarine landslides, mudflows, or slumping triggered by an earthquake. Occasionally they can result from a submarine eruption, if an underwater explosion displaces substantial amounts of water. Sea-floor displacements involved when a caldera collapses on the sea floor likewise can produce tsunamis, and if the caldera is a large one and its collapse sudden, as in the case of the Krakatau eruption of 1883, the resulting tsunami may be of stupendous proportions. Also in Krakatau-like eruptions, huge waves may be generated when incalculable amounts of volcanic tephra suddenly fall on the sea surface after a major explosion.

Tsunamis can travel thousands of miles from their source, sweep miles inland, and can reach heights up to several hundred feet. Japan has many times in recorded history experienced tsunamis up to 120 feet high, which killed tens of thousands of people at a time. The Krakatau eruption in 1883 caused tsunamis up to 130 feet, with 36,000 deaths in Indonesia. Hawaii regularly gets tsunamis up to forty feet.²⁵⁹ Earthquakes can trigger landslides that can locally produce water surges in lakes or estuaries up to more than a thousand feet high.²⁶⁰

So floods themselves are essentially universal occurrences. But what about the question of how flood traditions having so many features in common could arise? Legends of the Earth explains:²⁶¹

All in all, then, from the purely geologic point of view we should expect independent flood traditions to have arisen almost anywhere in the world at almost any time, engendered by flood catastrophes stemming from perfectly natural causes, and of all the possible causes of floods, only tsunamis are capable of giving rise to flood legends in widely separated places at the same time. Although many different floods are required to account for the many traditions known, there is no reason to be surprised that flood traditions from all over the world may bear notable resemblances to one another. For when we come right down to it, there are only two basic ways in which people can survive a flood: [italics added] by getting above it, or by riding it out on some floating object. Thus there are legends in which the survivors take to high ground or climb exaggeratedly tall trees, and there are legends in which the survivors float to safety in an ark, a canoe, a chest, or what have you. In most flood traditions a vessel is the means of salvation, and that too is not surprising, in view of the fact that the water depth is often exaggerated to the point where everything is submerged and there would be no other way to account for anyone's being saved to carry on the human race. Exaggeration likewise tends to reduce the number of survivors toward the apparently irreducible minimum of the one man and one woman needed to repopulate the world (but some legends manage to get by with even less). And finally, need we be surprised if some independently generated legends lay the blame for the disaster on somebody's misbehavior? Remember, in the preceding chapter, how the Maoris attributed the Tarawera eruption to the breaking of tabu by the victims? Nevertheless it is undeniable that many flood traditions in widely separated parts of the world do show similarities in detail, highly reminiscent of the biblical deluge, which cannot be explained entirely by the general similarity of floods and the general similarity of human reactions to floods.

There are only two ways in which the story of Noah's flood, whatever its local source, could have been spread around the world: by diffusion, as the people to whose culture it originally belonged migrated to new lands, or by transmission, which requires contact between at least one narrator and one listener from different cultures. Flood traditions are found throughout the western hemisphere from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. In the extreme diffusionist point of view this constitutes evidence that the Indians of North and South America are descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel, who brought the story of Noah with them as they migrated across Asia and into North America via Bering Strait and on down through South America. But while anthropologists do believe that man reached the Americas by way of Bering Strait, the waves of migration took place long before Noah's prototype existed. So that brings us to transmission and its corollary, syncretism (the fusion of elements from independent traditions). If all the biblical parallels in New World flood traditions are the result of cultural contact, then either that contact was somehow established long before the first missionaries are known to have reached the western hemisphere, which is unlikely, or else all such parallels must date from after the time of the first missionaries.

A highly illuminating example of how a legend can be transferred from one culture to another literally overnight was related by Alice Lee Marriott in a New Yorker article some years ago [Dorson, Richard M. "The debate over the trustworthiness of oral traditional history." Volksuberlieferung, Kurt Ranke Festschrift (1968), 19-35] When she was collecting the folklore of a South Dakota tribe, she was challenged one day by the old Indian who was her informant to tell him one of the tales of her people. She thereupon related the story of "the Brave Warrior and the Water Monsters" -- Beowulf. Few changes were necessary; it was "all within the patterns of legendary behavior, which the old man could understand, and I reflected that there might be more to this universal-distribution-of-folklore than I had realized." A little later she heard him relate the story to an audience of his people, "and I must admit the old man made a better story of it than I did. A born, creative story teller, he added bits here and there to round the tale out and make it richer. So must the story of Beowulf have gone, many centuries ago, from hearer to hearer, improved and embellished until at last it was written down." The punch line of her article told how a few years later in an ethnological journal she came across a paper entitled "Occurrence of a Beowulf-like myth among North American Indians," published by a graduate student who, in violation of an unwritten law among ethnologists, had been using the same informant.

With this illustration in mind, it seems quite natural that certain details of the biblical flood story should turn up all over the world. For more than nineteen centuries missionaries have been carrying it to every corner of the earth. The story of Noah is one of the most colorful of all the Bible stories, and it is also one whose moral is particularly obvious and therefore most likely to be emphasized. Moreover, it should have made the most impression precisely among those peoples who already had a flood tradition with which it could be fused. Missionaries have always been among the first to brave the wilderness to bring the Gospel to primitive people, and in many instances they were the first to take down the legends of the people among whom they worked. In other cases, however, the legends were collected by ethnologists and others who came well after the missionaries. Because it often was the missionaries who first devised written forms of obscure languages, it is impossible to prove whether a flood story really predates the missionary influence or whether it is just Noah being given back with local color, like Beowulf in South Dakota. Only one very equivocal instance of pre-missionary documentation is known (which will will be discussed subsequently), but at least one instance has been confirmed where Noah was given back in the same way as Beowulf: A missionary named Moffat related, in a book published in 1842...., how he had never found a flood legend among the South Africans until one day a Namaqua Hottentot told him one. Suspecting possible missionary influence, he questioned the man closely but was assured that it was a tale of his forefathers, and that the Hottentot had never even met a missionary before. But later, when Moffat was comparing notes with another missionary, he learned that the other had indeed told the story of Noah to the very same Hottentot.

So there exist plausible mechanisms for generating widely distributed flood legends, and there are examples of these mechanisms at work. Now let's look at some examples of ancient legends. Legends of the Earth describes one well known Greek flood legend, Deukalion's deluge:²⁶²

Best known to most of us after the Babylonian-Hebrew flood tradition is that of classical mythology, Deukalion's deluge. Of the several Greek flood traditions, it is the only one in which the flood is said to have been worldwide.... Deukalion's flood was accepted as historical fact by the Greeks, including Aristotle. There apparently was at least one king by that name. A marble pillar found on the island of Paros gives a list of the kings of Greece and the dates of their reigns, and according to this chronicle, Deukalion's deluge occurred in about 1539 B.C.... About the middle of the fifteenth century B.C., or possibly earlier, there was a Krakatau-like eruption of the volcano Santorin^262a in the Aegean Sea.... At the end of that eruption the volcano collapsed to form a caldera, and that collapse could have generated one or more tsunamis, possibly far bigger than any ever generated in the Mediterranean area in the more normal way by earthquakes. The possible dates for Deukalion and for the eruption are sufficiently close, in our present state of knowledge, that the proposal.... that the legend or myth of Deukalion's deluge was a consequence of that catastrophe appears very plausible. In this light it appears particularly significant that [Richard] Andree.... states that in an early version of the myth the flood is said to have come from the sea.... -- and what else could that mean but a tsunami?

Later versions of the Deukalion story include details that closely parallel the Hebrew-Babylonian flood story. In the course of time the sea flood became nine days and nights of rain, the chest became an ark, animals were included in the passenger list, and Deukalion sent out a dove on successive occasions to see if the waters had receded.... Thus the traditions of two different places, based on floods centuries apart, merged into what is essentially the same story.... There is considerable lack of agreement concerning Deukalion and the characters associated with other Greek flood traditions.

In view of the above, the Watchtower's description²⁶³ of one Greek legend is seen to be a gross simplification of the history of the several Greek flood legends. It is similar with a flood legend from India, in which a man named Manu is saved with the help of a small fish. Concerning this legend's development, Legends of the Earth said:

The legend of Manu is post-Vedic, there being only obscure references in the Vedas that might relate to it. It first appears in the Satapatha Brahmana, which goes back to about 600 B.C..... It has been suggested that in view of the geographic setting, the bursting of a landslide-dammed lake in the Himalayas could be a possible factual basis for the flood tradition in Sanskrit literature.

In later versions Manu is not merely a common man, but a great seer or a king. As in the case of the Deukalion myth, possibly Semitic elements appear after a while. In the Matsya Purana, dating from 320 A.D., Manu takes all living creatures and the seeds of plants into his "ark."

The Watchtower article also described legends from the South Pacific and the Americas. Legends of the Earth describes a number of South Pacific legends, and summarizes some interesting points:²⁶⁴

The South Seas also provide abundant flood traditions in very diverse forms. Aside from some biblical parallels, which can easily be attributed to missionary influence, many of these traditions are remarkably consistent with the local geologic setting. Very often the flood is said to have come from the sea, as would be expected in islands frequently subjected to earthquake-generated tsunamis or typhoon-lashed waves.

Legends of the Earth describes some American flood traditions, and comments that:

North American Indian lore contains abundant evidence of the way in which primitive mythologies absorb later elements. For instance, Old Coyote Man, the culture-hero of the Crow legends, is supposed to have invented horses -- but horses were unknown to the Indians until the Conquistadores introduced them in the sixteenth century. The general resemblance of many of the American Indian flood traditions to each other can readily be explained in terms of migration or contacts between tribes, and frequent resemblances to the Bible story are not at all difficult to attribute to the efforts of missionaries.²⁶⁵

Flood traditions are prolific throughout Latin America. There are numerous legends in which the survivors of the deluge, either a couple or a family, escape in a calabash, a canoe, or a raft, or climb mountains or trees. Biblical overtones are very recognizable in some cases.²⁶⁶

Next are described some legends of purely local origin, as well as ones with biblical overtones. The last example is one from the Aztecs, and was referred to earlier on page 205 as one equivocal instance of pre-missionary documentation:²⁶⁷

The story of Coxcox is the one and only flood legend with possibly biblical elements for which there seems to be pre-missionary documentation in the form of pictographs. Or is there? According to Andree.... none of the early writers concerned with Mexican mythology, who could have heard the tale at the time of the Conquistadores or shortly after, ever mentioned a Bible-like flood legend, and he doubted that the interpretation of the pictographs was the correct one. In this he followed Don Jose Fernando Ramirez, conservator of the National Museum in Mexico City, who showed that the descriptions of the pictographs as given by Clavigero, Humboldt, Kingsborough, and others were all based on the same source, a picture map published by Gemilli Careri in Churchill's A Collection of Voyages and Travels, volume 4 [written in 1732]. Gemelli Careri had read into this picture the story of the Flood, and Humboldt and all the rest followed suit and accepted his interpretation. But according to Ramirez the "dove" was intended to be the bird known as the Tihuitochan, which calls "Ti-hui," and the picture actually represented the story of the migration of the Aztecs to the Valley of Mexico. The Aztecs are believed to have come into Mexico from farther to the north. Their traditions told how a little bird kept repeating "Ti-hui, ti-hui," which in their language meant "Let's go!" and their priests interpreted this as a divine command to seek a new home. Seven subtribes set out, six of whom established themselves more or less quickly in various parts of Mexico, while the seventh wandered for some time, looking for a sign in the form of an eagle sitting on a rock holding a serpent in its mouth. The promised sign was encountered at Lake Texcoco, and accordingly the city now known as Mexico City was founded on its shores in 1325. This, then, is the tradition historians believe is embodied in the picture writing in question; it was Gemilli Careri alone who decided that the bird in the picture was the dove giving out tongues. He himself admitted that the chronology was "not so exact as it should be, there being too few years allow'd between the flood and the founding of Mexico".... -- for the picture includes symbols telling the number of years spent in various places during the wanderings.

Gemilli Careri heard the story of Coxcox during his sojourn in Mexico in 1667, well over a hundred years after the first missionaries had arrived with Cortez and ample time for biblical details to have become superposed on indigenous Aztec myths and traditions. Other Mexican flood stories are quite obviously the Bible story transplanted to a more familiar local setting.

The above should be enough to establish that the problem of how Flood traditions arose is not nearly so black-and-white as Watchtower publications would have it. Here are a few more things to consider.

A problem with putting too much stock in the supposed universality of Flood traditions is that they are not universal, but simply widespread. As significant as is the fact that many cultures have Flood traditions is the fact that many lack such traditions. According to Legends of the Earth,²⁶⁸

Flood traditions are lacking in semi-arid Central Asia, which is hardly surprising....

Very conspicuous by its absence is an Egyptian flood legend; but likewise conspicuous by their absence in Egypt are disastrous floods. Every year the Nile overflowed its banks gently and predictably, leaving behind a life-giving deposit of fine silt to replenish the soil. Lean years might have ensued when the waters fell short of the average, and extra-high waters might conceivably have caused some inconvenience, but the annual flood could never have been anything but benign on the whole. Its failure to materialize would have been the disaster to commemorate in legend. The other main rivers of Africa also have an annual rise which, being predictable, is not calamitous.

The only legend from southern Africa involving any sort of inundation is not a typical deluge tradition at all, but one which seeks to explain the origin of a particular lake.... This tale was collected by Livingstone, and was the only one he encountered in all his years of missionary work which had any resemblance to a flood tradition.

A good summary of the issues surrounding Flood legends is in the final paragraphs of Legends of the Earth.²⁶⁹

To cite further examples of flood traditions would become tedious, if it has not done so already. Enough instances have been given, I hope, to demonstrate that when viewed from their geologic context, many flood traditions obviously have originated on the spot. I can see no reason to assume that in explaining the ubiquity of flood traditions we are limited to a choice between two extreme alternatives. [Immanuel] Velikovsky, for instance states:

The answer to the problem of the similarity of the motifs in the folklore of various peoples is, in my view, as follows: A great many ideas reflect real historical content. There is a legend, found all over the world, that a deluge swept the earth and covered hills and even mountains. We have a poor opinion of the mental abilities of our ancestors if we think that merely an extraordinary overflow of the Euphrates so impressed the nomads of the desert that they thought the entire world was flooded, and that the legend so born wandered from people to people. [Worlds in Collision, Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1950; New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1967]

To which one might reply: Of course many ideas reflect real historic content. However, there is not one deluge legend, but rather a collection of traditions which are so diverse that they can be explained neither by one general catastrophe alone, nor by the dissemination of one local tradition alone. Some are highly imaginative but very wide-of-the-mark attempts to explain local topographic features or the presence of fossil shells high above sea level. A large number are recollections -- vastly distorted and exaggerated, as is the rule in folklore -- of real local disasters, often demonstrably consistent with special local geologic conditions. Surely it is not accidental, for instance, that in many flood traditions from the Pacific coast of the Americas and from Pacific islands, the flood is attributed to a rise of the sea; more than 90 percent of the earthquake energy released annually in the world is released in the Pacific area, and consequently tsunamis are most likely to be generated there. One of the oldest of the remembered flood disasters occurred a long, long time ago in Mesopotamia, and it made such an impression on the dwellers in the city of Ur that the tale was handed down from generation to generation and carried with the Patriarchs when they migrated toward the Mediterranean. The legend born of that long-ago flood might never have wandered very much farther from its source were it not for the fact that it became a part of the Scriptures, and thus in later ages was zealously carried to every corner of the world by Christian missionaries, often to become merged with pre-existing traditions indigenous to their localities. Flood traditions are nearly universal, partly because of the efforts of these missionaries, but mainly because floods in the plural are the most nearly universal of all geologic catastrophes.

Keep in mind the above material when reading the following conclusions from the Watchtower article on Flood legends, page 9.²⁷⁰ It contains a number of inaccuracies and unwarranted conclusions.

What can we conclude from these many Flood legends? Though they differ greatly in details, they have some common features. These indicate an origin in some gigantic and unforgettable cataclysm. Despite vivid colorations over the centuries, their underlying theme is like a thread that ties them to one great event -- the global Deluge related in the simple, uncolored Bible account.

Since the Flood legends are generally found among people who did not come in touch with the Bible until recent centuries, it would be a mistake to contend that the Scriptural account influenced them.... So we can confidently conclude that the Flood legends confirm the reality of the Biblical account.

This Watchtower article quoted from The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, as does the article on the Deluge in the Insight book. Here is the one from Insight.²⁷¹ Again note the inaccuracies:

The universality of the flood accounts is usually taken as evidence for the universal destruction of humanity by a flood and the spread of the human race from one locale and even from one family. Though the traditions may not all refer to the same flood, apparently the vast majority do. The assertion that many of these flood stories came from contacts with missionaries will not stand up because most of them were gathered by anthropologists not interested in vindicating the Bible,

What does who gathered the stories have to do with whether they came from missionary contacts?

and they are filled with fanciful and pagan elements evidently the result of transmission for extended periods of time in a pagan society. Moreover, some of the ancient accounts were written by people very much in opposition to the Hebrew-Christian tradition.

Opposition to the Hebrew-Christian tradition apparently did not matter in the case of the Greek Deukalion story or the Indian Manu story -- they gradually took on more and more biblical elements over time.

What about the Genesis Flood account itself? Is it self-consistent? Does it really bear the mark of inspiration by God? The general consensus among non-fundamentalist biblical scholars is that it is self-contradictory and is actually the result of two earlier accounts being merged and reworked by Jewish priests of the fifth century B.C. Isaac Asimov's In The Beginning²⁷² contains much commentary on this material. The Noah's Ark Nonsense²⁷³ explains the problems clearly:

The Flood story in Genesis is more complex than the other Flood accounts. Unlike them, it contains significant contradictions and inconsistencies. Here are some examples.

CONTRADICTIONS AND INCONSISTENCIES

1a. Then the Lord said to Noah, "... Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate; and seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive upon the face of all the earth" (7:1a, 2-3).

1b. And God said to Noah, "... And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every sort shall come in to you, to keep them alive" (6:13a, 19-20).

These two passages clearly disagree on the number of birds and of clean animals that should be taken aboard the ark (clean animals are those fit to eat; see Leviticus 11): seven pair in 1a, and one pair in 1b. The passages also disagree on the term for deity: "the Lord" vs. "God."

2a. And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights.... At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made, ... He waited another seven days, ... Then he waited another seven days (7:12; 8:6, 10a, 12a).

2b. In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.... In the six hundred and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried from off the earth; ... In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry. Then God said to Noah, "Go forth from the ark" (7:11; 8:13a, 14-16a).

These two sets of passages disagree on the duration of the Flood. In 2a a total of only 54 days (40 plus 7 plus 7) passed from the time that the Flood began until Noah left the ark. In 2b, however, the period was the equivalent of a solar year. The period appears to be more than a year (a year and ten days), but that is because time here is stated in terms of the old Near Eastern lunar year.²⁸

28. As stated in these passages in Genesis, the period of time is from the 600th year of Noah's life, 2d month, 17th day, to the 601st year, 2d month, 27th day. The "year" is a lunar year (12 months of 29 1/2 days each), with 11 days added (according to the ancient custom of counting both the first and last days [17th and 27th]). This adds up to 365 days, a solar year. See Cassuto, vol. 2, p. 113 [Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis].

Biblical fundamentalists invariably either ignore these differences or try to interpret the verses to eliminate the differences and to harmonize the passages. Such procedure fails because it distorts the evidence. Either device -- ignoring parts of the text or reinterpreting parts of the text -- usually leads to misinterpretation of the text.

THE DISCOVERY OF SOURCES

The only way to understand the cause of the inconsistencies is to recognize that we have before us an example of ancient composite literature. Two separate written sources have been conflated; that is, two sources, or extracts from two sources, have been interwoven into one account, without rewriting them to make their vocabulary, style, and ideas agree with each other. Conflation invariably produces contradictions and inconsistencies, and sometimes duplications. Ancient Near Eastern literature, including that of the Hebrews, often repeated ideas, however, so duplication of thought does not necessarily indicate several writers. On the other hand, duplication of an incident in a story is usually caused by conflation. Composite literature was very prevalent in the ancient world, and a major contribution of modern biblical scholarship is the recognition that much of both the Old Testament and the New Testament is composite.

The same two sources that are used in the Genesis Flood story run through the Pentateuch, where they are combined with other source material. The presence of written sources in the Creation accounts was first observed when H. B. Witter in 1711 recognized the significance of the different terms for God. Gradually biblical scholars discovered more and more evidence of earlier sources and later editing in the Pentateuch. The famous Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis assigned letters to the main sources: J, E, P, and D. Although the hypothesis has had to be revised and refined, it is basically sound. Orthodox Jews and Christians attack it because it upsets the traditional view that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, but the evidence for written sources is quite decisive. The contradictions, duplications, and linguistic inconsistencies cannot be sensibly explained as the composition of a single writer.^273a

The passages quoted above in the "a" category (1a, 2a) are from the J source, in which the term for God is "the Lord." The passages in the "b" category are from the P source, in which the term is "God." J was written in the tenth or possibly ninth century B.C., but the date of P is sixth century and later -- P was written over a period of time. J was a narrative document in which stories were arranged in a chronological framework. P was produced by Hebrew priests to promote their religion.

Duplication is another type of evidence that there are two sources in the Genesis Flood story. Three instances are quite plain. (1) Noah is told who and what to take aboard (7:1-5, J; 6:18-22, P). (2) The Flood begins (7:10, J; 7:11, P). (3) The deity promises not to do it again (8:21-22, J; 9:8-11, P).

The evidence forms a pattern: the same passage that is a duplication, or a contradiction, or causes a break in the flow of thought, usually displays a difference in vocabulary, especially the word for God.

If we are to understand the Flood story in the Bible in relation to other Deluge stories, we must first separate it into its two accounts and let each speak for itself. The traditional practice of treating them as a single account, on the other hand, conceals the distinguishing characteristics of each, and presents a distorted picture of the Hebrews' treatment of the story.

Below is a reconstruction of the two sources, in the Revised Standard Version, according to the analysis made by Professor Speiser.²⁹ "R" indicates either an insertion made by a redactor (editor) or a later gloss made by a scribe.

29. E. A. Speiser, Genesis, pp. 47-50. [Vol. 1, Anchor Bible series]

THE FLOOD STORY IN J

The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, "I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them." But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord (6:5-8).

Then the Lord said to Noah, "Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation. Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate; and seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive upon the face of all the earth. For in seven days I will send rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground." And Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him. (7:1-5).

And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives with him went into the ark, to escape the waters of the flood. (Of clean animals, and of animals that are not clean, and of birds, and of everything that creeps on the ground, (two and two, [R]) male and female, went into the ark with Noah [R; Speiser overlooked this gloss, suggested by 6:22 and 7:16]). And after seven days the waters of the flood came upon the earth (7:7-10).

And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights (7:12).

And the Lord shut him in. The flood continued forty days upon the earth [Speiser assigns part of this clause to P]; and the waters increased, and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth (7:16c-17).

Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the ground, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark (7:22-23).

The rain from the heavens was restrained, and the waters receded from the earth continually (8:2b-3a).

At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made, and sent forth a raven; and it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth. Then he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground; but the dove found no place to set her foot, and she returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put forth his hand and took her and brought her into the ark with him. He waited another seven days, and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark; and the dove came back to him in the evening, and lo, in her mouth a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth. Then he waited another seven days, and sent forth the dove; and she did not return to him any more (8:6-12).

And Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and behold, the face of the ground was dry (8:13b).

Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor, the Lord said in his heart, "I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease" (8:20-22).

THE FLOOD STORY IN P

These are the generations of Noah. (Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God [R].) And Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth. And God said to Noah, "I have determined to make an end of all flesh; for the earth is filled with violence through them; behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. Make a roof [Speiser: sky light] for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and set the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks. For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall die. But I will establish my covenant with you; and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons' wives with you. And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every sort shall come in to you to keep them alive. Also take with you every sort of food that is eaten, and store it up; and it shall serve as food for you and for them." Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him (6:9-22).

Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came upon the earth (7:6).

In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened (7:11).

On the very same day Noah and his sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth, and Noah's wife and the three wives of his sons with them entered the ark, they and every beast according to its kind, and all the cattle according to their kinds, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth according to its kind, and every bird according to its kind, every bird of every sort. They went into the ark with Noah, two and two of all flesh in which there was the breath of life. And they that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him (7:13-16b).

The waters prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark floated on the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed so mightily upon the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered; the waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, birds, cattle, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm upon the earth, and every man (7:18-21).

And the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days. But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed (7:24-8:2a).

At the end of a hundred and fifty days the waters had abated; and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest upon the mountains of Ararat. And the waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen (8:3b-5).

In the six hundred and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried from off the earth (8:13a).

In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry. Then God said to Noah, "Go forth from the ark, you and your wife, your sons and your sons' wives with you. Bring forth with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh (birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth [R; Speiser assigns this to P]) that they may breed abundantly on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply upon the earth." So Noah went forth, and his sons and his wife and his son's wives with him. And every beast, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves upon the earth, went forth by families out of the ark (8:14-19).

And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth" (9:1).

....

CHARACTERISTICS OF J

Two of the most obvious features of J, which are not in P, have been mentioned: "the Lord" as the name for God, and the distinction between clean and unclean animals, an old distinction in Hebrew and other religions. Also the numbers seven and forty are characteristic of J. Seven was a popular number in the Near East because of interest in the seven planets and the seven days of the week. "Forty days" occurs often in the Bible. The Hebrew word geshem, "heavy rain," is another linguistic feature of J's Flood story. In J, Noah sent forth birds after the rains ceased. The ark apparently had no window, and in order to see that the ground was dry, Noah had to remove the covering over the ark. Afterwards, Noah built an altar and offered up a tremendous burnt offering, which consisted of some of every kind of clean animal and every kind of clean bird. This feature demonstrates that J's author or authors sought to promote Hebrew ritualistic law....

CHARACTERISTICS OF P

P's priestly authors were very much interested in composing genealogies; therefore the term "generations" occurs often in P. The word occurs in the Flood story in Genesis 6:9.

Only P gives details of the ark's construction. The dimensions are given in Hebrew cubits: approximately 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high....

It is P which gives a landing site for the ark: "the mountains of Ararat." As we have observed, this indicates some connection with the Hurrian version of the Flood story. Considering the late date of P, however, its priestly writers may have learned of it indirectly through some other group.

The covenant idea was very characteristic of Hebrew religion. Accordingly, the priestly writers interpreted God's promise (not to send such a flood again) as a covenant between God and Noah and his descendants. They made the rainbow the sign of this covenant.

The situation after the Flood was similar to that after the Creation: only a very few people were on earth to reproduce the human race. Therefore the priestly writers portrayed God as giving the same instruction in both situations. He told Noah and his sons (9:1), as well as Adam and Eve (1:28), "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth." The same writers used the expression, "according to its kind," in both the Creation and Flood accounts (1:25; 7:14).

The author of The Noah's Ark Nonsense next shows the parallels in the two Genesis accounts with those in the early Sumerian account, the Gilgamesh Epic, and various other ancient flood stories.

For many years I noted breaks in the flow of thought in the Genesis account (usually using the New World Translation), the needless duplication of the description of events, the places where the account says clearly that two of each of every sort of animal went into the ark, as opposed to the places where it says seven clean and two unclean went in, and other problems. As is apparent from reading of the above J and P accounts, it is clear why these problems occur -- there are two accounts in Genesis that have not been made consistent with one another. Note how much more smoothly each account flows than does the composite account.

Here are a few more problems. Why, for example, does Gen. 8:6 say (New World Translation):

So it occurred that at the end of forty days Noah proceeded to open the window of the ark that he had made.

The composite account in Genesis does not make clear at the end of forty days of what. The verse only makes sense in terms of the above explanation -- it is part of the J document, which pegs the length of the Flood at 54 days total, and the forty days were the end of forty days of rain. Another translation of Genesis, in The Book of J,²⁷⁴ presents the entire J document and further makes these things clear.

Similarly, it is not clear what the 150 day time periods refer to. From reading various translations, it is not clear whether there are one or two. What is clear is that Gen. 7:24 to 8:2 says consistently the same thing across many translations. The New World Translation says:

And the waters continued overwhelming the earth a hundred and fifty days. After that God remembered Noah.... and God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters began to subside. And the springs of the watery deep and the floodgates of the heavens became stopped up, and so the downpour from the heavens was restrained.

The New English Bible says:

When the waters had increased over the earth for a hundred and fifty days, God thought of Noah.... and he made a wind pass over the earth, and the waters began to subside. The springs of the abyss were stopped up, and so were the windows of the sky; the downpour from the skies was checked.

The Jerusalem Bible says:

The waters rose on the earth for a hundred and fifty days. But God had Noah in mind.... God sent a wind across the earth and the waters subsided. The springs of the deep and the sluices of heaven were stopped. Rain ceased to fall from heaven....

The Revised Standard Version says:

And the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days. But God remembered Noah.... And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed.

The Bible in Living English says:

And the water swelled over the earth for a hundred and fifty days. And God remembered Noah.... and God sent a wind across the earth, and the water was checked; and the water-holes leading from the deep and the hatches of the sky were blocked, and the rain was shut off from the sky.

These quotations from the P document make it plain that the rain shut off after 150 days, whereas according to Gen. 7:4, 12, which is from the J document (New World Translation):

.... I am making it rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights.... And the downpour upon the earth went on for forty days and forty nights.

The Society makes no attempt, at least that I have been able to find, to address any of the above problems. Gen. 8:6 is not referenced in any Watchtower publications index from 1930 through 1989. It is conspicuous by its absence. The various time periods mentioned in Genesis -- the 40 day periods, the 150 day periods, and the dates of the month -- all have a general disconnectedness out of which little sense can be made, and the Society gives no hint of the difficulty. Even the Aid and Insight books do not attempt to reconcile the time periods, but present only the things that can be made sense of. Try to decipher the time periods yourself. You will quickly see what I mean.

Part 21: Summary on the Flood

By 1831, six years before Louis Agassiz presented his ideas on ice ages, geologists had been forced by the evidence to abandon their ideas that the deposits they had called "drift" had been formed by an earthwide flood. Almost to a man these geologists were deeply committed Christians, and they had called the deposits drift specifically because of their belief that they had drifted to their final resting places in the Flood. Science and Creationism explains this in more detail:²⁷⁵

Flood geology was considered and tested by early-nineteenth-century geologists. They never believed that a single flood had produced all fossil-bearing strata, but they did accept and then disprove a claim that the uppermost strata contained evidence for a single, catastrophic, worldwide inundation. The science of geology arose in nations that were glaciated during the great ice ages, and glacial deposits are similar to the products of floods. During the 1820s, British geologists carried out an extensive empirical program to test whether these deposits represented the action of a single flood. The work was led by two ministers, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick (who taught Darwin his geology) and the Reverend William Buckland. Buckland initially decided that all the "superficial gravels" (as these deposits were called) represented a single event, and he published his Reliquiae diluvianae (Relics of the Flood) in 1824. However, Buckland's subsequent field work proved that the superficial gravels were not contemporaneous but represented several different events (multiple ice ages, as we now know). Geology proclaimed no worldwide flood but rather a long sequence of local events. In one of the great statements in the history of science, Sedgwick, who was Buckland's close colleague in both science and theology, publicly abandoned flood geology -- and upheld empirical science -- in his presidential address to the Geological Society of London in 1831.

'Having been myself a believer, and, to the best of my power, a propagator of what I now regard as a philosophic heresy, and having more than once been quoted for opinions I do not now maintain, I think it right, as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation.... 'There is, I think, one great negative conclusion now incontestably established -- that the vast masses of diluvial gravel, scattered almost over the surface of the earth, do not belong to one violent and transitory period....

'We ought, indeed, to have paused before we first adopted the diluvian theory, and referred all our old superficial gravel to the action of the Mosaic flood.... In classing together distant unknown formations under one name; in giving them a simultaneous origin, and in determining their date, not by the organic remains we had discovered, but by those we expected hypothetically hereafter to discover, in them; we have given one more example of the passion with which the mind fastens upon general conclusions, and of the readiness with which it leaves the consideration of unconnected truths.'

I've presented extensive evidence that shows there are no traces of an earthwide Flood in the geology of the earth. One by one, I've shown that the Society's main arguments about geological phenomena related to the Flood do not hold up in the face of the evidence. Without a miracle, there was no source for the water. The amount of water present on earth today is insufficient to have covered the mountains, so without a miracle where could the necessary water have gone? There is no evidence that high mountains, deep sea basins, and polar ice caps formed during the last four thousand years. An earthwide tropical climate did not exist a little over four thousand years ago. Rain has been part of the weather for hundreds of millions of years. In short, there is no geological evidence the Flood occurred, and the Society's contentions about the geological evidence are spurious. The Society should take a lesson from Adam Sedgwick.

I have not proved that a Flood did not or could not have occurred -- only that if it did it had to be miraculous in every detail. It came and went without a trace, except possibly in legends and the Bible. I find this unreasonable. How could there be no geological traces of such a globally catastrophic event? With so much geological evidence in hand, it makes little more sense to believe a Flood occurred without a series of miracles than to believe the earth is flat, or the sun goes around the earth. Not surprisingly, some still believe these things, and use almost the same arguments the Society does in explaining away the evidence they don't want to believe.

For me, the Genesis account of the Flood is very hard to reconcile, not only with the physical evidence, but with the Bible's description of God as a loving creator. At the very least, it does not paint a picture of a reasonable God. Why would God destroy all animal life in addition to sinful mankind? Could it really be true of every man except Noah and seven others, as Genesis says, that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only bad all the time? And why go to such trouble to make a Flood, with all its consequences for the earth and animal life? Long before knowing any geological evidence other than what the Society presented in its publications, I held an opinion similar to Isaac Asimov's, who said,²⁷⁶ "Whatever their sins, a more merciful deity, one might imagine, would have simply swept them painlessly out of existence with a word, and begun over again."

Footnotes

¹ Insight on the Scriptures, Vol. 1, pp. 609-612, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1988.

² Aid to Bible Understanding, pp. 449-441, 1230, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1971.

³ Insight on the Scriptures, Vol. 1, p. 610, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1988.

⁴ Life-How Did It Get Here? By Evolution or by Creation?, p. 203, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1985.

⁵ Ivan T. Sanderson, "Riddle of the Frozen Giants," The Saturday Evening Post, January 16, 1960.

⁶ Antony J. Sutcliffe, On The Track Of Ice Age Mammals, p. 49, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985.

⁷ Daniel E. Wonderly, God's Time-Records in Ancient Sediments, Crystal Press Publishers, Flint, Michigan, 1977.

⁸ Daniel E. Wonderly, Neglect of Geologic Data: Sedimentary Strata Compared with Young-Earth Creationist Writings, Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute, Hatfield, Pennsylvania, 1987.

^8a Both are available from Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute, POB 423, Hatfield PA, 19440-0423.

^8b See, for example, Worlds in Collision by Immanuel Velikovsky, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1950. Velikovsky exaggerated the findings of frozen animals, animal remains in caves and remains in other unusual circumstances. He has come to be regarded as "the very model of a crank." [Science: Good, Bad and Bogus, Martin Gardner, Prometheus Books, 1989, p. xiv] Sanderson may well have gotten some of his information from Velikovsky's best-selling book.

In case you are not familiar with Velikovsky's works, here is a summary from pages 4 and 381 of Science: Good, Bad and Bogus: "Dr. Velikovsky (he was trained in psychoanalysis) set himself the task of revising the laws of astronomy and physics, and rewriting vast globs of ancient history, to spin an incredible tale about the planet Venus that would 'explain' the major miracles of the Old Testament." "The book throws together a jumbled mass of data to support the preposterous theory that a giant comet once erupted from the planet Jupiter, passed close to the earth on two occasions, then settled down as Venus. The first visit to the earth of this erratic comet was precisely at the time Moses stretched out his hand and caused the Red Sea to divide. The manna which fell from the skies shortly thereafter was a precipitate, fortunately edible, of suspended elements in the celestial visitor's tail. Later the comet's return coincided with Joshua's successful attempt to make the sun and moon stand still. The miracles of both Moses and Joshua were the result, Velikovsky informs us, of a temporary cessation of the earth's spin." Also see Broca's Brain, Carl Sagan, Ballantine Books, 1979, for more on Velikovsky.

Another example is The Earth's Shifting Crust, Charles Hapgood, Philadelphia, 1958. He presents a theory that the earth's poles have slid around, giving rise to great catastrophes such as the Flood.

A third book is The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, Donald W. Patten, Pacific Meridian Publishing Co., Seattle, WA, 1966, which has been cited in the Society's publications. The author refers quite favorably to the works of Immanuel Velikovsky and compares his own book to them, which shows the extent of his competence in the field of geology. This book is interesting because it gives a summary of the history of 20th century catastrophist authors. It even mentions Isaac Newton Vail, whose theories the Society espoused until the 1950s.

A fourth example is The Lost Ship of Noah, Charles Berlitz, G.P. Putnam's Son's, 1987, pp. 143-144. Berlitz is the author of such gems as Atlantis: The Eighth Continent, Doomsday 1999 A.D., Mysteries From Forgotten Worlds, and The Bermuda Triangle. He uncritically repeats the errors about quick-frozen mammals as expounded by Velikovsky and Hapgood.

A fifth example is The Bone Peddlers, William R. Fix, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1984, pp. 230-231. Fix does a devastating job on the supposed evolution of man, but accepts the nonsense of both Sanderson and Hapgood. He similarly accepts evidence for ESP and other paranormal phenomena.

⁹ O. F. Herz, "Frozen Mammoth in Siberia," Smithsonian Institution Annual Report for 1903, p. 614, 1903. Extracts translated from the Russian.

¹⁰ William R. Farrand, "Frozen Mammoths and Modern Geology," Science, vol. 133, p. 734, March 17, 1961.

¹¹ O. F. Herz, op cit, p. 621.

¹² ibid, pp. 614-623.

^12a Also see Dorothy B. Vitaliano, Legends of the Earth, The Citadel Press, Secaucus, New Jersey; 1973, 1976; pp. 280-281.

¹³ ibid, pp. 620-622.

¹⁴ ibid, p. 612.

¹⁵ William R. Farrand, op cit, p. 734.

¹⁶ Bjorn Kurten, How To Deep-Freeze a Mammoth, pp. 51-52, Columbia University Press, New York, 1986. English Edition.

¹⁷ Norman D. Newell, Creation and Evolution: Myth or Reality?, pp. 65-66, Columbia University Press, New York, 1982.

¹⁸ Windsor Chorlton, Ice Ages, pp. 53-54, Time-Life Books, Alexandria, VA, 1983.

¹⁹ Bjorn Kurten, op cit, pp. 57-59.

²⁰ Bjorn Kurten, The Innocent Assassins, p. 194, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991.

²¹ Windsor Chorlton, op cit, p. 59.

²² Antony Sutcliffe, op cit, p. 41.

²³ R. Dale Guthrie, Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1990.

²⁴ R. Dale Guthrie, op cit, pp. 7-24.

²⁵ ibid, pp. 1-44.

²⁶ William R. Farrand, op cit, March 17, 1961.

²⁷ ibid.

²⁸ ibid.

²⁹ ibid.

³⁰ anonymous, op cit, p. 203.

^30a Another misconception. Fossils of seashells are found embedded in the rocks on high mountains. Seashells themselves are never found just lying around on high mountain tops. This was recognized even in the 16th century by Leonardo Da Vinci, who "saw that the fossils were not simply strewn over the surface, but that the Appenines and Alps were almost wholly composed of fossil-filled rocks.... He deduced that the mountains were uplifted piles of river sediments and sea muds that had first hardened into shale, sandstone, and limestone, then folded and broken, and finally had been exposed to view by erosion." [Creation and Evolution: Myth or Reality?, Norman D. Newell, p. 36.]

However, in some areas such as Scandinavia and New England, marine deposits have been found at elevations up to about 1000 feet. But these are always found in areas where there is evidence that ice sheets covered the area and depressed it below sea level. The book Islands, H. W. Menard, Scientific American Books, Inc., New York, 1986, pp. 75-76 says ".... the uplift of Scandinavia was long ago obvious because ancient seaports became unusably shallow, then emerged, and gradually became elevated above a receding shoreline. This uplift extended from Denmark to the northern tip of Norway and from the Atlantic to eastern Finland. Nonetheless, it was a local phenomenon with a local cause. During the ice ages of the past million years, the whole region that now has elevated shorelines was covered by a continental ice cap centered in the northern end of what is now the Gulf of Bothnia. The load of the ice on the continental crust made a dish-shaped depression surrounded by a peripheral bulge. When the ice began to melt, the warped rocks began to resume their original shape. At the shrinking periphery of the ice, the sea cut terraces and left dateable marine fossils. By correlating terraces of the same age, it is possible to map the amount and rate of uplift of the deglaciated region. The center has been uplifted 500 [meters], and the amount of uplift is progressively less toward the edges of the former ice cap. Moreover, exactly the same evidence of differential, regional uplift can be obtained with tide gauges. Near Copenhagen, the sea floor is rising at 3 cm per century; at Stockholm the rise is 50 cm per century, and at the northern end of the Gulf of Bothnia it is 110 cm per century. All these phenomena are also observed in North America, where there was another ice cap."

The areas of marine submergence in the United States are shown on a map in Earth, Frank Press, W. H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1986, p. 253, which clearly shows that parts of coastal Maine and the Lake Champlain area of New York were under water for a time. Fossil skeletons of seals and whales have been found in these areas. The Lake Champlain area was connected to an arm of the Saint Lawrence seaway, and Lake Champlain still drains there. For a thorough discussion see After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America, E.C. Pielou, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1991.

Similar warping of the crust is observed in the British Isles, where Scotland, which was under ice, is rising, and the London area, which was not, is sinking.

³¹ William R. Farrand, op cit, March 17, 1961.

³² Bjorn Kurten, op cit.

³³ Windsor Chorlton, op cit.

³⁴ ibid, p. 70.

³⁵ Antony Sutcliffe, op cit, p. 41.

³⁶ ibid, pp. 105-116.

³⁷ ibid, p. 114.

³⁸ R. Dale Guthrie, op cit.

³⁹ E. C. Pielou, After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1991.

⁴⁰ Antony Sutcliffe, op cit, pp. 74-80.

⁴¹ ibid, p. 139.

⁴² Norman D. Newell, op cit, p. 68.

⁴³ The Bible -- God's Word or Man's?, pp. 114-115, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1989.

⁴⁴ Windsor Chorlton, op cit, pp. 54-69.

⁴⁵ Insight on the Scriptures, Vol. 1, p. 609, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1988.

⁴⁶ The Watchtower, p. 420, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, July 15, 1968.

^46a These are often based on an explanation from The Genesis Flood by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, pp. 240-241, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, MI, 1961,which says ".... the region above about 80 miles is very hot, over 100Deg F and possibly rising to 3000Deg F, and is in fact called the thermosphere for this reason. High temperature, of course, is the chief requisite for retaining a large quantity of water vapor. Furthermore, it is known that water vapor is substantially lighter than air and most of the other gases making up the atmosphere. There is thus nothing physically impossible about the concept of a vast thermal blanket once existing in the upper atmosphere."

The problem is that the atmosphere above 80 miles is extremely tenuous -- so tenuous that satellites can orbit at 100 miles. If the entire region above 80 miles were nothing but water vapor, at today's pressure, it would amount to only a small fraction of an inch if condensed and spread evenly over the surface of the earth. Also, the temperature is high because the upper atmosphere absorbs high energy radiation from the sun -- the thermosphere protects the earth's surface from ultraviolet and other types of radiation. If there were a thick vapor blanket up there, only the tenuous topmost portion would be hot, while the rest of it would be at much lower temperature, because it would be shielded from the radiation by the topmost layer. So the idea that a vast thermal blanket once existed in the upper atmosphere and provided enough water to flood the earth is not physically reasonable.

⁴⁷ Insight on the Scriptures, Vol. 1, p. 610, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1988.

⁴⁸ Norman D. Newell, Creation and Evolution: Myth or Reality?, pp. 37-38, Columbia University Press, New York, 1982.

⁴⁹ H. W. Menard, Islands, p. 77, Scientific American Books, Inc., New York, 1986.

⁵⁰ D. R. Selkirk and F. J. Burrows, editors, Confronting Creationism: Defending Darwin, New South Wales University Press, Kensington NSW Australia, 1988.

⁵¹ Bjorn Kurten, How To Deep-Freeze a Mammoth, pp. 23-24, Columbia University Press, New York, 1986. English Edition.

⁵² Lloyd Motz and Anneta Duveen, Essentials of Astronomy, p. 64, Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc., Belmont, CA, 1966.

⁵³ Norman D. Newell, op cit, pp. 119-124.

⁵⁴ Kent C. Condie, Plate Tectonics & Crustal Evolution, Second Edition, pp. 19-20, Pergamon Press, Inc., New York, 1982.

⁵⁵ Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb, The Genesis Flood, pp. 343-344, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1961.

⁵⁶ Laurence R. Kittleman, "Tephra," Scientific American, p. 171, New York, December, 1979.

⁵⁷ "Ice on the World," National Geographic Magazine, p. 98, Washington, D.C., January, 1987.

⁵⁸ Robert D. Ballard, Exploring Our Living Planet, p. 315, National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C., 1988.

⁵⁹ Awake!, pp. 17-27, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY.

⁶⁰ Robert Gannon, "How Old Is It?," Popular Science, p. 81, November, 1979.

⁶¹ David B. Wilson, Did the Devil Make Darwin Do It?, p. 216, The Iowa State Press, Ames, Iowa, 1983.

⁶² Laurie R. Godfrey, Scientists Confront Creationism, pp. 71-72, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1983.

⁶³ Robert D. Ballard, op cit.

⁶⁴ H. W. Menard, Islands, Scientific American Books, Inc., New York, 1986.

⁶⁵ ibid, pp. 27-39.

⁶⁶ ibid, pp. 41-48.

⁶⁷ D. R. Selkirk and F. J. Burrows, editors, Confronting Creationism: Defending Darwin, p. 64, New South Wales University Press, Kensington NSW Australia, 1988.

⁶⁸ Gregory E. Vink, W. Jason Morgan, Peter R. Vogt, "The Earth's Hot Spots," Scientific American, p. 50, New York, April, 1985.

⁶⁹ Insight On the Scriptures, op cit, Vol. 1, p. 610.

⁷⁰ H. W. Menard, Islands, pp. 118-127, Scientific American Books, Inc., New York, 1986.

⁷¹ Gregory E. Vink, et al, op cit, p. 52.

⁷² Kent C. Condie, op cit, p. 169.

⁷³ H. W. Menard, op cit, p. 44.

⁷⁴ Gregory E. Vink, et al, op cit, p. 50.

⁷⁵ Jean Francheteau, Scientific American, pp. 116-117, New York, September, 1983.

⁷⁶ Robert D. Ballard, op cit, p. 166.

⁷⁷ Walter Sullivan, Landprints, p. 53, Times Books, New York, NY, 1984.

⁷⁸ ibid, p. 178.

⁷⁹ Robert B. Smith and Robert L. Christiansen, Scientific American, p. 116, New York, February, 1980.

⁸⁰ National Geographic Magazine, Washington, D.C., August, 1985.

⁸¹ Thomas H. Jordan and J. Bernard Minster, Scientific American, p. 49, New York, August, 1988.

⁸² ibid, pp. 104-106.

⁸³ Peter Francis, Scientific American, New York, June, 1983.

⁸⁴ Norman D. Newell, op cit, p. 78.

⁸⁵ Antony Sutcliffe, op cit, p. 43.

⁸⁶ Walter Sullivan, op cit, p. 152.

⁸⁷ Bjorn Kurten, op cit, pp. 42-48.

⁸⁸ Enrico Bonatti and Kathleen Crane, "Oceanic Fracture Zones," Scientific American, New York, May, 1984.

⁸⁹ John G. Sclater and Christopher Tapscott, Scientific American, New York, June, 1979.

⁹⁰ Thomas H. Jordan and J. Bernard Minster, "Measuring Crustal Deformation in the American West," Scientific American, New York, August, 1988.

⁹¹ Allan Cox and Robert Brian Hart, Plate Tectonics-How it Works, pp. 268-269, Blackwell Scientific Publications, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, 1986.

⁹² The Bible -- God's Word or Man's?, p. 113, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1989.

^92a Think of the effect on the oceans themselves, having to absorb that much heat.

⁹³ William Glen, The Road to Jaramillo, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1982. Critical Years of the Revolution in Earth Science.

⁹⁴ ibid, p. 224.

⁹⁵ ibid, p. 269.

⁹⁶ ibid, pp. 340-351.

⁹⁷ Don L. Anderson and Adam M. Dziewonski, "Seismic Tomography," Scientific American, New York, October, 1984.

⁹⁸ David G. Howell, Scientific American, New York, November, 1985.

⁹⁹ David L. Jones, etc., Scientific American, New York, November, 1982.

¹⁰⁰ Robert S. White and Dan P. McKenzie, "Volcanism at Rifts," Scientific American, New York, July, 1989.

¹⁰¹ Robert D. Ballard, op cit, p. 327.

¹⁰² J. Brendan Murphy and R. Damian Nance, "Mountain Belts and the Supercontinent Cycle," Scientific American, pp. 84-91, New York, April, 1992.

¹⁰³ R. Damian Nance, Thomas R. Worsley and Judith B. Moody, "The Supercontinent Cycle," Scientific American, pp. 72-78, New York, July, 1988.

¹⁰⁴ ibid.

¹⁰⁵ Peter Molnar, Scientific American, New York, July, 1986.

¹⁰⁶ H. W. Menard, op cit, p. 137.

¹⁰⁷ Richard L. Hay and Mary D. Leakey, "The Fossil Footprints of Laetoli," Scientific American, New York, February, 1982.

¹⁰⁸ The Bible: God's Word or Man's?, p. 100.

¹⁰⁹ The Watchtower, op cit, pp. 3-4, January 15, 1992.

¹¹⁰ The New Encyclopedia Britannica, Micropedia, Vol. 1, p. 518, 1991.

¹¹¹ John Warwick Montgomery, The Quest For Noah's Ark, p. 227, Bethany Fellowship, Inc., Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1972.

A fairly reasonable account of many searches on Mount Ararat for Noah's ark. Uncritically accepts much hearsay evidence, and omits evidence contrary to the author's belief that the ark is on Ararat.

¹¹² Fred M. Bullard, Volcanoes in History, in Theory, in Eruption, pp. 248-249, University of Texas Press, 1962.

¹¹³ Charles Berlitz, The Lost Ship of Noah, pp. 15-27, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1987.

By the author of such books as The Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis: The Eighth Continent, and Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds. Contains much evidence supporting the author's opinion that the ark is on Mount Ararat, but suppresses much contrary evidence. The author apparently made a trip to Ararat in the mid 1980s, but found nothing. Berlitz quotes such luminaries as Immanuel Velikovsky and Charles Hapgood in support of his ideas on the Flood.

¹¹⁴ Lloyd R. Bailey, Where Is Noah's Ark?, pp. 13-46, Abingdon, Nashville, Tennessee, 1978.

One of the few objective accounts, and by far the best, of searches for Noah's ark that I've found. Supplies much evidence missing from less critical accounts.

¹¹⁵ Lloyd R. Bailey, Noah: The Person and the Story in History and Tradition, pp. 53-115, University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, South Carolina, 1989.

Perhaps the most comprehensive study of Noachian traditions available. Contains most of the material from Bailey's 1978 book.

¹¹⁶ ibid, pp. 13-46.

¹¹⁷ ibid, pp. 45-46.

¹¹⁸ ibid, p. 54.

¹¹⁹ ibid, p. 57.

¹²⁰ ibid, p. 63.

¹²¹ ibid, pp. 64-81.

¹²² Awake!, p. 22, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, September 22, 1986.

¹²³ Berlitz, op cit, p. 96.

¹²⁴ Bailey, op cit, p. 119.

¹²⁵ ibid, pp. 89-98.

¹²⁶ Samuel W. Matthews, "Ice on the World," National Geographic Magazine, p. 99, Washington, D.C., January, 1987.

¹²⁷ Howard M. Teeple, The Noah's Ark Nonsense, p. 121, Religion and Ethics Institute, Inc., Evanston, Illinois, 1978.

¹²⁸ David G. Howell, "Terranes," Scientific American, p. 118, New York, November, 1985.

¹²⁹ John C. Mutter, "Seismic Images of Plate Boundaries," Scientific American, New York, February, 1986.

¹³⁰ Kenneth J. Hsu, The Mediterranean Was a Desert, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1983. A Voyage of the Glomar Challenger.

¹³¹ ibid, p. 7.

¹³² ibid, pp. 10-19.

¹³³ ibid, p. 105.

¹³⁴ ibid, p. 127.

¹³⁵ ibid, pp. 149-153.

¹³⁶ Walter Sullivan, Continents In Motion, pp. 166-167, American Institute of Physics, New York, 1991.

¹³⁷ Kenneth J. Hsu, op cit, pp. 173-175.

¹³⁸ ibid, p. 182.

¹³⁹ ibid, pp. 31-32.

¹⁴⁰ The Bible -- God's Word or Man's?, pp. 113-114, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1989.

¹⁴¹ John Eliot Allen, Marjorie Burns, and Sam C. Sargent, Cataclysms on the Columbia, Timber Press, Portland, Oregon, 1986.

¹⁴² ibid, pp. 3-4.

¹⁴³ ibid, pp. 31-32.

¹⁴⁴ ibid, pp. 33-34.

¹⁴⁵ ibid, p. 27.

¹⁴⁶ ibid, pp. 37-39.

¹⁴⁷ ibid, p. 92.

¹⁴⁸ ibid, pp. 27-29.

¹⁴⁹ ibid, p. 93.

¹⁵⁰ ibid, p. 180.

¹⁵¹ ibid, p. 174.

¹⁵² ibid, p. 182.

¹⁵³ ibid, p. 36, 126, 127, 136, 137, 149, 181, 183.

¹⁵⁴ ibid, p. 104.

¹⁵⁵ ibid, p. 57.

¹⁵⁶ Walter Sullivan, Landprints, p. 165, Times Books, New York, NY, 1984.

¹⁵⁷ ibid, p. 168.

¹⁵⁸ John Eliot Allen, et al, op cit, p. 124.

¹⁵⁹ ibid, p. 108, 110, 111, 125, 126, 162.

¹⁶⁰ Walter Sullivan, op cit, p. 169.

¹⁶¹ John Eliot Allen, et al, op cit, pp. 63-65.

¹⁶² ibid, p. 38, 65, 143, 152.

¹⁶³ Walter Sullivan, op cit, p. 168.

¹⁶⁴ ibid, p. 164.

¹⁶⁵ John Eliot Allen, et al, op cit, pp. 77-79.

¹⁶⁶ Walter Sullivan, op cit, pp. 160-163.

¹⁶⁷ ibid, pp. 161-168.

¹⁶⁸ John Eliot Allen, et al, op cit, p. 113, 119, 151.

¹⁶⁹ ibid, pp. 98-99.

¹⁷⁰ ibid, pp. 40-41.

¹⁷¹ Alastair G. Dawson, Ice Age Earth: Late Quaternary Geology and Climate, Routledge, London and New York, 1992.

¹⁷² E. C. Pielou, After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1991.

¹⁷³ Walter Sullivan, op cit, p. 249.

¹⁷⁴ John Imbrie and Katherine Palmer Imbrie, Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery, pp. 48-49, Enslow Publishers, Short Hills, New Jersey, 1979.

¹⁷⁵ Frank Press and Raymond Siever, Earth, p. 250, W. H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1986.

¹⁷⁶ Robert P. Sharp, Living Ice, p. 14,46,77, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988.

¹⁷⁷ Walter Sullivan, Landprints, p. 264, Times Books, New York, NY, 1984.

¹⁷⁸ ibid.

¹⁷⁹ Windsor Chorlton, Ice Ages, p. 89, Time-Life Books, Alexandria, VA, 1983.

¹⁸⁰ John Imbrie, et al, op cit, p. 52.

^180a Note that glaciers do pluck out bedrock, as well as polishing it. The combination of features -- minor plucking, general polish, grooves, and striations -- is what distinguishes glacial action on bedrock.

¹⁸¹ Frank Press, et al, op cit, pp. 245-246.

¹⁸² Windsor Chorlton, op cit, pp. 95-96.

¹⁸³ Bjorn Kurten, The Innocent Assassins, pp. 84-88, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991.

¹⁸⁴ John Imbrie, et al, op cit, pp. 53-54.

¹⁸⁵ Walter Sullivan, op cit.

¹⁸⁶ John Imbrie, et al, op cit, pp. 54-55.

¹⁸⁷ Walter Sullivan, op cit, pp. 265-266.

¹⁸⁸ John Imbrie, et al, op cit, pp. 55-56.

¹⁸⁹ Walter Sullivan, op cit, p. 172.

¹⁹⁰ "No Way to Run a Desert," National Geographic Magazine, pp. 706-707, Washington, D.C., June, 1985.

¹⁹¹ John Eliot, et al, op cit, pp. 121-122.

¹⁹² The Bible: God's Word or Man's?, p. 115.

¹⁹³ ibid, pp. 56-57.

¹⁹⁴ ibid, p. 57.

¹⁹⁵ ibid, pp. 61-62.

¹⁹⁶ Windsor Chorlton, op cit, pp. 106-107.

¹⁹⁷ John Imbrie, et al, op cit, p. 113.

¹⁹⁸ ibid, pp. 120-121.

¹⁹⁹ Windsor Chorlton, op cit, p. 129.

²⁰⁰ Windsor Chorlton, op cit, p. 131.

²⁰¹ John Imbrie, et al, op cit, p. 139.

²⁰² ibid, p. 139.

²⁰³ Windsor Chorlton, op cit, pp. 132-141.

²⁰⁴ ibid, p. 132.

²⁰⁵ Thomas F. Goreau, Nora I. Goreau and Thomas J. Goreau, "Corals and Coral Reefs," Scientific American, p. 133, New York, August, 1979.

²⁰⁶ John Imbrie, et al, op cit, pp. 153-154.

²⁰⁷ Richard S. Davis, Vadim A Ranov and Andrey E. Dodonov, "Early Man in Soviet Central Asia," Scientific American, p. 130, New York, December, 1980.

²⁰⁸ John Imbrie, et al, op cit, pp. 156-158.

²⁰⁹ ibid, p. 158.

²¹⁰ ibid, p. 159.

²¹¹ John Imbrie, et al, op cit, p. 164.

²¹² ibid, pp. 158-159.

²¹³ ibid, pp. 167-173.

^213a Spectral analysis is a mathematical technique also known as Fourier analysis, which decomposes a signal into its frequency components. This technique is bread and butter to physicists and electrical engineers. It is used extensively in signal processing applications such as radar.

²¹⁴ Bjorn Kurten, The Innocent Assassins, pp. 88-94, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991.

²¹⁵ Windsor Chorlton, op cit, pp. 151-152.

²¹⁶ ibid, pp. 152-154.

^216a This material was published in 1983. For results of newer studies that go back about 40,000 years, see the next few paragraphs.

²¹⁷ "Ice on the World," National Geographic Magazine, pp. 96-99, Washington, D.C., January, 1987.

²¹⁸ Robert D. Ballard, Exploring Our Living Planet, p. 315, National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C., 1988.

²¹⁹ Nature, vol. 364, pp. 186, 203-7, 218-20.

²²⁰ Windsor Chorlton, op cit, pp. 154-159.

²²¹ J. W. C. White, "Don't Touch That Dial," Nature, vol. 364, p. 186, July 15, 1993.

²²² W. Dansgaard, et al., "Evidence for general instability of past climate from a 250-kyr ice-core record," Nature, vol. 364, p. 218.

²²³ GRIP members, "Climate instability during the last interglacial period recorded in the GRIP ice core," Nature, vol. 364, pp. 203-7.

²²⁴ ibid, vol. 362, pp. 495, 527-9, April 8, 1993.

²²⁵ ibid, vol. 361, pp. 432-6, February 4, 1993.

²²⁶ ibid, vol. 359, pp. 274-5, 311-3, September 24, 1992.

²²⁷ Richard A. Kerr, "How Ice Age Climate Got the Shakes," Science, vol. 260, pp. 890-2, May 14, 1993.

²²⁸ ibid, vol. 260, pp. 962-8.

²²⁹ ibid, vol. 259, pp. 926-34, February 12, 1993.

²³⁰ ibid, vol. 258, pp. 220-1, 255-60, 284-7, October 9, 1992.

²³¹ Windsor Chorlton, op cit, p. 166.

²³² Antony J. Sutcliffe, On The Track Of Ice Age Mammals, pp. 117-150, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985.

²³³ ibid, p. 136.

²³⁴ ibid, pp. 142-143.

²³⁵ ibid, p. 20.

²³⁶ ibid, pp. 141-147.

²³⁷ John Imbrie, et al, op cit, p. 67.

²³⁸ Frank Press, et al, op cit, p. 242.

²³⁹ Wallace S. Broecker and George H. Denton, "What Drives Glacial Cycles?," Scientific American, pp. 52-53, New York, January, 1990.

²⁴⁰ ibid, pp. 53-56.

^240a See also chapter 6 of On The Track Of Ice Age Mammals, Antony Sutcliffe, op cit. This chapter adds many other observations to what has been covered here. Note especially the chart on page 64, which graphically depicts the correlation among oxygen isotope ratios from a Pacific sea bottom core, oxygen isotope ratios from a Greenland ice core, vegetational changes during the last 140,000 years from an analysis of plant remains from the deep peat bog at Grand Pile, France, and vegetational changes during the last 120,000 years from an analysis of plant remains from a bog at Tenagi Phillipon, Greece.

²⁴¹ Thomas F. Goreau, "Corals and Coral Reefs," Scientific American, p. 124, New York, August, 1979.

²⁴² Daniel Heyler and Cecile M. Poplin, "The Fossils of Montceau-les-Mines," Scientific American, New York, September, 1988.

²⁴³ Richard L. Hay and Mary D. Leakey, "The Fossil Footprints of Laetoli," Scientific American, New York, February, 1982.

²⁴⁴ Aid to Bible Understanding, p. 440, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1971.

²⁴⁵ Insight on the Scriptures, Vol. 2, p. 728, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1988.

²⁴⁶ H. C. Leupold, Barnes Notes on the Old Testament: Exposition of Genesis, pp. 111-113, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1960.

²⁴⁷ Good News to Make You Happy, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, New York, 1975.

²⁴⁸ H. W. Menard, Islands, p. 92, 193, Scientific American Books, Inc., New York, 1986.

²⁴⁹ The Bible -- God's Word or Man's?, pp. 111-112, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1989.

²⁵⁰ The Bible -- God's Word or Man's?, p. 116, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1989.

²⁵¹ Insight on the Scriptures, Vol. 1, p. 611, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1988.

²⁵² The Watchtower, p. 8, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, January 15, 1992.

²⁵³ Awake!, p. 8, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, May 8, 1968.

²⁵⁴ Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain, pp. 89-91, Ballantine Books, New York, 1979.

²⁵⁵ ibid, pp. 81-88.

²⁵⁶ Isaac Asimov, In The Beginning, pp. 153-154, 165, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1981.

²⁵⁷ Steve Allen, Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion, & Morality, p. 154, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, New York, 1990.

²⁵⁸ Dorothy B. Vitaliano, Legends of the Earth, pp. 144-148, The Citadel Press, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1973, 1976.

²⁵⁹ Bruce A. Bolt, Earthquakes, pp. 81-86, W. H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1988.

²⁶⁰ ibid, p. 84,185.

²⁶¹ Vitaliano, op cit, pp. 150-153.

²⁶² ibid, pp. 156-160.

^262a This eruption has been variously dated at from about 1300 to 1650 B.C.

²⁶³ The Watchtower, op cit, p. 7.

²⁶⁴ Vitaliano, op cit, p. 166.

²⁶⁵ ibid, p. 169.

²⁶⁶ ibid, p. 172.

²⁶⁷ ibid, pp. 176-177.

²⁶⁸ ibid, pp. 163-164.

²⁶⁹ ibid, pp. 177-178.

²⁷⁰ The Watchtower, op cit, January 15, 1992.

²⁷¹ Insight on the Scriptures, op cit, Vol. 1, p. 611.

²⁷² Isaac Asimov, op cit.

²⁷³ Howard M. Teeple, The Noah's Ark Nonsense, pp. 41-52, Religion and Ethics Institute, Inc., Evanston, Illinois, 1978.

^273a An interesting viewpoint on the J document is given in The Book of J, Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg, Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1990. The following quotations from this book give a taste of the authors' ideas, and also shed light on the reasons many Biblical scholars see several original sources interwoven in the five Bible books ascribed to Moses.

"In Jerusalem, nearly three thousand years ago, an unknown author composed a work that has formed the spiritual consciousness of much of the world ever since. We possess only a fragmentary text of that work, embedded within what we call Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, three of the divisions of Torah, or the Five Books of Moses. Since we cannot know the circumstances under which the work was composed, or for what purposes, ultimately we must rely upon our experience as readers to justify our surmises as to what it is that we are reading. [p. 9]

"My.... assumption is that J was not a professional scribe but rather an immensely sophisticated, highly placed member of the Solomonic elite, enlightened and ironic. But my primary surmise is that J was a woman, and that she wrote for her contemporaries as a woman, in friendly competition with her only strong rival among those contemporaries, the male author of the court history narrative in 2 Samuel.... I will be attempting to account, through my years of reading experience, for my increasing sense of the astonishing differences between J and every other biblical writer. [pp. 9-10]

".... the Book of J, though fragmentary, is hardly Mr. David Rosenberg's creation or my own. All I have done is to remove the Book of J from its context in the Redactor's Torah and then to read what remains, which is the best and most profound writing in the Hebrew Bible. What emerges is an author not so much lost as barricaded from us by normative moralists and theologians, who had and have designs upon us that are altogether incompatible with J's vision.

"[There is] a profound reason for regarding the Bible as a library of literary texts, which to me and many other readers it must be. Yahweh, in transmogrified forms, remains the God of the Children of Abraham, of believing Jews, Christians, and Muslims. But Yahweh, in the Book of J, is a literary character, just as [Shakespeare's] Hamlet is. If the history of religion is the process of choosing forms of worship from poetic tales, in the West that history is even more extravagant: it is the worship, in greatly modified and revised forms, of an extraordinarily wayward and uncanny literary character, J's Yahweh.... I am neither a believer nor a historian, but the dilemma I cite seems to me as much theirs as mine. Why does Yahweh attempt to murder Moses? How can God sit under the terebinth trees at Mamre and devour roast calf and curds? What can we do with a Supreme Being who goes nearly berserk at Sinai and warns us he may break forth against the crowds, who clearly fill him with great distaste? [p. 12]

"The largest assumption of nearly all writers on the Bible is that it is a theological work, as well as historical and literary. J was no theologian, and rather deliberately not a historian.... The Book of J fits no genre, though it established whatever genre the authors of the E, P, and D texts sought to follow. J tells stories, portrays theomorphic men and women, links myth to history, and implicitly utters the greatest of moral prophecies to post-Solomonic Judah and Israel. Yet J is something other than a storyteller, a creator of personalities (human and divine), a national historian and prophet, or even an ancestor of the moral fictions of Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Tolstoy. There is always the other side of J: uncanny, tricky, sublime, ironic, a visionary of incommensurates.... [p. 13]

"The God of the Jews and the Christians, of the Muslims, of the secular scholars and critics, is not the Yahweh of J. What J portrays, with loving irony, is an archaic Judaism now largely lost to us, though to call it a Judaism at all is bound to be an error.... [p. 14]

"J's Yahweh is.... an imp who behaves sometimes as though he is rebelling against his Jewish mother, J. Like J herself, we ought always to be prepared to be surprised by him, which is the only way we can avoid being surprised. [p. 15]

"Embarrassment caused by the impishness of J's Yahweh presumably began with the early revisionists, attaining a first culmination with the work of the Redactor.... Jewish Hellenists rather desperately sought to.... [allegorize] away a Yahweh who walked and who argued, who ate and who rested, who possessed arms and hands, face and legs. [p. 24]

"J's attitude toward Yahweh resembles nothing so much as a mother's somewhat wary but still proudly amused stance toward a favorite son who has grown up to be benignly powerful but also eccentrically irascible. [p. 26]"

A reviewer said: "Fascinating.... The Book of J clearly highlights one of the major problems in Western culture: the fact that the Jehovah of the Old Testament is not a theological god at all but an intensely human character as violent and unpredictable as King Lear."

Another author, Robert Alter, in The Art of Biblical Narrative, extolled the literary qualities found in the Hebrew Scriptures as a whole. Bloom said that Alter "reads a work of 'composite artistry,' in which the artist is the Redactor, masterfully blending his somewhat incompatible sources. [The Book of J, p. 14]"

The Society is aware of many of these points, although it sweeps the conclusions under the rug. The original version of the Society's book All Scripture Is Inspired and Beneficial (pub. 1963, p. 13, para. 3-5) said: "Jehovah God is the Author of the Bible, but he inspired Moses to compile and write the book of Genesis. We say 'compile' because it is evident that Moses possessed written documents preserved by his forefathers as precious, valuable records of the origins of mankind. The Bible refers to eleven of these, the Hebrew word being toledoth (Greek, genesis), which, according to the noted Hebrew scholar Gesenius, means 'history.' A study of the writing style of ancient times reveals that such historical documents were ended with a colophon or conclusion, setting out the name of the writer or owner of the document. Hence, we are able to identify the eleven 'histories' in Genesis by these colophons that conclude them.... Moses compiled these documents under inspiration." The later edition of All Scripture Is Inspired (revised ed., 1990, p. 13, para. 3) completely revised this interpretation and said: "Jehovah God is the Author of the Bible, but he inspired Moses to write the book of Genesis. From where did Moses get the information he recorded in Genesis? Some could have been received directly by divine revelation and some, under the direction of holy spirit, through oral transmission. It is also possible that Moses possessed written documents preserved by his forefathers as precious, valuable records of the origins of mankind." Both editions go on to say that Moses is the single author of Genesis because: (1) Tradition ascribes authorship to Moses. (2) Many references within the rest of the Bible do so.

It is of note that the later edition of All Scripture Is Inspired deletes mention of the compilation of Genesis. It is also interesting to note the slant that the Insight book gives to these points. Vol. 1, pp. 919-920, says that no "definite conclusion can be arrived at, therefore, as to the immediate source from which Moses obtained the information he recorded", but that, nevertheless, the writers believe the "important point is that Jehovah God guided the prophet Moses so that he wrote by divine inspiration." Vol. 2, p. 1212 explains the reasons that the point of view in the earlier version of All Scripture Is Inspired has been changed. It should be obvious that some of the Society's writers noted the clear division of Genesis into sections and the evidence for compilation; otherwise why would they bring the point up?

Insight also discredits the "Documentary Theory," (the general notions originated in the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis) saying: "If the material attributed to each theoretical source is extricated portion by portion, and sentence by sentence, from the Genesis account and then reassembled, the result is a number of accounts each one of which by itself is illogical and incoherent...." A careful reading of the material here presented should convince the reader that the exact opposite is true of the Flood accounts; they make far more sense separately than merged into one.

²⁷⁴ Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg, The Book of J, pp. 68-72, Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1990.

²⁷⁵ Ashley Montagu, ed., Science and Creationism, p. 134-135, Oxford University Press, New York, 1984.

²⁷⁶ Isaac Asimov, In The Beginning, p. 165, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1981.