The One and Only Ice Age
By: Bruce Malone
Search for the Truth
On the morning of July 15, 1942, six brand new P-38 Lightnings and two B-17 Flying Fortresses took off from a secret airfield in Greenland, heading for bombing missions in Germany. The squadron became lost in a blizzard and ran out of fuel. The pilots were forced to land on a glacier. One made a crash landing and the other seven made perfect belly landings. The crewmen were rescued nine days later, but the planes were abandoned to the relentless snows and remained on the glacier for half a century.
In 1980, Richard Taylor and Patrick Epps, two Atlanta businessmen, decided to find the airplanes. Patrick Epps joked that “All we’d have to do is shovel the snow off the wings, fill them with gas, crank them up, and fly them off into the sunset.” After twelve years of obsessive effort, extensive searching, back breaking labor, and millions of dollars spent; the persistent partners finally succeeded in locating and retrieving one of the eight airplanes. It was awhile before that P-38 was “flown into the sunset” because it had to be recovered from underneath 250 feet of solid ice and then dismantled piece-by-piece. The story of this discovery can be found in the December 1992 issue of Life Magazine, “The Lost Squadron.”
This event calls into question the standard interpretation of ice cores that have been drilled in the ice at the polar caps. These cores supposedly show hundreds of thousands of years of accumulation and multiple ice ages on our planet. The fact that 250 feet of solid ice can accumulate in only 50 years clearly illustrates that hundreds of thousands of years are not required for the formation of the polar ice caps. Instead of hundreds of thousands of years and multiple ice ages, a single catastrophic event that caused an incredible shift in climatic conditions could explain the depth of ice at the polar caps.1
Both evolutionists and creationists alike recognize the ice age as the last major geologic event to have drastically affected our planet. Most evolutionists believe there have been dozens of ice ages, but this belief is based on secondary evidence, such as changes in the oxygen concentrations in ice cores, rather than direct evidence. Most creationists believe that the earth has experienced only one great ice age which lasted several centuries before the ice receded to present levels. The evidence for this ice age, and for a dramatically different climate in the not so distant past, is undeniable. Furthermore, evidence is rapidly accumulating to indicate that there has been just one ice age.2,3
The creation model of history shows that the great ice age was an inevitable outcome of the worldwide flood. The massive land movements and volcanism which accompanied the flood would have left the oceans considerably warmer than they were before the flood or following the ice age. Solar radiation would have been reduced by volcanic ash high in the sky following the flood, resulting in colder terrestrial temperatures. The inevitable result of warmer oceans would be increased water evaporation. In combination with less solar radiation reaching the earth’s surface, massive snow storms would be caused in the northern and southern latitudes. These snow storms would have continued for centuries until the oceans cooled off and the atmosphere cleared up. Thus, the great ice age is not only explained by the worldwide flood but would have been an unstoppable consequence of this flood.
1. Larry Vardiman, Ice Cores and the Age of the Earth, ICR, 1993.
2. Michael Oard, The Evidence for only One Ice Age, Proceedings of 2nd International Conf. on Creationism, 1990.
3. Michael Oard, Submarine Mass Flow Deposition of Pre-Pleistocene Ice-age Deposits, Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Creationism, 1994.