Short Answers to Good Questions: How would a warm ocean cause an Ice Age?

Photo by Infomastern

 

During the 150 days of the flood, Pangaea split. This involved violent volcanic and seismic activity, and huge amounts of lava being dumped into the oceans, which warmed the earth's oceans. Warm oceans produce increased levels of precipitation, which creates a thick cloud cover and results in cool land masses. The temperature difference between the ocean and land masses would have made for intense weather patterns, super-storms that raged for weeks across half a continent. The nearly non-stop precipitation (plus high amounts of volcanic ash in the atmosphere), would bring about the Ice Age, slowly at first, and then snowballing towards the end. Then the frozen land masses of the Ice Age would in turn cool the oceans. At that point the oceans were likely cooler than they are today, with ice caps creeping far southward, and the level of precipitation for most of the globe would drop to drought level. In addition to the drought, it would be a time of intense wind and dust storms, and large amounts of "dirty snow" would be heaped up in moving drifts by the wind. (Which accounts for the mammoth buried with buttercups in his stomach, and the loess deposits covering huge areas of the northern latitudes.) This period is called the “glacial maximum.” After a pause, the glaciers, now exposed to the sun without proper cloud cover, would melt in a catastrophically short period, perhaps less than a hundred years.

Want to learn more?
The Snowbliz, by Michael Oard
What Started the Ice Age? By Dr. Larry Vardiman
A Dark and Stormy World By Dr. Larry Vardiman

Short Answers to Good Questions: What Did North America Look Like During the Ice Age?

What Did North America Look Like During the Ice Age?

 

 

Glaciated areas looked, well, glaciated—hard barren plains of packed ice and snow, bordered by tundra. The rest of North America was greener, wetter, a little cooler; probably more inviting looking than it is today, unless a mega storm was ripping through your neighborhood, or a nearby volcano saw fit to erupt. The abundant rainfall was caused by condensation contributed by a warm ocean paired with cooler landmasses. This went as the temperature of the ocean dropped, until it became cooler than it is today, and the rainfall ceased. For a few short years the earth must have seemed to have fallen asleep; little rain, only wind¹ which as the drought increased began piling up snow and dirt into giant shifting hills, like an apocalyptic Hollywood dust bowl. These deposits of “loess” can be found all over the world, and North America was no exception. Ancient “sand dunes” from this period cover most of the Great Plains.² To add to the environmental disaster, the ice caps began to melt, flooding rivers and creating immense bogs. Mass extinction of “mega fauna” became the order of the day. In America we lost 70% of all mammals that weighed over 100lbs³; horses, camels, any lingering dinosaurs, giant beavers and sloths, and, of course, the woolly mammoths. It was the worst of times. Some calculate that it took the earth about 200 years⁴ to find her balance, and become the lovable planet we know today.

 

 

Learn more about the Ice Age here.

 

 

 

1 Oard Ice Age Caused By the Genesis Flood, pp. 109-119

2Muhs, D.R. and V.T. Holliday, Evidence of active dune sand on the Great Plains in the 19th century from accounts of early explorers, Quaternary Research 43:198–208, 1995.

3Martin, P.S., and R.G. Klein (Eds.), Quaternary extinctions: A prehistoric revolution, University of Arizona Press, Tuscon, AZ, 1984.

Stone, R., Mammoth: The resurrection of an Ice Age giant, Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, MA, pp. 94–143, 2001.

Agenbroad, L.D. and L. Nelson, Mammoths: Ice Age giants, Lerner Publications Company, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 87–99, 2002.

4Oard, Frozen in Time, Chapter 10 Catastrophic Melting