Hello everyone! What wonderful weather we have been having here…our monsoon season has begun with a bang. Lots and lots of rain…and cooler weather.
Speaking of cooler weather, during the Ice Age in certain areas, the weather was much cooler and many animals adapted to this new environment. These adaptations were able to happen because God had already designed them with the genes necessary for such changes. A great example of this is the woolly mammoth.
The original elephant kind probably did not have had such a thick coat of fur and hair. But they would have carried and passed down the genes even to the two elephant kinds that migrated to the ark (see my earlier blog on how the animals got to the ark). Only a omniscient God would know and design animals to have such genes needed for adaptations utilized many generations later.
From hundreds of thousands of frozen remains, we know the woolly mammoths lived in the lowlands of Siberia, the Bering Strait region, Europe, and other placed as well. It is estimated that at least a million mammoths inhabited Siberia and Alaska alone. So where did these animals as well as others living in that region get their food? Could the lowlands next to the glaciers give these animals enough food even in the winter? And what about water? Wouldn’t it all be frozen?
Let’s answer these two questions before we go on. Evidence suggests that parts of the region were much warmer than some scientists claim (see my previous blog on Ice Age animals). For example some of the plants identified in the stomachs of the Beresovka mammoth now inhabit only areas of warmer climates. Thus, the lowlands of Siberia and Alaska would be comprised of an abundance of vegetation and water.
Most people have heard that the intact carcasses of some mammoths contained partially digested food in their stomachs. Let’s take a closer look at this. First of all, only about a six intact carcasses have been found. The rest of the carcasses, by all means the vast majority, show extensive decay. It is from these six carcasses that some scientists have claimed an unprecedented super-cell, fast freeze, had to have happened in order to preserve such stomach contents. These scientists are correct in one aspect. The freeze must have happened fairly quick for such a degree of preservation. But not a world wide super-freeze.
“Since the mammoth remains are frozen in so-called ‘muck’, and in river terraces and deltas associated with river floods, on top of flood sediments, they must have been frozen there at some time during the Ice Age, after the flood. The mammoths must have been buried in the muck, sand, and gravel, and frozen fast enough to preserve them up until the present.”1
Michael Oard, meteorologist and creation scientist, proposes that most of the mammoths were buried and frozen during the end of the post-flood Ice Age. As the continental ice sheets (glaciers) melted, they caused catastrophic flood events including failed ice dams that would release immense amounts of cold, fresh water. Any mammoths in a riverbed, where escape would be difficult, could easily have buried such an event as this.
As this end of the Ice Age melting and flooding occurred, it would bring about a permanent climate change. A vast cold and frozen desert in the north could have been brought about by this flood of cold fresh water surging into the arctic ocean. This would have resulted in the rapid formation of ice on the surface of the salt water thus cutting off the evaporation of the warmer ocean waters near the northern lands.
Before this dramatic change in the climate, mammoths (and other animals) “may have been in the habit of migrating north to these coastal regions near the arctic ocean during cold weather. However, with the freezing-over of the sea, they moved in the wrong direction, into even colder weather. Some mammoths show evidence of death from suffocation or drowning and it is significant that very cold weather has been known to cause suffocation of cattle in North America.”2
The mammoths are still a mystery to those who believe in an old earth (billions of years), and ten thousand year long ice ages. This thinking cannot explain the burial and freezing of the Ice Age animals with a slow and gradual onset of glaciation over thousands of years and its slow melting over more thousands of years. Only biblical understanding can explain the evidence found about the Ice Age mammoths.
Look for next week’s blog to answer the question – Does the bible mention the Ice Age?
Until then take care and God Bless!
Willow
References:
The Revised And Expanded Answers Book, Ken Ham, et. al., March , pgs 206-208.
An Ice Age Caused By The Genesis Flood, Michael Oard, p. 86-91, 128-133.
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