The Ice Age | Berean Archive

"Although theories abound, no one really knows what causes ice ages." — David Alt, University of Montana geologist, 2001¹

"Biblical creationists have not reached a consensus on one Ice Age model." — Editor's note on Answers in Genesis's flagship Ice Age dating article, 2013²

"But that a great sheet or great sheets of ice once spread over the 'drift' areas in America and Europe… seems utterly incapable of proof, and wholly incredible." — George McCready Price, founder of modern flood geology, 1923³

Summary

There was an ice age. Ice sheets kilometres thick once covered Canada, the northern United States, Scandinavia, and northern Britain. Their moraines, striations, erratic boulders, and drowned coastlines are not in dispute. What is in dispute is when it happened, how long it lasted, how many times it happened, and what caused it.

Young-earth creationists have given four different answers over the past century, and the article covers all of them:

It never happened. George McCready Price, the founder of modern flood geology, denied continental glaciation outright and assigned the "glacial" deposits to Noah's Flood. Almost no creationist holds this today, though Mats Molén's work runs in this direction.
The vapor canopy collapsed. Henry Morris taught that the pre-Flood water canopy kept the poles warm; when it fell as the Flood's rain, the poles froze. Creationist modeling killed the canopy — its own advocates found it cooks the earth — and every major creationist ministry has now abandoned it.
The Flood's warm oceans made it snow. Michael Oard's model, first published in 1979: the Flood left the oceans warm from pole to pole, driving enormous evaporation and snowfall, while post-Flood volcanic dust cooled the summers. One ice age, about 700 years long, ending around the time of Abraham. This is now the standard model of Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries International, and the Institute for Creation Research.
Variants. Walt Brown froze the mammoths during the Flood with supercold hail. AiG compresses Oard's 700 years to roughly 300 and starts the ice at Babel. Others move the Flood/post-Flood boundary so late that the ice-age deposits become Flood deposits and there is almost no post-Flood ice age at all.

The model's real strengths. Oard's model is genuine quantitative work — energy-balance equations with published error bars, done by a career meteorologist, later tested in real climate models by other creationists. It makes falsifiable predictions, and some of them look good: mainstream science does struggle to explain what starts an ice age, a warm-ocean ice age predicts the wet Sahara and the giant pluvial lakes that a cold-dry secular ice age fights to explain, and it predicts mild early winters in unglaciated Siberia — which is roughly what the mammoth fossils suggest. The best creationist writing on the mammoths is also better than its reputation: Oard rejects the famous flash-frozen-mammoth story, for the same evidential reasons mainstream science does.

The model's real problems. Stated plainly, because a skeptic will find them anyway:

The ice cores. Greenland's GISP2 core has about 110,000 counted annual layers, cross-checked by up to five independent seasonal signals and anchored by radiometric clocks that have nothing to do with counting snow — a Chinese cave stalagmite agrees with the Greenland count to better than 800 years across 60,000, and argon-dated volcanic horizons agree to about 2%. The creationist answer requires the count to be wrong by a factor of about twenty, in ice that Oard's own model says fell after his ice age ended.
The cycle count. The marine record contains 51 numbered glacial stages, and the same alternations appear independently in Chinese wind-blown dust, stacked till sheets with buried soils between them, coral terrace staircases, and cave formations. A one-ice-age model must explain away not one record but the agreement of five.
The three-way squeeze. To build the ice sheets in 500 years, Oard halves their thickness. But half-thickness ice cannot depress Hudson Bay by the amount it has measurably rebounded, and cannot lower sea level by the 130-plus metres the drowned shorelines record. The model is caught between three measurements that do not move.
The heat. Warming the whole ocean to 30°C takes about 10²⁶ joules, and the Flood mechanisms proposed to supply it deliver about 10²⁸ — enough to boil the oceans three times over. That number was published by creationist John Baumgardner, not by a critic, and creationists agree it is unsolved.
The chronology. Even Answers in Genesis's own research journal published a paper in 2024 concluding that Oard's model, the glacial evidence, and the Masoretic timeline "are not consistent."

The honest verdict. The post-Flood ice age is the most serious piece of model-building in young-earth science, and several of its predictions deserve more credit than critics give them. But it has not answered the ice cores, the cycle count, or the rebound-and-sea-level squeeze, and its own practitioners' models and journals say so. Anyone using this topic in an argument should know both halves.

Every source this article rests on is catalogued, with what each one says and which way it cuts, in a companion page: the literature.

The great reversal

The history of this subject contains an irony that neither side usually tells.

The Ice Age replaced the Flood. Around 1800, the sheets of boulder clay, gravel, and out-of-place boulders spread across northern Europe and North America were called "diluvium" — debris of Noah's Flood. William Buckland of Oxford built the case in Reliquiae Diluvianae (1823).⁴ Then the evidence turned. Adam Sedgwick publicly recanted diluvialism in his 1831 presidential address to the Geological Society. Louis Agassiz proposed continental glaciation in 1837 and toured Britain in 1840, and Buckland — the leading Flood geologist of his generation — examined the field evidence and switched sides. The Ice Age was born as the replacement for the Flood interpretation of the drift.

It was also, at the time, a catastrophist heresy. The historian Martin Rudwick writes that an ice age "was totally unexpected by leading geologists of all stripes: by Buckland no less than by Lyell… It was drastic enough to count as a catastrophe, yet this particular catastrophe was the very last kind of event that might have been anticipated," and that Lyell resisted it as "an unacceptably catastrophic deviation from the 'uniformity' of an earth in a steady state."⁵

So the first flood geologists fought the Ice Age. Sir Henry Howorth, a Victorian catastrophist, spent three multi-volume works arguing that ice cannot do what glacialists claimed: "I not only disbelieve in, but I utterly deny the possibility of ice having moved over hundreds of miles of level country."⁶ George McCready Price, whose books founded twentieth-century flood geology, followed Howorth. Price accepted mountain glaciers but denied the continental ice sheets entirely. His textbook The New Geology (1923) lists his objections — glacial marks on New England summits too high for ice, driftless areas inside the supposed ice margin, warm-climate fossils in "glacial" beds — and concludes that continental glaciation "is mere matter of speculation."³ He even proposed that the glacial theory's popularity was psychological: "a sort of mental buffer, an intellectual shock-absorber, enabling the uniformitarian to pass from that old world of so many wonders… over to the modern world, with as little sense of catastrophe as possible."³

Modern creationism reversed him. Today's young-earth organizations do not merely accept the Ice Age; they need it. It explains post-Flood animal migration to the Americas, the mammoths, the megafauna extinctions, and the drowned land bridges. The reversal is complete and almost never acknowledged. It is worth stating for honesty's sake: the movement's founder called the Ice Age impossible, and the movement now calls it a deduction from the Flood.

One more piece of the irony: Buckland and Sedgwick were devout men who abandoned the Flood interpretation of the drift because of field evidence. Whatever else the nineteenth-century story shows, it does not show a conspiracy against Scripture.

What has to be explained

The field evidence both sides accept: till sheets and moraines across roughly a third of the world's land at maximum,⁷ striated and polished bedrock, erratic boulders carried hundreds of kilometres, U-shaped valleys, drumlin fields, loess blankets, pluvial lakes in now-dry basins, drowned coastlines, and raised beaches around Hudson Bay and the Baltic.

Any model must supply three things, and Oard's list of them is fair:⁸

Much cooler summers — snow must survive the melt season.
Much more precipitation — cold air is dry air, so an ordinary cold climate starves the ice.
Persistence — the anomaly must last long enough to build ice sheets.

The tension between the first two requirements is real and both sides feel it. Cool a continent and you dry its air. Oard quantifies it: drop Canada's summers 12°C and the air holds about 60% less moisture.⁹ The mainstream's answer is time — modest orbital nudges plus feedbacks, integrated over tens of thousands of years. The creationist answer is a heat source the mainstream does not have: an ocean warmed by the Flood.

Can secular models explain the ice age at all?

The creationist charge is specific, and it is the argument most readers will have heard: no model produces an ice age unless it has warm oceans for moisture and volcanic particulates for cool summers — and only the Flood supplies both. So it is worth stating exactly what the secular account claims, what its models can and cannot do, and where the charge lands.

What the secular account actually is. Orbital cycles pace the ice ages; they do not power them. The direct radiative push from the orbital variations is far too small — that is the mainstream's own 100-kyr problem, stated in its founding paper.¹⁰ The amplitude comes from feedbacks: snow and ice reflecting sunlight, atmospheric CO₂ falling by roughly a third at glacial maxima (measured directly in ice-core air bubbles),¹¹ dust dimming the surface, and the slow mechanics of the ice sheets themselves. Milankovitch is a pacemaker attached to an amplifier, and mainstream reviews say so plainly — Ganopolski in 2024: "a generally accepted comprehensive theory of glacial cycles has not emerged yet," inside an abstract affirming "strong support for the astronomical theory."¹²

The creationist evidence that the models fail. The best items are real and should be stated at full strength:

Rind, Peteet and Kukla, 1989. A general circulation model was handed a head start — ten metres of ice prescribed everywhere the Laurentide ice sheet stood — under orbital conditions favorable to glaciation. Instead of growing, the ice melted everywhere within five model years.¹³ For that generation of models, glacial inception genuinely did not work.
Phillips and Held, 1994. A model that did produce glaciation put it in the wrong place: "We now have glaciation, but mainly outside the area where it existed during the last ice age."¹⁴
The moisture trap. Cooling dries the air; the mainstream needs the climate to get cold and snowy at once, and cold works against snowy. This is a fair statement of a real difficulty in inception modeling.

What the models can do now. The charge is aimed at a model generation that is thirty-five years old. Current earth-system models of intermediate complexity do grow ice sheets from orbital forcing plus low CO₂, with no warm ocean and no volcanic loading. Talento, Willeit and Ganopolski (2024) treat inception as a threshold phenomenon — glaciation triggers when summer insolation at 65°N falls below a critical level that depends on CO₂ — and in their simulations "ice sheets grow mostly in North America, and only under low CO₂ conditions are ice sheets also formed over Scandinavia," which is where the real record starts them.¹⁵ The honest statement of the current score: "secular models cannot produce an ice age" was true in 1989 and is not true now; what remains genuinely unsettled is the threshold's calibration, the carbon-cycle bookkeeping, and the 100-kyr rhythm — pacing and amplitude questions, not existence questions.

The empirical problem with the "necessary conditions" claim. The decisive point is not a model at all. The ice age we can measure was cold and dry, not warm and wet. Greenland's own ice layers record it: accumulation during the Younger Dryas was 47 ± 2% of the early-Holocene rate, and 88 ± 2% during the Bølling warm phase — glacial Greenland got less snow than today, not more.¹⁶ The glacial-age north was Guthrie's mammoth steppe: arid, windy, dusty, nearly lakeless.¹⁷ Real ice sheets grew on starvation rations, slowly — which is only a problem if they must be built in 500 years. So the creationist argument, stated carefully, is not "secular science cannot explain the ice age"; it is "secular science cannot explain a fast ice age, and a fast one is what the biblical timescale requires." That is true, and it cuts both ways: warm oceans and telescoped volcanism are necessary conditions for the creationist ice age, not for the ice age.

The volcanism arithmetic makes the same point. Both sides count the same 1,927 volcanic events in the Greenland cores' ice-age section.¹⁸ Spread over the secular ~100,000 years, that is one eruption every fifty-odd years — ordinary background volcanism, providing brief one-to-three-year coolings and no sustained forcing. Compressed into Oard's 700 years, it is nearly three eruptions per year, every year, for seven centuries — a volcanic winter with no modern analogue. The count does not decide between the models; the divisor does. And the divisor is exactly what the layer-counting and cross-anchoring evidence below is about.

Where the charge finally lands. It is fair for creationists to say the mainstream has never watched an ice age start, that its inception models needed decades of repair and still carry poorly constrained thresholds, and that its best theory explains the timing far better than the size. It is not fair to say secular models "don't work" without Flood mechanisms — they now work without them, on slow clocks — and the measured dryness of the actual glacial climate is direct evidence that the real ice age was not built by warm-ocean snowfall. Meanwhile the creationist mechanism, tested in the same kind of models by its own community, has so far failed at its stated ocean temperature (§ "The model was tested — by creationists — and partly failed"). Neither side currently owns a complete, working account of ice-age initiation. Only one side's account is contradicted by the layer counts, the rebound, and the sea level.

The standard model: Oard's post-Flood ice age

The man and the model

Michael Oard holds an MS in atmospheric science from the University of Washington and spent about thirty years as a National Weather Service meteorologist, finishing as lead forecaster in Great Falls, Montana.¹⁹ He is a meteorologist, not a glaciologist — a real strength on the storm-and-energy-balance side of the model, a real limitation on the glacial-stratigraphy side. His first ice-age paper appeared in the Creation Research Society Quarterly in 1979; the full model came as an ICR monograph in 1990, the popular version as Frozen in Time in 2004, and his latest book-length statement in 2025.²⁰

The model has exactly two engines, both consequences of the Flood:²¹

A warm ocean. The "fountains of the great deep," Flood volcanism, and tectonic mixing leave the post-Flood ocean warm "from pole to pole and from top to bottom."²² Oard sets the starting temperature at 30°C — a ceiling he derives not from physics but from biology: much warmer "and marine life as we know it now would have been seriously threatened."²² Warm water evaporates fast: three times faster at 30°C than at 10°C, seven times faster than at 0°C.²² The Arctic Ocean stays ice-free, feeding snow directly onto Keewatin and keeping Siberia's lowlands mild.

Volcanic dust and aerosols. Post-Flood eruptions load the stratosphere, reflecting summer sunlight. The Greenland cores record 1,927 volcanic events in their ice-age portion; the creationist timescale telescopes them into a few centuries instead of spreading them across 100,000 years.¹⁸ Oard is explicit that the compression is the whole trick: "It is the short time frame that makes the difference."²³ He even turns a standard objection around: a secular critic computed that eruptions would need to be ten times more frequent than the modern rate to sustain glaciation — impossible over 100,000 years, routine over 500.²³

The numbers, with the error bars restored

The popular literature quotes "about 500 years to glacial maximum, 200 years of melting, 700 years total." The published derivation is wider, and the width matters.

Cooling the ocean from 30°C to a glacial-maximum 10°C sheds about 3.0 × 10²⁵ calories. Assigning each variable in the heat-balance equations a minimum and a maximum, Oard's published bracket for the time to glacial maximum is about 200 to 1,700 years (Origins, 1990), or 174 to 1,765 years (Frozen in Time, 2004); "about 500" is his midrange pick.²² ²³ The upper bound alone overruns the entire biblical window between the Flood and Abraham. An article that quotes only "500 years" is quoting a choice, not a result.

Other load-bearing numbers, all Oard's:

Quantity	Oard's value	Conventional value
Northern Hemisphere average ice depth	~700 m (range 515–906)	~1,700 m
Antarctic average ice depth at maximum	~1,200 m (range 726–1,673)	~1,880 m
Total ice volume	about half the conventional	—
Peripheral melt rate	~10 m/yr (range 7.2–17.7)	—
Melt duration	<200 years	~10,000 years

²²

Two revisions inside his own corpus are worth knowing. His starting ocean was 24°C in 1979 and became 30°C in 1990.²⁰ His melt rate was 2 m/yr in 1979 and became 10 m/yr in 1990 — a five-fold revision that turned a 236-year melt into a 200-year one at much greater ice thickness.²⁰ The 10 m/yr figure itself is defensible; it matches measured ablation in the melt zones of Alaskan, Icelandic, and Norwegian glaciers today.²³

The snow arrives by "snowblitz" — ice sheets do not creep down from the Arctic; they form in place. One northeaster a week dropping 50 cm of snow, with no summer melt, stacks about 530 m of ice over New England and southeast Canada in 200 years.²³ The assumptions to notice: one major storm every week for two centuries, and zero net summer loss.

Who adopted it

All three major organizations run Oard's model as their standard account. CMI's Creation Answers Book reproduces his numbers exactly.²⁴ ICR repackaged it as the HEAT mnemonic — Hot oceans, Evaporation, Aerosols, Time — and dates the ice to "about 4,000 years ago."²⁵ AiG adopted the framework but compressed the timeline: Snelling and Matthews start the ice at the Babel judgment, "around a century or so after the Flood (perhaps 2250 BC)," and end it with the megafauna "around 2100–2000 BC" — roughly 300 years to Oard's 700.² The two schemes do not agree, and AiG's editors say so in print: "Biblical creationists have not reached a consensus on one Ice Age model."²

The model was tested — by creationists — and partly failed

This is the part of the story that is almost never told, and it comes entirely from creationist sources.

ICR's Larry Vardiman (PhD atmospheric science, Colorado State) and Wesley Brewer ran the mainstream NCAR WRF weather model on real, observed storms, then reran them with the sea surface warmed. The results were real and honestly reported. A Pineapple Express storm over Yosemite quadrupled its precipitation as the Pacific warmed toward 45°C; Yellowstone storms did the same; a warm-ocean tropical cyclone over the Arabian Sea dropped over 8,000 mm of rain in eighteen simulated days.²⁶ From these they projected glaciers "thousands of feet thick" in a century or two — but the projection multiplies the simulated precipitation increase by an assumed doubling of storm frequency and assumed zero summer melt, neither of which was modeled.²⁶ And one experiment went the other way: warming the Atlantic under Hurricane Charley and Tropical Storm Fay produced storms that "did not intensify as much as had been anticipated" and veered off track, throttled by wind shear.²⁶ Vardiman published the negative result. That is to his credit.

Then came the full climate-model tests at Cedarville University. Steven Gollmer found that with a 30°C ocean "the formation of snow and ice are impossible because air and land temperatures in the Arctic remain above freezing." Oard reported the problem himself in 2019: "Climate models with a warm ocean show that winters would be too warm after the Flood for the Ice Age… The model runs, indeed, showed that the warm ocean is a powerful source for atmospheric heat—more than I previously thought."¹⁸ To make the simulation glaciate at all, the Cedarville team dropped the ocean to 24°C — exactly the figure Oard had abandoned in 1990 — and loaded the atmosphere with heavy aerosols. The 2023 run then produced mountain glaciation and rough Laurentide/Cordilleran outlines within centuries, which is a real success; but it also left Greenland and northern Canada mostly ice-free, and froze the Arctic Ocean over — the exact opposite of the warm, open Arctic that Oard's Siberia and Keewatin require.²⁷

An honest summary: the mechanism's core physics (warm water → more snow) is sound and simulable; the full model has not yet been made to work in a climate model at its stated parameters, and the people who discovered that are its friends.

The other models

Price and Howorth: there was no ice age

Covered above. Price's position was not idle: he rejected the pre-Pleistocene "tillites" too, arguing in 1923 that "when water really gets in a hurry, it can pile miscellaneous materials up in a very surprising manner"³ — the same move Oard would make about the same rocks 74 years later. His denial was never universal, though: Byron Nelson's The Deluge Story in Stone (1931) accepted a post-Flood ice age driven by Flood-deflected ocean currents, and even noted the unglaciated Alaska–Siberia lowlands that Oard would later build on.²⁸ No major organization holds Price's full position today, but pieces of it survive in Molén (below) and in Oard's thin-ice-sheet papers.

The vapor canopy ice age — proposed, modeled, abandoned

Henry Morris's version, stated as late as 1989: before the Flood, a "vast thermal blanket of invisible water vapour" (the "waters above the firmament" of Genesis 1:6) kept the whole earth warm; its collapse at the Flood removed the greenhouse, the poles froze, and Flood-heated seas fed the snow. His ending mechanism was unique: CO₂ from regrowing peat bogs rebuilt a partial greenhouse and melted the ice.²⁹

The canopy was killed from inside. The model's own scholarly standard-bearer, Joseph Dillow, computed that the canopy held 40 feet (12.19 m) of rainable water — 2.18 atmospheres of surface pressure.³⁰ Rush and Vardiman's 1990 radiative modeling then found that any canopy holding meaningful water cooks the planet — even a 50-millibar canopy (only half a metre of rainable water, a twenty-fourth of Dillow's figure) "would raise the surface temperature more than 100°."³¹ Vardiman's 2003 rescue attempt required the sun to shine at 25% of its present output.³² CMI now lists the canopy under "Arguments we think creationists should not use," and the editors appended a note to Morris's own article: "CMI has rejected the canopy theory for decades… Even ICR, which Dr Morris founded, now rejects the canopy theory."²⁹

One record needs correcting here, because Oard himself has it wrong. Oard states flatly that The Genesis Flood (1961) "makes no acknowledgement of an ice age."³³ It does. The book contains a named section, "The Glacial Period" (pp. 292–311), with a complete post-Flood, single-glaciation model — including subsections titled "The Theory of Multiple Glaciations" and "The Evidence for Only One Glaciation," and the judgment that supposed earlier tills "really represent either deposits made in the last stages of the Deluge or else deposits made in the early stages of the oncoming glaciation" (p. 299).³⁴ Oard's own 1979 founding paper cites those very pages. The correction matters beyond housekeeping: the one-ice-age argument structure predates Oard by nearly two decades, and the movement's founding text already carried it.

Walt Brown: mammoths frozen during the Flood

Brown's hydroplate theory freezes the Siberian mammoths in the Flood's opening hours: muddy water jetting above the atmosphere froze into hail at −150°F and buried the animals alive; the crust then rolled 35–45°, carrying the carcasses to their present Arctic latitudes.³⁵ His ice age proper resembles Oard's — he credits Oard with priority on the warm-ocean mechanism — but adds "high and, therefore, cold continents" as a second engine.³⁵

The Brown–Oard exchange is the best intra-creationist fight in this literature, and both men land blows. Brown asks why mammoths near the end of a 700-year ice age had not starved centuries earlier, and where Oard's mountains of loess came from.³⁵ Oard's reply is stronger: the mammoths sit in post-Flood contexts — on top of glacial till, in river terraces and thaw pits — are almost entirely bones rather than flesh (decay takes time a Flood burial does not allow), and are rare precisely where the ice sheets sat, which makes sense if ice excluded them and none at all if a global hailstorm buried them everywhere. Brown's own test — no marine fossils or coal beneath mammoth carcasses — "likely fails in the New Siberian Islands," where the permafrost sits on marine rocks and coal.³⁶ Of the Earth roll, Oard writes: "This is massive conjecture, or one could say special pleading."³⁶

The quick freeze that creationists do not hold

The popular image — mammoths flash-frozen mid-meal with buttercups in their teeth, proving a sudden catastrophe — comes from Velikovsky, Charles Hapgood, and Ivan Sanderson's 1960 Saturday Evening Post article "Riddle of the Frozen Giants," with the −150°F figure traced to a Birds Eye Frozen Foods calculation.²³ Its scholarly carrier inside creationism was Joseph Dillow, whose canopy book devoted over a hundred pages to the mammoths and froze them at the onset of the Flood itself — a Flood-simultaneous polar freeze, not an ice-age model.³⁰ The leading creationist mammoth specialist rejects the whole story, on evidence: only about five dozen fleshy carcasses exist against millions of buried bones; the famous Berezovka mammoth's organs had rotted and its stomach was "badly decayed"; blowfly pupae infest many carcasses; scavengers chewed Blue Babe; and the carcasses died in different seasons, which no single instant catastrophe permits.²³ The half-digested stomach contents need no freezer at all: elephants are hindgut fermenters, and studies of 50 culled elephants found "no protozoa and no fermentation in the stomachs" — the stomach is a storage organ, so intact stomach contents are expected in any buried elephant. Oard's verdict: "A quick freeze is an unnecessary hypothesis."²³

Oard's own mechanism has the mammoths thriving in unglaciated Siberia through the ice age — kept mild by the open Arctic Ocean — then dying in the deglaciation's dust storms and thaw pits, buried in wind-blown loess. His honest concession, printed in his own book: "Is there any proof from the carcasses that they died in dust storms? Other than the sediment surrounding the mammoths, there is little evidence from the carcasses, themselves."²³ The evangelical geologists Young and Stearley reach the same split verdict from the other side: Oard's evidence that the mammoths did not all die at once rests on arguments that "are cogent and irrefutable," while "his arguments for extinction at the hands of several catastrophic dust storms are very weak."³⁷

Molén: the evidence itself is misread

The Swedish creationist Mats Molén runs Price's program with modern tools, and — unusually — publishes the fieldwork in secular journals. His case studies argue that classic "glacial" diamictites are gravity-flow deposits: the Varangerfjorden tillite of Norway (including the famous striated "Reusch's moraine" pavement) in Geologos 2018, and the Gowganda Formation of Ontario in Geologos 2021, where he found that supposed dropstones "rarely penetrate laminae" — the signature of clasts carried in a debris flow, not dropped through water from floating ice.³⁸ Applied to the pre-Pleistocene record, this is now the standard creationist position (below). Applied to the Pleistocene, it corrodes the very evidence Oard's model needs, which is why the two programs coexist uneasily. No formal Oard–Molén exchange exists in print; the tension is structural, and creationist writing does not usually acknowledge it.

The boundary problem: is the ice age even post-Flood?

Beneath every version sits an unsettled question: where in the rock record does the Flood end? Oard puts the boundary in the late Cenozoic, leaving a short post-Flood window that his 700 years barely fits. Others put it at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary, opening centuries of post-Flood time but turning much of the Cenozoic into post-Flood deposits that then need their own catastrophes. Push the boundary late enough and the Pleistocene glacial deposits become Flood deposits — and the post-Flood ice age nearly vanishes, as it did for Price. Froede and Akridge call the wider methodological split "a developing schism in Flood geology."³⁹ The ice age is where the schism bites hardest, because the Babel migrations, the mammoths, and the ice all have to share a few post-Flood centuries.

The old-earth mirror image: Hugh Ross

For contrast: old-earth creationist Hugh Ross accepts the entire Milankovitch framework and argues the ice-age cycle is designed — earth's unusually slow orbital-forcing frequencies have a natural probability he puts below 0.00001, and the shift to long 100,000-year cycles about 800,000 years ago produced the stable 10,000-year interglacial that made civilization possible.⁴⁰ The same data that Oard's school spends whole papers attacking is, for Ross, evidence of providence. Both camps read Scripture as true; they cannot both be reading the ice right.

Where the creationist case is strongest

An honest accounting cuts both ways. These are the arguments that survive scrutiny.

Ice-age initiation is genuinely unsolved. This is not a quote-mine. The founding paper of the orbital theory admitted its central cycle "would not arise as a linear response" to the forcing;¹⁰ Imbrie and eighteen colleagues wrote in 1993 that the 100,000-year radiation cycle "is much too small in amplitude and too late in phase to produce the corresponding climate cycle by direct forcing";⁴¹ Paillard's standard review names the 100-kyr problem, the stage-11 problem, and the mid-Pleistocene transition problem;⁴² and a 2023 Annual Review says of the transition, "A full explanation is still lacking."¹² Oard's three-requirements trap — cooling dries the air — is a fair statement of a real modeling difficulty. What the argument does not show is that no ice age occurred or that the counting of them is wrong; every one of those quotations comes from scientists who accept the ~50-cycle record. And the problem is shrinking, not growing: a 640,000-year cave record dated by uranium decay — no orbital tuning anywhere in it — shows the ice-age terminations spaced at four or five precession cycles, exactly as orbital pacing predicts.⁴³

The wet ice-age world. Lake Bonneville was Great Salt Lake's giant ancestor — hundreds of metres deep, needing several times the modern runoff. The Sahara was grassland with crocodiles and rock art. A cold, dry secular glacial climate has to work hard for this; a warm-ocean ice age predicts it directly.⁸ The catch: in the mainstream chronology the African Humid Period and the Bonneville highstand are not simultaneous, while Oard's single short ice age requires them to be — and the mainstream explanation for the wet Sahara is orbital precession, the very mechanism Oard rejects.

Unglaciated Siberia and the mammoth steppe. The lowlands of Siberia, Alaska, and the Yukon never glaciated, even while supporting millions of large grazers — the "productivity paradox." Oard's open Arctic Ocean keeps those coasts mild and wet early on; a cited climate experiment removing Arctic sea ice warmed Siberian winters by 12–28°C.²³ The saiga antelope, whose small hooves cannot cross boggy ground or deep snow, left fossils across Ice Age Siberia to the Arctic islands — hard to square with today's climate, easy with a milder one.²³ Mainstream reconstruction agrees the glacial-era north was strange — Guthrie's mammoth steppe is arid, sunny, windy, and dusty¹⁷ — though it gets there without a warm Arctic.

The megafauna extinction is unexplained on both sides. About 35 genera of large mammals vanished from North America alone. Grayson and Meltzer's review of the overkill hypothesis found kill sites for exactly two of them and concluded, "what did happen is not at all clear."⁴⁴ Creationists should quote that accurately: the mainstream has several candidate explanations and cannot decide, which is not the same as having none.

The Wrangel Island mammoths. The youngest mammoth radiocarbon dates on earth — Wrangel Island, Arctic Siberia — run to about 4,000 radiocarbon years before present; the Radiocarbon paper's own title says mammoths survived there "Until 2000 BC," contemporary with Egypt's Middle Kingdom.⁴⁵ These dates land inside the biblical window, and the island-refuge story mainstream science tells about them is nearly identical to the one Oard tells about the New Siberian Islands. What the dates do not do is compress the rest of the record: the same paper lists mainland Siberian mammoths at ~9,700 radiocarbon years and older.

Bretz and the Missoula Flood. J Harlen Bretz proposed in 1923 that a catastrophic flood carved eastern Washington's Channeled Scablands. The United States Geological Survey establishment resisted for forty years — the 1927 "Great Scablands Debate" critics included men who had never visited the field area — before evidence and aerial photography vindicated him. A 1965 field conference telegraphed him: "We are now all catastrophists." He received the Penrose Medal in 1979, aged 96.⁴⁶ Creationists tell this as a parable of anti-biblical bias, and a mainstream state-history source partly agrees: Bretz's flood "seemed like a reversion to a pre-scientific era."⁴⁷ Honesty requires the other half: for most of the disputed period Bretz had no water source — Pardee's Glacial Lake Missoula supplied it later — and Victor Baker, the story's chief historian, blames Lyellian uniformitarianism, not the Bible.⁴⁶ Resisting a mechanism with no known cause is ordinary science. It is still true that "too catastrophic" functioned as an objection for decades, and that lesson is fairly claimed.

The case for one ice age, examined

Everything above funnels into a single question. The creationist model needs there to have been exactly one ice age; the mainstream record contains about fifty. If the fifty are real, no forcing argument matters — one Flood cannot start and stop fifty glaciations. So the one-ice-age claim is the load-bearing wall of the whole structure, and it deserves the deepest examination in the article. What follows is built from a full pass through the creationist one-ice-age literature: every argument, its sources, and its fate.

The argument as its author states it

Oard's case is a list of general observations — eleven of them in Frozen in Time's summary table: one ice age is meteorologically difficult (so thirty are thirty times worse); most till is local to its bedrock; most till dates from the "last" glaciation even on secular terms; driftless areas inside the ice margin escaped glaciation; interior bedrock is only lightly eroded; flora and fauna barely changed across the supposed 2.5 million years; fossils are rare inside glaciated regions; and the mass extinction came only after the "last" ice age.²³ Biblical Geology 101 (2022) compresses the case to three arguments — assumption, driftless areas, and the extinction: "Why were there not corresponding extinctions after the other 49 ice ages, if indeed there were 49 ice ages?"²³

Oard is candid about the character of this evidence. Under the same table in the 1990 monograph he writes: "this evidence is mostly general, and large-scale."⁴⁸ And the list has shrunk under creationist criticism: the 1990 conference version had thirteen items; Mats Molén's printed objections (wind-polished bedrock and peat under the first till in Sweden) cost it one on the spot — Oard: "I may have to delete the stone pillars on Flowerpot Island as evidence… although I do not understand how this could happen" — and by 2004 two were gone.⁴⁹ Three of the surviving eleven rows are asserted in the table and never argued in the chapter.²³

What is genuinely strong in it

The history of the count is a fair target. The four-ice-age scheme of Penck and Brückner ruled for half a century and was, in Oard's word, "fiction" — and here he has real mainstream support. The geophysicist N. D. Watkins wrote in 1972 that "Perhaps, the best known, at least the most significant, results of the 'reinforcement syndrome' in the geological sciences is the very firmly established concept of four glacial periods during the last Ice Age" — a mainstream concession, in print, that a glacial count was once propped up by publication bias.⁵⁰ Oard also lands a sharp jab from the same era: Penck and Brückner's four terraces "seemed to fit the Milankovitch cycles," and when the terraces were later subdivided, "this new information conforms to the astronomical theory even better" — the unfalsifiability worry in miniature.⁵¹ The limit of the argument: it indicts the pre-isotope counting, which the modern record replaced; Watkins's syndrome ran against the very four-stage scheme whose demolition the ~50-stage record completed.
One extinction pulse. The megafauna died after the last glaciation only. If forty-nine similar cycles preceded it, why no forty-nine extinction pulses? This is the best single argument on the list, and the mainstream answer (the last deglaciation uniquely coincided with armed humans) leans on an overkill hypothesis that mainstream archaeology itself has battered.⁴⁴
Real field wedges, honestly worked. Oard's Wind River study is his one original field test, and it scores real points: the mainstream's own literature concedes moraines exist for only three ice ages there ("evidence for older ice ages cannot be found"); the Sacagawea-terrace correlation rests on nothing but similar elevation, which Oard field-checked ("I verified this in the field—there is no physical connection"); and the terrace dates from different methods disagree by a factor of four.⁵² The other side of the same mountains should be stated with it: ³⁶Cl exposure dating of the moraine boulders puts Pinedale at 15,000–23,000 years, Bull Lake at a minimum of 120,000, and Sacagawea Ridge at a minimum of 232,000 — from which Young and Stearley draw the blunt conclusion that on Flood premises "the Deluge of Noah had to take place more than 230,000 years ago."³⁷ In Alberta, the secular literature really did collapse a 26-till multiple-glaciation scheme to essentially one preserved glaciation over much of the province.⁵³ And the Little Ice Age series shows, from observed modern glaciers, that a single glaciation builds composite moraines, annual moraine belts, and stacked till layers — so counting advances by counting moraines or till beds genuinely does not work.⁵⁴
Soils can form fast. The creationist soil literature cites real field data: a foot of soil on Krakatoa's ash in 45 years, 12 inches at Kamenetz Fortress in 230 years, an organic-rich horizon in Montana in eighty years of irrigation.⁵⁵ Time is not the only variable in pedogenesis, and creationists are right to say so.

The scope collapse

Now the other side of the ledger, starting with the argument's own citations. Every secular source Oard quotes for "one ice age" turns out, on inspection of the source, to claim something smaller — and most presuppose multiple glaciations in the very passage he uses:⁵⁶

Source	Oard's use	What it actually says
Young et al. 1994	multiple glaciation is "assumed"	One late-Wisconsinan event in a ~37 × 33 km box near Edmonton. The next sentence calls the multiple-glaciation assumption "reasonable," grounded in "demonstrated multiple events in the American Midwest" — and the paper's own argument requires pre-Illinoian glaciation in Iowa.
Beaney & Shaw 2000	"only a single glaciation" of Alberta	A literature-review sentence relaying four other papers; the author calls the stratigraphy "unimportant for this particular study."
Derbyshire 1979	several tills can be one advance	True — and stated of "the Pleistocene glaciations," plural. A method caution that cuts both ways: one till also does not prove one glaciation.
Feininger 1971	till is local, so one ice age	A paper about transport distance whose flushing model is built on "the superposition of tills of different glaciations."
Charlesworth 1957	glacial deposits unfossiliferous	True; the very next word is "Nevertheless," followed by a chapter of methods for correlating multiple glaciations.
Jackson et al. 2010/2011	Alberta shows one glaciation	Accepts the one-glaciation result for western Alberta and documents two to three glaciations, separated by radiocarbon-dated non-glacial beds, in the eastern third — in a limiting clause Oard quotes and then argues past.
Sugden & John 1976	evidence for earlier glaciations is scarce	The quotation is verbatim — but the authors' first stated reason for skipping earlier glaciations is that the mechanisms "were basically similar" (redundancy), the next sentence is "Nevertheless, some instructive comparisons with the Weichselian can be made," and p. 139 gives "abundant evidence for multiple Pleistocene glaciations," including ten Icelandic tillites separated by non-glacial intervals.⁵⁷
Kennett 1982	"up to 30" glaciations hypothesized	Kennett's p. 747 says "as many as 30 glacial episodes" — in "about 1.6 m.y.," not Oard's 2.5 million years, attributed to another work rather than counted from cores; Kennett's own core-based count of full-extent glaciations, two pages later, is "about 11."⁵⁸

Not one of these sources claims one ice age globally. The pattern is consistent: regional preservation results and method cautions, quoted as if they were global counts. The same pattern extends to his engineering-geology source: Eyles (1983) is quoted correctly on lightly-eroded shield bedrock and organics incorporated by readvances — but the chapter quoted names three distinct British glaciations, offers "pre-Devensian glacial deposits or readvancing ice lobes" as alternatives where Oard reports only the readvance, and prices the low Canadian Shield erosion at "as low as 10 m for each major glaciation."⁵⁹ One quotation also carries a wrong page (a till-thickness claim located to a page about Britain) — the locator-drift defect that dominates this corpus generally.

Does the fifty survive without orbital tuning?

The most sophisticated creationist counterattack concedes the wiggles are there and attacks their dating: the marine chronology is "orbitally tuned" — ages assigned by aligning the record with Milankovitch cycles — so citing it as proof of Milankovitch-paced ice ages is circular (Hebert), or the wiggles are real but compressed (Vardiman: centennial ocean oscillations; Oard: decadal volcanic pulses recorded in fast-accumulating ice).⁶⁰ The circularity worry is not invented: the mainstream's own methodologists have published the same warning, complete with a demonstration that two random walks can be convincingly "tuned" to each other, and confirmation of the exact tuning chains Hebert traces.⁶¹ But the chapter Hebert quotes four times as his chief authority on tuning answers the charge by name, in a paragraph he never quotes: "Although orbital tuning has often been criticized as circular reasoning, it has passed a number of tests" — concordant independent datums back into the late Eocene, and recovery of the distinctive 95-, 125- and 404-kyr eccentricity "fingerprint" in precession-tuned series.⁶² Two of Hebert's four quotations are also truncated at exactly the clause where the source turns from the hazard to the remedies ("Several strategies exist to lessen the subjectivity…"; "Independent age markers also provide important tests…").⁶²

But the charge answers the wrong question, and this is the decisive point. Tuning assigns ages to the cycle boundaries. It does not create the cycles. The number of alternations in a sediment core is a stratigraphic observation — you count them — and the count survives every de-tuning test that has been run:⁶³

The LR04 stack's authors state it themselves: "its stratigraphic features are essentially independent of any timescale… almost any age model could be applied to the LR04 stack."
Count the alternations between radiometrically dated magnetic reversals — no insolation curve consulted — and you get nine glacial cycles inside the Brunhes epoch (argon- and beryllium-dated at ~773 ka) at ~86 kyr per cycle, and about 52 cycles down to the Matuyama–Gauss reversal at ~45 kyr per cycle in the older section. The "100-kyr world" and the "41-kyr world" both fall out of counting between dated horizons.
Huybers built a chronology with no orbital assumptions at all — depth as the clock, corrected for compaction, pinned only at radiometric reversal ages — precisely "to avoid circular reasoning." It identifies 104 glacial-cycle events over the same interval, finds 33 of 36 deglaciations at high obliquity, and agrees with the tuned timescale to within 5–8 kyr — about one percent.
The uranium-dated Chinese cave record times seven terminations over 640,000 years with no orbital input, at four-to-five precession-cycle spacing.⁴³

The tuning literature and the creationist literature have never met: the word "Huybers" does not appear anywhere in the creationist corpus — not in Hebert's tuning papers, not in Oard's. The untuned chronologies that directly answer the circularity charge have gone unengaged for two decades. Meanwhile the three creationist readings of the same wiggles — natural centennial oscillations, decadal volcanic pulses, too-circular-to-use — are mutually incompatible, and one of them (Hebert's) explicitly warns creationists off the data another (Vardiman's) is built on.⁶⁰

The field evidence the literature does not answer

The deepest finding of the survey is an absence, confirmed by systematic search of the creationist corpus:⁶⁴

"Pollen" occurs zero times in Oard's 1990 monograph — the flagship treatment of multiple glaciations never mentions the strongest interglacial evidence: ordered vegetational successions (birch, then oak and elm, then hornbeam, then spruce, then back to birch) preserved in organic beds between tills, which no transport or entrainment mechanism can produce, because a washed-in assemblage is mixed, not zoned.
No creationist has ever written about the named sites: the Don Valley Brickyard, Two Creeks, Hoxne, the Cromer Forest-bed, the Huon Peninsula coral staircase, the Barbados terraces. Searches across creation.com, AiG, ICR, ARJ, CRSQ, and the ICC proceedings return nothing.
The Chinese loess couplets are reproduced but never discussed: Oard's own 2014 article prints a figure labelling paleosol units S-m through S32 — thirty-plus soil/dust alternations in one column — and offers no account of them.
The dated Missouri till stack is cited but never answered: Oard's one engagement with cosmogenic burial dating names Balco and Rovey's method and never mentions their result — five tills with soils between them, dated in correct stratigraphic order from 2.4 million to 0.2 million years, checked against magnetic polarity. His counter-mechanism (higher past cosmic-ray flux plus accelerated decay) ends in his own words: "It could be they cancel each other and the net effect would be small."
The paleosol rebuttal literature is real but method-level, and its one field study — test pits and thin sections in Montana — concedes the two points that matter: genuinely buried soils normally do keep their organic A-horizons (the Dust Bowl burials do), and the decisive vertical excavation at their own site was never made. Their argument framework even states the condition under which multi-method agreement should win — "If actual data agree between columns that have been assembled independently… the likelihood that they are correct appears to be greater" — which is precisely the condition the Missouri stack satisfies.⁵⁵
Even inside creationism the interglacial evidence has been pressed: Molén surveyed the Swedish and Baffin Island organic beds and called them "the best examples of 'interglacial' deposits in the world, as far as I know," with only transported peat and wind-blown pollen on offer as answers.⁴⁹

Verdict on the one-ice-age claim

The claim has better arguments than skeptics usually allow — the extinction pulse, the driftless areas, the collapsed regional till counts, the composite-moraine template, the reinforcement-syndrome history — and its author concedes its limits with unusual honesty ("mostly general, and large-scale"; "far-traveled erratics are a problem"; "sufficient time between glacial advances for vegetation to grow").⁴⁸ But as it stands it is a case built at the wrong altitude. Its arguments are general observations and method cautions; the evidence against it is specific, stratified, and dated — and the specific evidence is precisely what the literature declines to engage. The count of ~50 cycles survives with the tuning removed; the soils between the tills survive the paleosol critique at every dated site; and the argument's own secular citations, read in full, testify for the other side. Until the creationist literature answers Huybers, the pollen successions, and the Missouri isochrons — by name, at the sites — the one-ice-age claim rests on the general outrunning the specific. And with it rests the "no start, no stop, without the Flood" argument, which needs the fifty to be one.

Where the creationist case fails

The ice cores

This is the hardest evidence, and the article states it at full strength because the creationist literature usually does not.

The count. The GISP2 core from central Greenland was counted layer by layer to 110,000 years at 2,800 m depth. The counting does not depend on layer thickness or on any model: up to five physically independent seasonal signals — summer depth-hoar texture, spring dust peaks, laser-scattered dust, summer nitric-acid conductivity, and (near the top) oxygen-isotope cycles — must agree, and do.⁶⁵ The count's authors publish their own uncertainty: 1–10% in the top 2,500 m, about 20% below, and the core is deformed and untrustworthy below 2,800 m.⁶⁵ The successor Greenland chronology counts ambiguous layers at half weight and carries the ambiguity as an explicit error bar — 950 years, about 5%, at 60,000 years.⁶⁶

The cross-checks are the argument. Layer counting could conceivably mistake storms for years. It could not do so in a way that happens to track unrelated radiometric clocks:

A Chinese cave stalagmite, dated by uranium–thorium decay, matches the Greenland layer count to better than 800 years across 60,000 — under 1.4%.⁶⁶
The Laschamp geomagnetic event is argon-dated at 40,400 ± 1,000 years and layer-counted at 41,250 ± 814; the Z2 volcanic ash is argon-dated 54,500 ± 1,000 and counted 55,380 ± 1,184. Two clocks, different physics, ~2% apart.⁶⁶
The AD 774/5 cosmic-ray spike, fixed to a calendar year by tree rings on three continents, was found in the ice — seven layers off. The chronology was corrected by seven years in 1,240, an error of 0.6%, caught by an independent absolute marker.⁶⁷ If layers were storms at the rate the creationist model needs, the spike would have sat twenty times deeper. In the same study, 24 of 32 historically recorded volcanic dust-veils landed within ±3 years of an ice sulfate spike.⁶⁷

The creationist counter-case, at its best. Oard's reinterpretation assigns the lower core to a 700-year ice age with roughly 3–6 m of water-equivalent snowfall a year, making the "annual" signals storm-scale oscillations — at 2,000 m depth his layers are 100 times thicker than the secular ones.⁶⁸ The famous concession he quotes from the GISP2 team — that a large storm or snow dune could be miscounted as a year — is genuine and accurately worded; the sentences immediately after it, which he does not quote, measure the resulting error: about 1% in the Holocene, 5% in the Wisconsinan, and under 2% against an independent uranium-thorium marker at 30,500 years.⁶⁹ The strongest single creationist argument is historical: the original GISP2 count reached only 85,000 years, and rose to 110,000 after the dust instrument's resolution was increased from 8 mm to 1 mm — bringing it into line with the orbitally tuned marine record. Hebert calls that circular.⁷⁰ The straight answer: layers at that depth are about 4 mm thick, and an 8 mm instrument physically cannot resolve a 4 mm layer, so the first count was necessarily an undercount. But the concern deserved a straight answer, not a wave-off, and the tie-point circularity worry is legitimate in general — it is answered only by the anchors that owe nothing to tuning, which is exactly what the uranium, argon, and tree-ring checks are.

An internal problem, computable from public data. Hebert concedes that in the upper halves of the Greenland cores, "creationist and uniformitarian age assignments agree to within a factor of two or three."⁷⁰ Run the numbers on the primary GISP2 depth-age table: the Holocene boundary sits at 1,678 m and 11,651 counted years. In Oard's model, everything above that boundary fell in the ~4,000 years since his ice age — under essentially modern climate, where his high-snowfall overcounting mechanisms do not apply. Even spotting him a correctly counted top 500 m, he needs roughly a five-fold overcount in post-ice-age ice, with no mechanism on offer. More snowfall would not help him; thicker layers are easier to count.

The Lost Squadron. The most popular version of the creationist argument: P-38 fighters that landed on Greenland in 1942 were found under 268 feet of ice in 1992 — so ice accumulates fast, and the cores are misdated. The facts are real; the inference transfers an accumulation rate across Greenland's steepest climate gradient. The planes sit near the southeast coast, the wettest sector of the ice sheet — over 1,500 mm of water-equivalent snowfall a year, a figure published in the Journal of Glaciology the year before the recovery — while the ice cores are drilled at the interior divide, which gets about a sixth of that.⁷¹ The 268 feet is firn, not ice: about 53 m water-equivalent, an ordinary southeast-Greenland half-century. At the SE-Dome site 220 km away, the 1963 nuclear-test tritium layer lies at 81 m — the same burial depth in the same fifty-odd years, dated three independent ways.⁷² The tell is who declines the argument: Vardiman raised the planes in 1992 and immediately warned that "life is never as simple as implied above";⁷³ Oard's technical ice-core work available online never uses them (his 2005 monograph exists only in print and could not be checked); Hebert's 2018 treatment concedes the apples-to-oranges charge ("Fair enough") and demotes the planes to an analogy for post-Flood snowfall;⁷⁴ and CMI's own article has carried an editorial note since at least 2009 conceding that published accumulation rates make the burial depth "not… a major surprise."⁷⁵ Only popular-level material still runs it as a refutation of ice-core dating.

The 106-layer tephra argument. A newer creationist claim: two chemically identical volcanic ash layers in the GRIP core sit 106 counted years apart; identical chemistry means one eruption, so the 106 layers fell in a year or two.⁷⁶ The premise is refuted by the paper the argument cites: the Borrobol and Penifiler tephras — two eruptions about 160 years apart with indistinguishable chemistry — were established in radiocarbon-dated Scottish lake sediments before anyone found them in Greenland ice. The ice cores did not invent the pair; they reproduced it. That is a successful prediction, not an artifact.⁷⁷

Fifty-one ice ages, five ways

The deep-sea record is not "an ice age"; it is a staircase. The LR04 stack of 57 globally distributed sediment cores — over 38,000 measurements — contains 51 numbered glacial stages in the Quaternary, and the boundary table is published and downloadable.⁷⁸ A one-ice-age model must explain not this record alone but its agreement with four others:

Stacked tills with buried soils. In Iowa and Missouri, drill cores and outcrops read: loess, soil, till, soil, till, till, till, bedrock.⁷⁹ A soil is not a deposit; it is a weathering profile that develops in place on a stable, vegetated, ice-free land surface. Each buried soil is a completed warm interval. These sections were named in the 1890s — the interpretation was forced on field geologists by digging holes, not by Milankovitch theory. And the Missouri stack is now radiometrically dated: cosmogenic ²⁶Al/¹⁰Be burial isochrons put five separate ice advances at 2.4 Ma, 1.3 Ma, and three between 0.75 and 0.2 Ma, in correct stratigraphic order, checked against magnetic polarity.⁸⁰ Oard's answers — glaciotectonic stacking for the tills, poor drainage or acid rain for the "soils" — are a different ad hoc mechanism for each observation, and his fair point that many Midwest paleosols lack their organic top horizon does not touch the dated Missouri sequence.
Chinese loess. The Loess Plateau alternates wind-blown glacial dust with interglacial soils — 33 couplets deep, loess units L1 through L33 against soils S0 through S32 — matching the marine stages cycle for cycle through the last 1.8 million years, and more loosely below that: continental wind on one side of the planet agreeing with ocean-floor chemistry on the other.⁸¹
Coral staircases. The Huon Peninsula coast in Papua New Guinea is rising. Each interglacial high sea level built a reef there, and uplift then lifted it clear of the next one. John Chappell mapped the result in 1974: "a spectacular flight of terraces," developed for more than 80 km and rising to over 600 m, recording nine dated Pleistocene sea-level maxima — at 30, 40–50, 60, 80, 105, 120, 140, 185 and 220 thousand years ago.⁸² The built-in check is that uplift is not uniform: it runs about 0.5 mm a year at the northwest end of the coast and 3.5 mm a year at the southeast, so the same highstand sits at a different height in every section — and the sea levels recovered from those different heights still agree. The last-interglacial reef crest stands at 320 m in one section and 403 m in another; uranium-series dates reach 253,000 years on terrace X, and a 2022 satellite remapping counts 31 terraces in the flight, the highest assigned roughly 414,000 years.⁸³
Cave records. Siberian stalagmites grew only in warm intervals — each growth phase uranium-dated — recording the same repeated alternations.⁸⁴

One honest counterweight belongs here: the Devils Hole calcite record in Nevada, also uranium-dated, disagrees with the orbital timescale by roughly 10,000 years at the second-to-last deglaciation. The discrepancy is real and argued over — though a second uranium-dated Nevada cave record, from Lehman Caves 400 km away, times the same deglaciation "at a time consistent with Milankovitch forcing," while conceding that the early Devils Hole onset "remains robust."⁸⁵ Either way it moves one boundary; it does not reduce the number of cycles.

The three-way squeeze: ice volume, rebound, sea level

The physics, run with the numbers in the open.

Latent heat sets a ceiling. Condensing the mainstream ice volume — 52 million km³, the figure required by the observed sea-level fall⁸⁶ — releases 1.35 × 10²⁶ J. Spread over the ice sheets in 500 years, that is 343 W/m² of heat the atmosphere above the growing ice must dump to space — the radiative output of a surface at +6°C, over ground that must stay cold enough to snow. That is not a difficulty; it is a contradiction. The mainstream ice volume cannot be built in 500 years. (In fairness: the warm ocean stores almost exactly the right total energy — 1.37 × 10²⁶ J — so the model's source is self-consistent. The bottleneck is disposal, not supply.)

So Oard halves the ice — and that is what rescues the thermodynamics. At his ~700 m average, the latent-heat flux drops to ~115 W/m², inside the physical ceiling for a cold, high-latitude surface. His thin-ice case cites real field literature on the multi-domed Laurentide.⁸⁷ Credit where due: the thin model is not thermodynamically absurd. But it now fails two independent measurements:

Rebound. Ice presses the crust down by (ice density ÷ mantle density) × thickness — at 700 m of ice, a maximum depression of about 195 m. The raised marine shorelines around Hudson Bay stand at roughly 270–315 m, and GPS measures the land still rising at ~10 mm/yr today, with the uplift bull's-eye centred exactly where the ice was thickest.⁸⁸ Oard's ice sheet cannot depress the crust by less than the crust has demonstrably come back up. Worse, the mantle viscosity that sets the rebound speed was measured from the rebound itself; a mantle runny enough to rebound within a biblical timeframe would have finished by now, and Hudson Bay would be still. It is not.
Sea level. Melt Oard's ice into the ocean and sea level rises about 43 m (57 m with a generous Antarctic allowance). The measured lowstand — from ~1,000 dated drowned shorelines, reefs, and sediments — is −134 m.⁸⁶ Oard's own 2020 paper accepts the consequence: his sea-level fall "may have been only about 50 m," which barely exposes the Bering land bridge, so he now raises the bridge tectonically instead.⁸⁹ That reversal abandons the mechanism every creationist ministry still uses to walk animals to Australia and people to America.

Half-size ice saves the heat budget and breaks the rebound and the sea level. Full-size ice fits the rebound and the sea level and breaks the heat budget. There is no setting of the dial that fits all three.

Two more independent clocks point the same way. Deep Siberian permafrost reaches 1,000–1,500 m; pure heat conduction takes roughly 47,000–71,000 years to freeze ground that deep, before counting the latent heat of the pore water, which multiplies the time several-fold. The input is the thermal diffusivity of rock, measured in a laboratory. And Greenland's measured glacial-era snowfall was lower than today's — Younger Dryas accumulation was 47% of the early Holocene¹⁶ — which is the empirical form of the objection to any heavy-snowfall ice age: cold air is dry air, and the ice cores show it.

The heat problem, in the creationists' own words

Warming the ocean needs ~10²⁶ J. The proposed source — an ocean floor's worth of new igneous rock from catastrophic plate tectonics — releases ~10²⁸ J, enough to boil the oceans roughly three times over. The calculation is John Baumgardner's, the creationist architect of catastrophic plate tectonics: the energy would "melt a layer of silicate rock 12 km thick or… boil away a layer of water 25 km deep over the entire earth."⁹⁰ Baumgardner elsewhere: "all creationist Creation or Flood models I know of have serious problems with heat disposal."⁹¹ Hebert, candidly: "we do not yet have a definitive answer to this question," followed by the most quotable sentence in the genre — "Better to have a potent Ice Age explanation… that can be 'dialed back' if need be than to have an explanation (Milankovitch forcing) that is too weak to accomplish the task."⁹² That is the entire debate in one line: the creationist mechanism has too much energy, the mainstream one arguably too little. But "too much" here means four hundred Chicxulub impacts of excess heat with no published disposal mechanism, and the creationist technical literature (Worraker's multi-part series) confirms the problem stands.⁹³

The Milankovitch counterattack, and why it fell short

ICR physicist Jake Hebert spent three long papers re-deriving the 1976 "Pacemaker of the Ice Ages" analysis, arguing that the later revision of the Brunhes–Matuyama magnetic reversal date (700 → 780 thousand years) invalidates the original statistics and that the revision itself was circular — tuned to Milankovitch and then "confirmed."⁹⁴ Three things should be said. First, his central fact is true and checkable, he built and ran his own spectral code, and he reported results that hurt his own case — including one peak where his reanalysis matched Milankovitch better than the original. Second, the circularity charge fails on the independent evidence he himself cites: argon–argon dating of lavas straddling the reversal, and a beryllium-10 marker in Antarctic ice, both give ~773–783 thousand years with no orbital input anywhere.⁹⁵ Third — and this cuts in every direction — no mainstream scientist has ever replied to any of it. Hebert says so himself: "there has been no public response to my research from uniformitarian scientists or old-earth creationists."⁹⁶ Work published in Answers Research Journal sits outside the channels paleoclimatologists read. Silence is not refutation, and it is not vindication either.

The chronology does not fit — says AiG's own journal

Eric Tweedy, Answers Research Journal, 2024: "accepted historical glaciation extents, Oard's Ice Age model as he parameterized it, northern Europe settlement traditions, and the Masoretic biblical timeline are not consistent."⁹⁷ His sharpest point is a catch-22 on the Bering land bridge: the bridge exists only at glacial maximum, when ice blocks the routes onto and off it; when the ice clears, the sea covers the bridge. "Arrival before the glaciers means eviction by the glaciers as they peak."⁹⁷ Oard's tectonic-bridge proposal (above) is the attempted fix, and it contradicts his own 2004 book.

External history presses harder. On Ussher's chronology the Flood is 2348 BC and AiG's ice age runs ~2250–2000 BC. Conventional Egyptology puts the Giza pyramids at 2600–2500 BC — before the Flood, inside the ice age. The creationist response is a wholesale revision of Egyptian chronology: Manetho's dynasties overlap, the Sothic calendar anchor is a modern construct, and the Old Kingdom compresses into the post-Babel centuries.⁹⁸ Whatever one makes of that program, its cost should be stated: it discards the dynasty framework, the Sothic anchor, and the radiocarbon dates together, and AiG states its method openly — "The Christian should only accept revised chronology that is consistent with the Bible."⁹⁸

The Bible and the ice age

Scripture never mentions it, and the main creationist sources say so. Oard: "The Ice Age is not mentioned in the Bible; it is a climatic deduction from the biblical event of the Flood."²³ Snelling and Matthews open with "The Bible doesn't say, 'And then there was an Ice Age.'"² CMI's geomorphologist Ron Neller, asked why the Bible is silent, answers that the people alive then would not have known they were living in an ice age — "These are labels that modern scientists have applied" — and calls the Job references "vague… and not necessarily confirmation of the post-Flood Ice Age."⁹⁹

The Job argument, tested. The claim that Job — the book creationists date to the post-Flood patriarchal era — is unusually preoccupied with ice and snow turns out to be true, narrowly. Counting ice, snow, frost, frozen, hoary, and congealed across all 31,102 KJV verses: Job leads the Bible with 12 occurrences (Psalms is next with 6) and leads in density by more than 2.5-fold. "The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen" (Job 38:30, KJV). The caveat that honesty requires: add "hail" and Exodus wins on the strength of the seventh plague, and in any case the count proves the author had cold weather on his mind, not that glaciers stood in Europe when he wrote.

Peleg. Mainstream creationism reads "in his days was the earth divided" (Genesis 10:25) as the Babel dispersion, not continental drift — running the continents apart within Peleg's lifetime would be a second Flood-scale catastrophe inside the ice age, and the context of Genesis 10–11 is nations and languages.¹⁰⁰ AiG hangs its ice-age chronology on Peleg's generation: Babel judgment ~2250 BC, ice advance for two to three centuries, megafauna extinct by ~2000 BC.²

Ancient ice ages and Snowball Earth

The rock record contains "tillites" far older than the Pleistocene — late Paleozoic, Ordovician, and two Precambrian sets, the last inflated by secular science into "Snowball Earth." Here the creationist position is uniform, because it must be: there can be no glaciers during a year-long global flood, so all pre-Pleistocene glacial deposits are reinterpreted as gigantic submarine landslides and debris flows.³³ The case is better than it sounds. Debris flows produce diamict texture, striated clasts, even striated pavements — the Bigganjargga "moraine" pavement in Norway shows clast imprints proving soft-sediment sliding,¹⁰¹ a secular American Journal of Science monograph (Schermerhorn 1974) argued much of the Precambrian "glacial" record is mass-flow deposit, and Molén's field studies (above) press the same case in secular journals today. The dropstone criterion cuts the creationists' way surprisingly often: clasts that fail to puncture the laminae beneath them were not dropped from floating ice. Snowball Earth itself is turned into an offensive argument — a fully white planet's albedo should keep it frozen forever, and the "freeze-fry" escape mechanisms are, in Oard's word, far-fetched.¹⁰² The weakness is scale: known submarine landslides are orders of magnitude smaller than, say, the late Paleozoic deposits spread across Gondwana with radiating striation patterns. This is the one sector of the debate where the creationist literature is arguably ahead of its popular reputation, and it should still be presented as a minority reading of hard rocks, not a solved problem.

Objections and responses

"No one knows what causes ice ages, so the creationists win by default." No. The initiation and pacing problems are real and admitted, but they are puzzles inside a framework whose record — how many, in what order, how long — is multiply cross-checked. A model that cannot yet explain the trigger still beats a model contradicted by the layer counts, the rebound, and the sea level.

"The Lost Squadron planes prove the ice cores are misdated." They do not, and the serious creationist ice-core specialists do not use the argument. The planes lie in Greenland's wettest corner; the cores are drilled in its driest interior; the accumulation map predates the recovery. Use Hebert's version if any: the planes illustrate that high snowfall buries things fast, which the post-Flood model independently asserts for the interior. They prove nothing about layer counting.

"Identical ash layers 106 'years' apart prove the layers aren't annual." The two eruptions with identical chemistry a century apart were documented in radiocarbon-dated Scottish lake mud before the ice cores found them. The argument's premise is false in the source it cites.

"The mammoths were flash-frozen — you can't explain them." The flash freeze is a mid-century magazine legend that the leading creationist specialist rejects on the evidence: decayed organs, fly pupae, scavenging, deaths in every season, and hindgut digestion explaining the stomach contents. Both serious models — mammoth-steppe and post-Flood — bury the animals slowly in wind-blown silt.

"Radiocarbon dates of the youngest mammoths land in Bible times, so the whole chronology compresses." The Wrangel dates are genuinely striking and creationists may fairly cite them. But they sit at the end of an unbroken series running back through 9,700-year mainland dates to 12,700 and beyond; cherry-picking the youngest island stragglers does not move the series.

"Ice sheets kilometres thick need hundreds of thousands of years." This objection, popular on the skeptical side, is wrong, and creationists are right to say so. At today's snowfall the Greenland ice sheet needs only ~5,000–10,000 years of accumulation, and everyone's models agree ice sheets can grow in millennia. The age evidence is in the layers and their cross-checks, not in the mere thickness.

"Creationists just ignore the problems." The technical creationist literature does not. Oard published the climate-model failure against his own mechanism; Vardiman published his negative hypercane result and dismantled the naive Lost Squadron argument in the same article that introduced it; Hebert prints the strongest counter-evidence to his Pacemaker case before answering it; AiG's journal published Tweedy's chronological critique; and CMI maintains a public list of arguments not to use. The gap is between the technical literature and the popular material, which routinely runs arguments the specialists have shelved.

"Then why not accept the mainstream account outright?" Because its own foundations have admitted open problems — initiation, the 100-kyr pacing, the mid-Pleistocene transition, Devils Hole — and because the creationist framework is committed to a global Flood whose climatic aftermath would include a glacial episode. The argument of this article is narrower than either side wants: the evidence for many long glacial cycles is very strong; the evidence that a warm-ocean catastrophe can produce a glacial episode is physically respectable; and the published attempts to fit that episode into 700 post-Flood years have so far failed their own community's tests.

What a careful creationist should and should not argue

Safe to use: the admitted secular initiation and pacing problems (with dates on the quotes); the wet Sahara and pluvial lakes; unglaciated Siberia, the saiga, and the productivity paradox; the megafauna extinction as unsolved on all sides — and the single-extinction-pulse argument built on it; Wrangel Island as a striking convergence; the Bretz story as a documented case of "too catastrophic" functioning as an objection; the debris-flow reinterpretation of pre-Pleistocene tillites; the thickness-is-not-age concession; the Watkins reinforcement-syndrome quote on the old four-glaciation scheme (with its scope stated); composite and annual moraines from single modern glaciations as a caution against counting advances by counting moraines; fast-pedogenesis field data as a caution against treating soil development as a pure clock.

Retired or never-good: the Lost Squadron as a refutation of ice-core dating; the 106-layer tephra argument; the flash-frozen mammoths; the vapor canopy; a bare "500 years to glacial maximum" without its published 174–1,765-year bracket; "no one knows what causes ice ages" quoted from a 1957 textbook or a regional trade book as if it described the current field; quoting Young et al., Beaney & Shaw, Derbyshire, Feininger, or Charlesworth as support for one global ice age — each is a regional result or method caution, and four of the five presuppose multiple glaciations in the passage quoted; citing the tuning-circularity argument without engaging the untuned chronologies (Huybers, reversal-anchored counts) that answer it.

Must be answered before the model can claim victory: 110,000 cross-anchored layers with a required ~5× overcount in post-ice-age ice; ~50 glacial stages that survive with the orbital tuning removed; the pollen successions in interglacial beds and the named sites no creationist has ever addressed; the radiometrically dated Missouri till-and-soil stack; the rebound–sea-level–heat squeeze; deep permafrost; the 10²⁸-joule Flood heat budget; and a chronology that AiG's own journal says does not currently cohere.

Sources

1.
Alt, David. Glacial Lake Missoula and Its Humongous Floods. Mountain Press, Missoula, MT. 2001. Page 180. A popular regional-geology trade book about the floods from Glacial Lake Missoula, not a climatology review. Its aside on the initiation of ice ages is accurate that it is debated, but it is not a statement of the field's state of the art. Michael Oard quotes it in at least five publications, for example at creation.com/what-caused-ice-age. The article uses it for the line that no one really knows what causes ice ages. ↩
2.
Snelling, Andrew A., and Mike Matthews. “When Was the Ice Age in Biblical History?” Answers 8(2). Apr 2013. The editor's note reads: “Biblical creationists have not reached a consensus on one Ice Age model. This article represents one view. Differences between the models have no major bearing on the overall timescale of a straightforward reading of Scriptures, i.e., the Flood of Genesis 6, which occurred roughly 4300 years ago, brought on one major Ice Age that lasted a few hundred years.” Their dates are the Babel judgment and ice-age onset, and the megafauna extinction: “around a century or so after the Flood (perhaps 2250 BC)”. “around 2100–2000 BC”. A magazine article by Andrew Snelling and Mike Matthews for Answers in Genesis, a young-earth creationist ministry, that dates the Ice Age from the Bible's genealogies and the cities of Abraham's day, not from radiometric dating. It places the start of the Ice Age near the Babel judgment and its end near the extinction of the large animals, a span the article puts at roughly 300 years against Oard's 700. The article uses it as the clearest statement of the ministry's own shorter timeline, and its editor's note shows that creationists disagree on the model. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
3.
Price, George McCready. The New Geology. Pacific Press, Mountain View, CA. 1923. A geology textbook by George McCready Price, whom the article calls the founder of modern flood geology. It lists his objections to the continental ice sheets, such as glacial marks on New England summits too high for ice and driftless areas inside the supposed ice margin. The article uses it as the book that set out the creationist case against the ice sheets.
1. 3a.
  Page 570. ↩
2. 3b.
  Pages 162–164: The five objections, and this sentence from the same pages: “But that in the long ago immense ice caps covered the greater portion of the northeastern part of North America and the northwestern part of Europe, is mere matter of speculation.” ↩
3. 3c.
  Page 571. ↩
4. 3d.
  Pages 333–334: Precambrian "tillites". Pages 448–449: The Permian tillites of India and South Africa: “Is it reasonable to think that huge glaciers once spread poleward in each direction from the tropics as a center?” ↩
4.
Buckland, William. Reliquiae Diluvianae; or, Observations on the Organic Remains… Attesting the Action of an Universal Deluge. John Murray, London. 2nd edition. 1823. Sedgwick's recantation came in his address, “Address to the Geological Society… on retiring from the President's Chair”. published in Proceedings of the Geological Society of London 1 (No. 20):281–316 (1831), at p. 313: “the vast masses of diluvial gravel, scattered almost over the surface of the earth, do not belong to one violent and transitory period”. “Having been myself a believer, and, to the best of my power, a propagator of what I now regard as a philosophic heresy… I think it right, as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation.” Sedgwick's limit, p. 314: “do we deny the reality of a historic deluge? I utterly reject such an inference.” Buckland's own paper in the same Proceedings, 3 (Pt. 2, No. 72):327–348 (1840–41), names his past error at p. 332, phenomena. “which he had attributed to diluvial action”. and at p. 335 the Comrie test, where he marked predicted glacier evidence on a map in advance: “The results coincided with the anticipations.” Murchison's 1842 anniversary address (same volume, pp. 685–687) records Buckland retreating within fifteen months toward a mixed ice-and-water position. The reversal was messier than either side's tidy telling. The standard biography, Clark and Hughes (1890), misquotes the recantation as "after the same kind" for "of the same kind". A book by William Buckland of Oxford on the animal remains found in caves and fissures and in diluvial gravel, which he argued were left by a universal Flood. The article uses it as the case for the gravel and boulders being Noah's Flood debris, the view that the Ice Age later replaced. ↩
5.
Rudwick, Martin J. S. Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform. University of Chicago Press. 2008. Pages 550–551, 517. A history of geology by the historian Martin Rudwick, on how geologists reconstructed the Earth's past. Oard quotes it in "Secular scientific problems with the Ice Age," Creation 42(1):48–51 (2020), at https://creation.com/ice-age-problems. The article uses Rudwick to show that the Ice Age was unexpected by the leading geologists of its day. ↩
6.
Howorth, Henry H. The Glacial Nightmare and the Flood. Sampson Low, London. 1893. Pages xiv–xv: George McCready Price quotes the preface in his 1923 book, p. 571. A two-volume book by Sir Henry Howorth, a Member of Parliament and Fellow of the Geological Society, against glacial geology, the idea that great ice sheets once covered much of the land. Its subtitle calls it a second appeal to common sense. Howorth was a catastrophist but not a young-earth creationist, and the article uses his preface as the flood geologists' rejection of the Ice Age. ↩
7.
Ireland, Jasmine, and Stacia McKeever. “Was there an Ice Age?” Creation 26(2):32–33. Mar 2004. “eventually covered about one-third of the land on the earth”. “the Ice Age lasted around 700 years—500 years to build up and 200 years to melt back.” A short popular article in Creation, the magazine of Creation Ministries International, that sets out the ministry's standard figures for the Ice Age. It says the Flood's warm oceans and volcanic dust let snow pile up into ice sheets over about one-third of the land, and it gives the whole Ice Age as around 700 years. The article uses it as the source of those standard CMI figures for the ice's extent and length. ↩
8.
Oard, Michael J., and Robert Carter. Biblical Geology 101. Creation Book Publishers. 2022. A creationist geology book by Michael Oard and Robert Carter. Chapter 11 of it gives Oard's ice-age model with its tables, and the article uses that chapter for the three things any ice-age model must supply and for the lake and Sahara evidence that a wet ice-age climate has to explain.
1. 8a.
  Chapter 11, table 11.2: Two published slips in this chapter. The summer-temperature threshold is printed as. “−10°C”. and is twice rendered. “(−14°F)”. (−10°C is +14°F), and the threshold itself moved from −7°C in Oard's 2014 article to −10°C here without stated reason. ↩
2. 8b.
  Chapter 11: “about 12 times the size of Great Salt Lake, and about 300 m (1,000 ft) deep”. Death Valley's Lake Manly is. “some 180 m (600 ft) deep”. The ice-age southwest had. “about four times the amount of precipitation”. The Sahara's rock art and stranded crocodiles are the other evidence. Oard's 1990 paper cites Smith and Street-Perrott for six times the modern runoff to sustain Bonneville. Oard concedes that the mainstream has a mechanism: “Their best theory involves cooler temperatures, less evaporation, and more runoff. These conditions would be helpful, but the magnitude of the changes is still a challenge for them to explain.” ↩
9.
Oard, Michael J. “Secular scientific problems with the Ice Age.” Creation 42(1):48–51. Jan 2020. A magazine article by Michael Oard that sets out the problems he finds in the mainstream account of the Ice Age. The article uses it for Oard's figure that cooling Canada's summers by 12°C leaves the air holding about 60% less moisture, which it treats as the central difficulty for any ice age. ↩
10.
Hays, J. D. et al. “Variations in the Earth's Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages.” Science 194(4270):1121–1132. Dec 10, 1976. The precession doublet at about 19 and 23 kyr was matched in advance of observation. On the dominant cycle: “Yet this cycle would not arise as a linear response of the climate system to variations in obliquity and precession,”. “we abandon the assumption of linearity.” A 1976 paper by J. D. Hays, John Imbrie and N. J. Shackleton that tests whether changes in Earth's orbit set the timing of the ice ages. It found spectral peaks at 23,000, 42,000 and about 100,000 years in two Indian Ocean cores, carrying about 10, 25 and 50 percent of the climatic variance. The article uses it as the founding paper of the orbital theory and for its admission that the central cycle would not arise as a linear response. ↩ ↩
11.
Lüthi, D. et al. “High-resolution carbon dioxide concentration record 650,000–800,000 years before present.” Nature 453:379–382. 2008. A Nature paper with a high-resolution record of atmospheric carbon dioxide from ice cores, covering 650,000 to 800,000 years ago. Its record runs roughly 170–300 ppm across the glacial cycles, with glacial-maximum values near 180–190 ppm against interglacial values near 280 ppm. The article uses it for the measured fall in CO₂ at glacial maxima, one of the feedbacks that amplify the weak orbital push. ↩
12.
Herbert, Timothy D. “The Mid-Pleistocene Climate Transition.” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 51:389–418. 2023. “Explaining this change is very difficult because there was no corresponding change in the orbital pacing that would trigger a change in timing… A full explanation is still lacking.” Ganopolski, A., "Toward generalized Milankovitch theory (GMT)," Climate of the Past 20:151–185 (2024), says in its abstract: “a generally accepted comprehensive theory of glacial cycles has not emerged yet”. That abstract also affirms "strong support for the astronomical theory." A review article by Timothy D. Herbert on the Mid-Pleistocene Climate Transition, a change in the ice-age cycle that the review says is still unexplained. The article uses it as a recent mainstream admission that the transition has no full explanation yet. ↩ ↩
13.
Rind, D. et al. “Can Milankovitch orbital variations initiate the growth of ice sheets in a general circulation model?” Journal of Geophysical Research 94(D10):12851–12871. 1989. “fully expecting the ice to grow… melted everywhere in 5 years!” A test of whether orbital (Milankovitch) changes can start ice sheets growing in a general circulation model, a computer simulation of the global climate. The article uses it because the ice melted everywhere in the model within five years, so glacial start-up did not work for that generation of models. Oard reports it in Frozen in Time, ch. 10, and The New Answers Book 1, ch. 16, and says that the model was given the prescribed 30 feet (10 m) of ice, with the authors. ↩
14.
Phillips, P. J., and I. M. Held. “TITLE NEEDED.” Journal of Climate 7:780. 1994. “We now have glaciation, but mainly outside the area where it existed during the last ice age.” A 1994 Journal of Climate paper by Phillips and Held, whose model produced glaciation. The article uses it for a model that did produce glaciation but put it in the wrong place. ↩
15.
Talento, S. et al. “New estimation of critical insolation–CO₂ relationship for triggering glacial inception.” Climate of the Past 20:1349–1364. 2024. “To trigger glacial inception, the orbital forcing… must be lower than a critical level, which depends on the atmospheric CO₂ concentration… The experiments evidence the fact that during glacial inception, ice sheets grow mostly in North America, and only under low CO₂ conditions are ice sheets also formed over Scandinavia.” The paper also concedes a calibration weakness that a creationist may fairly quote: “paleoclimatic data do not provide a strong constraint on the dependence between CO₂ and critical insolation.” A 2024 modelling paper that estimates the critical summer insolation needed to trigger glacial inception, a level that depends on CO₂. The article uses it for the current state of the models, which grow ice sheets from orbital forcing and low CO₂ alone, with no warm ocean and no volcanic loading. ↩
16.
Rasmussen, S. O. et al. “A new Greenland ice core chronology for the last glacial termination.” Journal of Geophysical Research 111:D06102. 2006. “compared to the early Holocene, the mean accumulation rates in the Younger Dryas and Bølling periods are found to be 47 ± 2% and 88 ± 2%, respectively.” Permafrost: maximum Siberian thickness ~1,000–1,500 m (western Yakutia); conduction time L²/κ gives ~47,000–71,000 years for 1,500 m at κ = 1.0–1.5 × 10⁻⁶ m²/s, before pore-water latent heat (≈ 6× the sensible heat at 30% porosity). A paper by S. O. Rasmussen and colleagues that gives a new Greenland ice-core chronology for the last glacial termination, the warming that ended the last ice age. The article uses it for the Younger Dryas snowfall, which was 47% of the early Holocene rate, so glacial Greenland got less snow than today, not more. ↩ ↩
17.
Guthrie, R. Dale. “Origin and causes of the mammoth steppe: a story of cloud cover, woolly mammal tooth pits, buckles, and inside-out Beringia.” Quaternary Science Reviews 20:549–574. 2001. “during the last full glacial (LGM), say 18,000 B.P., most of the north was unimaginably arid… loess sheets, sand seas, dune fields and wind were common features of this aridity.” A paper by R. Dale Guthrie of the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which argues that the glacial north was a dry, dusty steppe, the mammoth steppe, with more moisture only in a narrow Bering belt. The article uses it for that picture of the glacial north as arid, windy and dusty. ↩ ↩
18.
Oard, Michael J. “Flood impacts reinforce volcanic cooling to start the Ice Age.” Journal of Creation 33(3):77–84. Dec 2019. Abstract: “Climate models with a warm ocean show that winters would be too warm after the Flood for the Ice Age.” Body: “Dr Steven Gollmer from Cedarville University discovered that the warm oceans would prohibit the formation of ice sheets unless the high-latitude oceans cooled enough and/or the amount of aerosols… was very high… The model runs, indeed, showed that the warm ocean is a powerful source for atmospheric heat—more than I previously thought.” The same paper gives the 1,927 volcanic events figure for the Greenland cores' ice-age portion. A 2019 journal article by Michael Oard arguing that volcanic aerosols and Flood impacts could start the Ice Age straight after the Flood. It reports Gollmer's climate-model runs, which showed the warm ocean to be a powerful source of atmospheric heat, and counts 1,927 volcanic events in the ice-age part of the Greenland cores. The article uses it for the volcanism arithmetic and for Oard's admission that warm-ocean models make winters too warm. ↩ ↩ ↩
19.
Oard, Michael J. Author biography. n.d. The biography that two creationist ministries publish for Michael Oard, who took a BS in 1969 and an MS in 1973, both in atmospheric science at the University of Washington. It records that he was a National Weather Service meteorologist from 1973 to 2001, lead forecaster in Great Falls, MT, from 1981 to 2001, and a member of the board of the Creation Research Society. The article uses it to show that Oard is a meteorologist, not a glaciologist. Mirror: Creation.com ↩
20.
Oard, Michael J. “A Rapid Post-Flood Ice Age.” Creation Research Society Quarterly 16:29–37. 1979. The paper says: “I will assume a pleasantly warm average ocean temperature immediately following the flood of 24 degrees C.” “an average decrease of 2 meters a year would be a good estimate. At this rate, it would take 236 years to melt the ice sheets.” The paper also records that in 1979. “Some Creationists do not believe there was an ice age.” The first paper in which Oard set out a rapid post-flood ice age, written by Michael J. Oard, M.S. in atmospheric science. It proposes that volcanic dust and a snow and ice cover cooled the continents after the Flood, while a warm ocean supplied the moisture, and it gives an ice age of about 500 years. The author says he does not defend the evidence for an ice age itself. The article uses the paper for two later revisions Oard made to its numbers, the starting ocean temperature and the melt rate. ↩ ↩
1. 20a.
  Oard's later book-length statements, in order: An Ice Age Caused by the Genesis Flood, ICR (1990, out of print); Frozen in Time, Master Books (2004); The Frozen Record: Examining the Ice Core History of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets, ICR Technical Monograph, Institute for Creation Research, Santee, CA (2005), xv + 199 pp., ISBN 978-0-932766-82-3; The Missoula Flood Controversy and the Genesis Flood, CRS Monograph 13 (2004); Ancient Ice Ages or Gigantic Submarine Landslides?, CRS Monograph 6 (1997); How Noah's Flood Caused a Single Ice Age, Creation Book Publishers (2025), ISBN 9781942773450. Later citations giving "Dallas, TX" for the Santee monograph are anachronistic. ↩
21.
Vardiman, Larry, and Michael J. Oard. “ICR and Explaining the Ice Age.” Acts & Facts 52(6):18. 2023. “One of the mechanisms was that volcanic aerosols trapped in the stratosphere after the Flood… cooled the continents during the summer. The second mechanism was the warm ocean water after the Flood from pole to pole and top to bottom.” ICR calls the two mechanisms "suggested by other creationists"; Oard's contribution is the quantification. A magazine article by Larry Vardiman, an atmospheric scientist at the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), and Michael Oard. It reports ICR computer simulations in which warm oceans energized storms and grew ice sheets within centuries, not hundreds of thousands of years. The article uses it as ICR's own statement of the model's two engines. ↩
22.
Oard, Michael J. “A Post-Flood Ice-Age Model Can Account for Quaternary Features.” Origins 17(1):8–26. 1990. Oard's full model of a post-Flood ice age, published in Origins (Geoscience Research Institute). It summarizes how the ice sheets build up and melt after the Flood, gives a rough estimate of the time to reach glacial maximum and the melting time, and says the model can account for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The article uses its numbers for the time to glacial maximum and for the starting temperature of the ocean.
1. 22a.
  “But if the average temperature was much warmer than 30ºC, marine life as we know it now would have been seriously threatened. This suggests using 30ºC as a probable maximum temperature for the oceans immediately following the flood.” ↩ ↩
2. 22b.
  “the evaporation rate at an ocean surface temperature of 30ºC is over three times greater than it is at 10ºC, and over seven times greater than it is at 0ºC.” ↩
3. 22c.
  “the estimated time to reach glacial maximum ranges from around 200 years to about 1700 years. A time of about 500 years is considered the most probable, based on the most reasonable values in the heat balance equations applied to the post-flood climate.” ↩
4. 22d.
  “Estimates of the average ice depth for the Northern Hemisphere ranged from 515-906 m, the most probable depth being about 700 m. The ice depth on Antarctica was estimated to range from 726-1673 [m], with a best estimate of about 1200 m. These values compare with typical estimates of 1700 m in the Northern Hemisphere and 1880 m over Antarctica (Flint 1971, p. 84).” And: “My estimates for the maximum ice volume are about one-half those obtained by conventional models.” Melt: “The ablation rate ranged from 7.2-17.7 m/yr at the periphery; the best estimate was a conservative 10 m/yr.” ↩
23.
Oard. Frozen in Time. Master Books. 2004. Oard's popular book on the post-Flood ice age, written for lay readers. Its chapters give the details of the model and answer the objections of other writers. The article cites its chapters for the volcanic dust, the snow, the melting, the mammoths and the timing of the Ice Age.
1. 23a.
  Chapter 7: “The creationist's time scale is telescoped, putting all these tremendous volcanic eruptions into a relatively short period after the Flood. It is the short time frame that makes the difference.” The Damon quotation he answers: “volcanic explosions would need to be an order of magnitude [ten times] more numerous than during the past 160 years to result in continental glaciation equivalent to the Wisconsin glacial episode.” Online chapter: https://answersingenesis.org/environmental-science/ice-age/genesis-flood-caused-the-ice-age/. ↩ ↩
2. 23b.
  Chapter 9: “I calculated a minimum cooling time of 174 years and a maximum time of 1,765 years. Using values in the mid range of the variables, I ended up with about 500 years to reach glacial maximum.” Online chapter: https://answersingenesis.org/environmental-science/ice-age/peak-of-ice-age/. ↩
3. 23c.
  Chapter 10: “The Flood model rate of 30 feet/year (10 m/yr) at the periphery compares very closely to modern measurements in the cool, commonly cloudy melting zones of glaciers in Alaska, Iceland, and Norway.” Also his use of the Rind, Peteet & Kukla simulation, in which 10 m of prescribed ice. “melted everywhere in 5 years”. instead of growing. Online chapter: https://answersingenesis.org/environmental-science/ice-age/catastrophic-melting/. ↩
4. 23d.
  Chapter 8: The chapter is "The Snowblitz." With a second storm track, “as much as 2,200 feet (670 m) of ice… in just a 200-year period.” His stated simplification: “Summer runoff was neglected by assuming it was balanced by an increase in snow, due to re-evaporated moisture from non-glaciated land.” Online chapter: https://answersingenesis.org/environmental-science/ice-age/the-snowblitz/. ↩
5. 23e.
  Chapter 4, 15: “The quick-freeze hypothesis was given a boost by Birds Eye Frozen Foods Company in 1960… a sudden plunge to a temperature below −150°F (−100°C).” The catastrophist sources he answers: Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (1950) and Earth in Upheaval (1955); Sanderson, "Riddle of the frozen giants," Saturday Evening Post, 16 January 1960; Hapgood, Earth's Shifting Crust (1958). His documentation of Hapgood embellishing Baron Toll's alder tree into a fruit tree with "ripe fruit" is in chapter 4. ↩
6. 23f.
  Chapter 15: The chapter is "Were Siberian Mammoths Quick Frozen?" and makes a seven-point case. It covers the Berezovka mammoth's rotted organs and badly decayed stomach, and a table of seasons of death. “In 1929, there were only 39 known carcasses… Walter Brown lists 58 carcasses as of 2001”. “More than 1,000 blowfly pupae cases were found within the nasal cavity of one of the mammoth partial carcasses found at Colorado Creek, Alaska, in 1983”. The Kruger elephant study: “no protozoa and no fermentation in the stomachs”. “A quick freeze is an unnecessary hypothesis.” Online chapter: https://answersingenesis.org/extinct-animals/ice-age/were-siberian-mammoths-quick-frozen/. ↩ ↩
7. 23g.
  Chapter 16: The chapter is "Extinction of the Woolly Mammoth." It covers the dust-storm and thaw-pit (alas) mechanisms, a Dust Bowl analogue, loess burial, and a concession he quotes. It also states why time matters. Vereshchagin's estimate at 2–3 cm/yr of loess: “it would have taken 20–30 years to cover a mammoth, during which time the bones and tusks would have been almost entirely destroyed”. versus the creationist compression of loess deposition. “into a few hundred years or less.” Online chapter: https://answersingenesis.org/extinct-animals/ice-age/extinction-of-the-woolly-mammoth/. ↩
8. 23h.
  Chapter 14: The chapter is "Mammoths Thrive Early in the Post-Flood Ice Age." It covers the Newson sea-ice-removal simulation: “The winter air temperatures over Siberia and Canada warmed 20 to 50°F (12 to 28°C)”. the saiga argument, quoting Sher: “In the Pleistocene, as today, the saiga could not move over mushy, boggy ground or in deep snow”. the productivity paradox, and the population arithmetic. Addo elephant-park doubling rates give. “1.3 billion mammoths living three hundred years after the Flood!” Online chapter: https://answersingenesis.org/extinct-animals/ice-age/mammoths-thrive-early-in-the-post-flood-ice-age/. ↩ ↩
9. 23i.
  Chapter 13: “The Ice Age is not mentioned in the Bible; it is a climatic deduction from the biblical event of the Flood… The Book of Job is probably the only book written during the Ice Age. Job does mention snow and ice, but he could have observed such features during winter.” His migration arithmetic: nomads averaging two miles a day for four warm months cover the 15,000 miles to Tierra del Fuego. “in only 60 years.” Online chapter: https://answersingenesis.org/answers/books/frozen-in-time/where-was-man-during-the-ice-age/. ↩
10. 23j.
  Chapter 11 of Oard's 2004 book on the Ice Age, which lists eleven general observations in a summary table. The article uses it for that table, on which Oard's case rests. The compressed 2022 version, with the '49 ice ages' extinction argument, is Oard and Carter, Biblical Geology 101 (2022), ch. 11. The '50 ice ages' claim there cites Walker and Lowe, J. Geol. Soc. London 164:1073–1092 (2007), whose title's '50' refers to fifty years of Quaternary research, and whose abstract contains no glacial count. The ~50-cycle figure is independently sound (51 numbered glacial stages in LR04), but the citation for it is doubtful. Cited here as url https://answersingenesis.org/environmental-science/ice-age/only-one-ice-age/. Chapter 11, Only One Ice Age, table 11.2: Three table rows are not argued in the chapter, and footnote 3 defers to the 1990 monograph. “Most North American loess from the 'last'”. “Interior till thin and coarse-grained”. “Inadequate thickness of periphery till”. ↩ ↩ ↩
24.
Batten, D. et al. “What about ice ages?” The Creation Answers Book. Creation Book Publishers. n.d. Chapter 16: “The only clear evidence we have is for one Ice Age… The Ice Age can be better understood as lasting 700 years or so rather than two million years.” A question-and-answer book from Creation Ministries International, written by four of its writers. The article uses it because CMI's book reproduces Oard's numbers exactly. ↩
25.
Clarey, Tim. “Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore: Showcase for the Ice Age.” Acts & Facts. 2023. “1) Hot oceans… 2) Evaporation… 3) Aerosols… 4) Time.” “The Ice Age began soon after the Flood and likely lasted for about 500 to 700 years. Evidence indicates this was the only Ice Age in Earth's history.” An article that uses a national lakeshore as a showcase for the Ice Age and sets out the model in four parts. The article uses it for the HEAT mnemonic that ICR made from the model. ↩
26.
Vardiman, Larry, and Wesley Brewer. “Numerical Simulation of Precipitation in Yosemite National Park with a Warm Ocean: A Pineapple Express Case Study.” Answers Research Journal 3:23–36. 2010. The simulation series, all in Answers Research Journal: "…Deep Upper Low and Rex Blocking Pattern Case Studies," ARJ 3:119–145 (2010); "Numerical Simulation of Precipitation in Yellowstone National Park with a Warm Ocean," ARJ 3:209–266 (2010); "A Well-Watered Land: Numerical Simulations of a Hypercyclone in the Middle East," ARJ 4:55–74 (2011); "Numerical Simulations of Hypercanes Charley and Fay…," ARJ 5:13–24 (2012); "Numerical Simulations of Three Nor'easters with a Warm Atlantic Ocean," ARJ 5:39–58 (2012). Sea-surface temperatures prescribed at 0, 10, 20, 30, 40 and 45°C; WRF became unstable at 50°C. "Hypercane" is Kerry Emanuel's own mainstream theoretical construct (Emanuel, Nature 326:483–485, 1987), proposed for impact events, not for Genesis. A 2010 computer study that ran the NCAR WRF weather model on the Pineapple Express storm over Yosemite of December 1996, with the Pacific sea surface held at fixed temperatures, and compared the result with the real storm. Warm water raised the simulated precipitation by as much as four times, and the article uses it for the glaciers the authors projected from that result. ↩
1. 26a.
  “it is possible to calculate the depth of glaciers that will accumulate in Yosemite National Park if no melting occurs in the summers”. “Multiplying the two effects together—the increase in precipitation due to warmer sea-surface temperatures and the greater frequency of cold storms—it is likely that the snowfall… would have been four to eight times what it is today.” The frequency doubling is assumed, not simulated; the authors also concede. “volcanic aerosols would likely be needed, especially in summer, to keep the snow from melting.” ↩
2. 26b.
  From the Charley and Fay paper, ARJ 5:13–24: “However, the results of this numerical simulation showed otherwise… the hypercanes which developed did not intensify as much as had been anticipated. Neither did they follow similar tracks.” Cause identified: “Strong vertical wind shears also developed in the circulation which suppresses the intensification of hurricanes.” ↩
27.
Sultan, E., and S. M. Gollmer. “Geologic Analysis of Ice Age Simulation Results.” Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism. 2023. Initial conditions: “increasing ocean temperatures to 24 C, changing the atmospheric aerosols to 2.0 tau.” Failures: “the Total Earth Ice map shows Greenland and northern Canada as mostly ice free,”. “the arctic ocean is completely covered while geologically it is hypothesized that the arctic ocean was too warm to be covered in ice during the LGM.” Gollmer's earlier finding that 30°C oceans prevent ice formation is reported in Oard 2019 and in the 2013 conference abstract. A conference paper that tested the Cedarville team's Ice Age simulation against the geology. It counts as successes mountain glaciation worldwide, the Laurentide and Cordilleran outlines, the ice-free corridor and an unglaciated Siberia. The article uses it for the 24°C ocean the team needed and for the failures the team admits. ↩
28.
Nelson, Byron C. The Deluge Story in Stone. Augsburg, Minneapolis. 1931. Pages 134–136: The post-Flood ice age and the unglaciated Alaska and Siberia are described on these pages. A 1931 book that argues for a post-Flood ice age driven by Flood-deflected ocean currents, and notes the unglaciated Alaska and Siberia lowlands. The article uses it to show that the denial of ice ages was not universal among creationists. ↩
29.
Morris, Henry M. “The ice age.” Creation 11(2):10–12. Mar 1989. The page opens with the editors' update: “this article is rather out of date now. For example, CMI has rejected the canopy theory for decades… Even ICR, which Dr Morris founded, now rejects the canopy theory.” A 1989 article by Henry M. Morris, who founded ICR, that sets out the canopy model of the Ice Age. The article uses it for Morris's own canopy model and for the editors' update that CMI and ICR now reject the canopy theory. ↩ ↩
30.
Dillow, Joseph C. The Waters Above: Earth's Pre-Flood Vapor Canopy. Moody Press. 1981. “the ancient canopy contained 12.19 m of water (0.5 inches/hr x 24 hr x 40 days = 40 ft = 12.19 m). Thus, the surface pressure was 2.18 Atm.” Pages 383–396: The frozen-mammoth explanation, per Oard's 2000 review, which proposes a quick freeze at the Flood's onset. A 1981 book on the pre-Flood vapor canopy, revised in 1983. The article uses it for the canopy's mass, 40 feet of rainable water, and for the book's frozen-mammoth explanation. The canopy mass is primary-sourced from his own restatement: Dillow, "The Vertical Temperature Structure of the Pre-Flood Vapor Canopy," CRSQ 20(1):7–14 (1983), p. 7: ↩ ↩
31.
Rush, D. E., and L. Vardiman. “Pre-Flood Vapor Canopy Radiative Temperature Profiles.” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, 231–240. 1990. “addition of only 50 mb of water vapor above the present atmosphere would raise the surface temperature more than 100°.” The paper's conclusion: “The canopy blanket is simply so effective that the surface temperature becomes inhospitable.” A 1990 conference paper that calculates the temperature profiles of a pre-Flood water vapor canopy with a radiation model. The article uses it for the 50-millibar canopy result. ↩
32.
Vardiman, Larry. “Temperature Profiles for an Optimized Water Vapor Canopy.” Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, 29–39. 2003. “if the solar constant was less than 25% of today's value the surface temperature would be livable.” A 2003 conference paper that calculates the surface temperature under a water vapor canopy at a lower solar constant, the sun's energy reaching Earth. The article uses it for the rescue attempt that needs the sun at a quarter of its present output. ↩
33.
Oard, Michael J. “The challenge of ancient ice ages answered.” Creation 38(1):48–50. Jan 2016. Footnote 1 of the article: “makes no acknowledgement of an ice age, but was instrumental in whetting the author's appetite to dig deeper into the subject.” That claim is false. The article also concedes the scale problem: “Present-day landslides are small, while the debris claimed to be from alleged ancient ice ages sometimes covers very large areas.” A 2016 magazine article by Michael Oard that reinterprets the pre-Pleistocene "ice ages" of the rock record as Flood submarine landslides. The article uses it for Oard's statement that The Genesis Flood says nothing about an ice age, and for his claim that all pre-Pleistocene glacial deposits are underwater landslides and debris flows. ↩ ↩
34.
Whitcomb, John C., and Henry M. Morris. The Genesis Flood. Presbyterian & Reformed. 1961. Section The Glacial Period, pages 292–311: Its subsections include "Ice-Age Theories" (p. 293), "The Theory of Multiple Glaciations" (p. 295), "The Evidence for Only One Glaciation" (p. 296), and "The End of the Ice Age" (p. 303). Oard's own 1979 founding paper cites the section: Oard 1979, CRSQ 16:29–37, citing "The Genesis Flood… pp. 292-306" and summarizing its cooling mechanisms. A 1961 book on the Flood by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris. Its section "The Glacial Period" is the ice-age part of the book. The article uses it to correct Oard's statement that the book says nothing about an ice age. ↩
35.
Brown, Walt. In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood. 9th (draft) edition. 2019. Chapter Frozen Mammoths: “Within hours, mammoths… were buried alive and quickly frozen as some of this muddy hail fell back to Earth in a gigantic hail storm.” A book by Walt Brown, who proposes the hydroplate theory of the Flood. This is a 2019 draft of its ninth edition. The article uses it for Brown's hydroplate account of the frozen mammoths and for his disagreement with Oard over the Ice Age. ↩
1. 35a.
  Brown says: “Michael Oard and I agree that the global flood produced the Ice Age… However, Oard overlooks an equally important factor: high and, therefore, cold continents.” He also says: “To the best of my knowledge, Michael Oard was the first to publish the proposal that warm waters coming from under the Earth's crust during the flood contributed to the only Ice Age. For this, he deserves full credit.” ↩
2. 35b.
  Section Details Relating to the Mild Ice Age Theory: “If temperatures at the peak of the Ice Age (700 years after the flood) were that severe, why didn't the mammoths… die centuries earlier by starvation…?” “What was the source of so much loess?” ↩
36.
Oard, Michael J. Analysis of Walt Brown's Flood model. Creation Ministries International. 2013. Oard's verdict on Brown's position: “This is massive conjecture, or one could say special pleading”. His own position: “I have begun working on a comprehensive Flood model that is in the building stage, called the impact/vertical tectonics (IVT) model.” A 2013 critique of Walt Brown's hydroplate model of the Flood, written by Michael Oard for Creation Ministries International. The article uses it for Oard's reply to Brown on the mammoths, which rests on five evidences that they are post-Flood. ↩ ↩
37.
Young, Davis A., and Ralph F. Stearley. The Bible, Rocks and Time. IVP Academic. 2008. Page 278: “cogent and irrefutable”. Page 279: “he has not come close to demonstrating that vast dust-storms were the immediate agent of death and preservation”. Page 426: The Wind River ³⁶Cl dates lead to the conclusion, citing Phillips et al., GSA Bulletin 109:1453–63, 1997: “more than 230,000 years ago”. Page 386: More than a dozen Sierra Nevada glaciation cycles, with weathering intervals between them. A 2008 book by two geologists, Davis A. Young and Ralph F. Stearley, that tests creationist claims against the rocks. The article uses it for their split verdict on Oard's mammoth arguments and for their check of his Wind River dating. ↩ ↩
38.
Molén, Mats O. “The origin of upper Precambrian diamictites, northern Norway: a case study applicable to diamictites in general.” Geologos 23(3):163–181. 2018. Also Molén's 2021 study of the Gowganda Formation, Geologos 27(2):73–91 (doi:10.2478/logos-2021-0009): “Field evidence suggests that the Palaeoproterozoic Gowganda Formation in Canada is non-glacial in origin.” The same study says: “the clasts which are interpreted to be dropstones rarely penetrate laminae and are commonly draped by sediments the appearance of which is similar to lonestones in gravity flows.” Also "Are all glacial diamictites glacial?" Geology Today 41(1):10–18 (2025). His creationist founding paper is "Diamictites: ice-ages or gravity flows?", Proceedings of the Second ICC (1990), pp. 177–190. A 2018 study by Mats O. Molén, a creationist who publishes in secular journals, that reanalyses the Varangerfjord diamictites of northern Norway. It uses surface microtextures on sand grains, sedimentary structures and geomorphology, and it finds no sign of glacial processes, pointing instead to gravity flows, possibly in a submarine fan. The article uses it for the standard creationist reading of the pre-Pleistocene record, including the striated pavement that the article calls Reusch's moraine. ↩
39.
Froede, C. R. Jr., and A. J. Akridge. “A developing schism in Flood geology.” Journal of Creation 27(2):49–54. 2013. “Remodelled naturalistic approach”. “Reconstructed Bible-based approach”. The first adapts the standard timescale and plate tectonics; the second defines earth history solely from the Bible. On the boundary question see also Ross, M., "Evaluating potential post-Flood boundaries with biostratigraphy," Journal of Creation 26(2) (2012), and Arment's ARJ work on a Neogene–Quaternary boundary. A 2013 viewpoint article in Journal of Creation by C. R. Froede Jr and A. Jerry Akridge, arguing that young-earth creationists are dividing into two frameworks for Flood geology. The article uses it for the wider split that the paper describes. ↩
40.
Ross, Hugh. “Milankovitch Cycle Design.” Reasons to Believe. Aug 29, 2011. Relaying Dave Waltham: “the probability of our planet possessing such very low Milankovitch frequencies by natural processes alone is less than 0.00001”. Also cited: "What Happened 800,000 Years Ago That Made Civilization Possible?", Reasons to Believe (16 December 2019). A 2011 web article by Hugh Ross on Milankovitch cycles, published by Reasons to Believe. The article uses it for the probability figure that Ross gives for the planet's slow orbital frequencies. ↩
41.
Imbrie, J. et al. “On the structure and origin of major glaciation cycles 2. The 100,000-year cycle.” Paleoceanography 8(6):699–735. 1993. “But the 100,000-year radiation cycle (arising from eccentricity variation) is much too small in amplitude and too late in phase to produce the corresponding climate cycle by direct forcing.” A 1993 paper by 19 authors, first among them J. Imbrie, on the 100,000-year cycle of the ice ages, the second part of a series on the major glaciation cycles. The article uses it because the authors admit that the orbital cycle is too small and too late to drive the climate cycle directly. ↩
42.
Paillard, Didier. “Glacial cycles: Toward a new paradigm.” Reviews of Geophysics 39(3):325–346. 2001. Its abstract names the "100-kyr problem," the "stage 11 problem," and the "late Pleistocene transition problem." See also Raymo, M. E. and Nisancioglu, K., "The 41 kyr world: Milankovitch's other unsolved mystery," Paleoceanography 18(1):1011 (2003). Maslin, M. A. and Ridgwell, A. J., Geol. Soc. London Spec. Pub. 247:19–34 (2005), with the title. “Mid-Pleistocene revolution and the 'eccentricity myth'”. argues that the 100-kyr cycles are bundles of four or five precession cycles, and says: “eccentricity at most paces rather than drives the system”. A review of the astronomical theory of ice ages, the idea that slow changes in Earth's orbit set the timing of glacial cycles, by a researcher at the CEA-CNRS climate laboratory at Saclay, France. It argues that the climate system seems to jump abruptly between quasi-steady states, and that other parts of the climate system, such as carbon dioxide and the deep ocean, may play an even more fundamental role. The article uses it as the standard review that names the 100-kyr problem and the stage 11 problem as unsolved. ↩
43.
Cheng, Hai et al. “The Asian monsoon over the past 640,000 years and ice age terminations.” Nature 534:640–646. 2016. “On the basis of our record's timing, the terminations are separated by four or five precession cycles, supporting the idea that the '100,000-year' ice age cycle is an average of discrete numbers of precession cycles.” The chronology is ²³⁰Th/²³⁴U throughout — no orbital tuning. A study of the Asian monsoon over the past 640,000 years, with dates for the ice age terminations, by Hai Cheng and colleagues. The article uses it for a Chinese cave record that times seven terminations over 640,000 years with no orbital input, at four-to-five precession-cycle spacing. ↩ ↩
44.
Grayson, D. K., and D. J. Meltzer. “A requiem for North American overkill.” Journal of Archaeological Science 30(5):585–593. 2003. Of 35 extinct genera, kill sites exist for two, and the authors write: “mammoth and mastodon—and there are only 14 sites”. On Martin's absence-of-evidence defense, they write: “removes the hypothesis from the realm of science and places it squarely in the realm of faith”. They conclude: “Unfortunately, what did happen is not at all clear.” A paper by two archaeologists, D. K. Grayson of the University of Washington and D. J. Meltzer of Southern Methodist University, against Paul Martin's overkill hypothesis, which says human hunting caused the extinction of North America's large mammals. They give a brief history of the argument and then examine the late Pleistocene archaeological and paleontological record, which they say gives the hypothesis almost no support. The article uses it as the mainstream's own admission that the cause of the North American extinctions is unclear. ↩ ↩
45.
Stuart, A. J. et al. “The latest woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius Blumenbach) in Europe and Asia: a review of the current evidence.” Quaternary Science Reviews 21:1559–1569. 2002. The youngest Wrangel Island dates run from 3,685 ± 60 to 4,040 ± 30 ¹⁴C BP, showing. “contemporaneity with ancient Egyptian civilisation”. The youngest mainland dates are ~9,670–9,860 ¹⁴C BP (Taymyr). The calibrated calendar claim is in Vartanyan et al., "Radiocarbon Dating Evidence for Mammoths on Wrangel Island, Arctic Ocean, Until 2000 BC," Radiocarbon 37(1):1–6 (1995). A viewpoint article by five researchers that summarizes the youngest directly radiocarbon-dated mammoth remains from each region of Eurasia, drawing on published dates and the authors' own project on the timing of mammoth loss. The article uses it for the youngest Wrangel Island dates, which it places inside the biblical window. ↩
46.
Baker, Victor R. “The Spokane Flood debates: historical background and philosophical perspective.” Geological Society, London, Special Publications 301:33–50. 2008. The 12 January 1927 debate had critics who had not visited the field. In 1928, Bretz wrote: “if such hypotheses outrage prevailing modes of thought…” The 1965 telegram to him said: “We are now all catastrophists”. In his 1980 Penrose acceptance, Bretz said: “Perhaps I can be credited with reviving and demystifying legendary catastrophism and challenging a too rigorous uniformitarianism.” Baker's diagnosis: “The limitation imposed by Bretz's critics was the version of uniformitarianism promoted by Charles Lyell and others.” The "All my enemies are dead" quip is reported second-hand and should not be treated as documented. A history of the 1920s and 1930s debate over the Channeled Scablands, the dry channels of eastern Washington, written by Victor R. Baker of the University of Arizona. It shows that the geological community largely resisted J Harlen Bretz's flood hypothesis for decades, and that the field evidence became overwhelming by the 1960s. The article uses it for the course of the debate and for Baker's own account of why Bretz's critics resisted him. ↩ ↩
47.
Tate, Cassandra. “Bretz, J Harlen (1882-1981).” HistoryLink.org. Nov 29, 2007. “Bretz's flood, with elements that suggested the Biblical story of Noah, seemed like a reversion to a pre-scientific era.” It also says: “he had ignored the crucial question of where the water for the flood could have come from.” An essay on J Harlen Bretz, essay 8382 on HistoryLink.org, by Cassandra Tate. The article uses it as a mainstream history source that partly agrees with the creationist reading of the Bretz story. ↩
48.
Oard. An Ice Age Caused by the Genesis Flood. Pages 135–166. ICR. 1990. Chapter 7, One Ice Age, or Many?, table 7.1, page 149: “As stated previously, this evidence is mostly general, and large-scale.” Page 142: “Admittedly, far-traveled erratics are a problem for a one-ice-age model”. Page 145: Modern margin oscillations are. “still too slow for a 700-year ice age”. Page 146: “Even one thin post-Flood ice sheet may have trouble explaining why these driftless areas were not glaciated”. Page 150: “The rare organic deposits at least indicate that in some areas there was sufficient time between glacial advances for vegetation to grow”. Chapter 7 of Oard's 1990 ICR book on the one-Ice-Age model, titled 'One Ice Age, or Many?'. The article uses it for the author's own concessions about how general his evidence is and where it falls short. ↩ ↩
49.
Oard, Michael J. “The Evidence for Only One Ice Age.” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, 190–200. 1990. Molén's fuller survey, 'The Ice Age: It Really Was Short,' Proceedings of the Sixth ICC (2008), pp. 339–355, says: “These are the best examples of 'interglacial' deposits in the world, as far as I know.” Oard's conference paper, with printed discussion, which lists thirteen items in its Table I. The article uses it for how that list shrank under criticism. Molén's objection cites wind-polished bedrock and radiocarbon-dated peat beneath the first till in Sweden, and Oard's reply retracts Flowerpot Island. ↩ ↩
50.
Watkins, N. D. “TITLE NEEDED.” Geological Society of America Bulletin 83:551–574. 1972. Page 563. A 1972 Geological Society of America Bulletin paper by the geophysicist N. D. Watkins. The 'reinforcement syndrome' term is Watkins's own, from 1971. The syndrome is indicted for propping up the four-glaciation scheme, the count made before isotope records, which the modern ~50-stage record overthrew. The article uses it as a mainstream concession that a glacial count was once propped up by publication bias. ↩
51.
Oard, Michael J. “Ice Ages: The Mystery Solved?—Part I: The Inadequacy of a Uniformitarian Ice Age.” Creation Research Society Quarterly 21(2):66–76. 1984. “The problem is compounded greatly when it is realized that as many as 30 ice sheets are believed to have developed and melted in regular succession.” Part I of a Creation Research Society Quarterly argument that the astronomical theory of ice ages, which relies on small changes in Earth's orbit, cannot work within uniformitarian assumptions. The article uses it for the history of the four-ice-age count, the 2.3% insolation-anomaly calculation and Oard's multiplier argument. ↩
52.
Oard, Michael J. “Were the Wind River Terraces Caused by Multiple Glaciations?” Creation Research Society Quarterly 50(3):154–171. 2014. “for only three ice ages are claimed in the field; evidence for older ice ages cannot be found”. and that the WR7–Sacagawea correlation was made. “on the basis of very similar elevations”. His own concessions in the same paper include a section titled. Section Origin of Most Strath Terraces Unknown: in which he writes: “I believe the uniformitarian interpretation is close”. and an identification of the Lava Creek B ash that carries an explicit if. Oard's 2014 paper on the terraces of the upper Wind River Basin in Wyoming, arguing that moraines the mainstream assigns to several ice ages may come from one glaciation, and that the terraces above WR3 were cut by Flood runoff. The article uses it as Oard's one original field test, which scores real points. Quoting Hall and Jaworowski, 1999, Oard writes that moraines. ↩
53.
Oard, M. J. “Only one glaciation observed in western Alberta, Canada—the ice-age reinforcement syndrome.” Journal of Creation 29(2):12–13. 2015. Oard reproduces their limiting clause: “rather than only in the eastern part of that region as we argue below”. His Gravenor and Bayrock quotation, which says 'no buried soils', dates from 1961. A short Journal of Creation article in which Oard argues that western Alberta shows only one glaciation, and that belief in several is a reinforcement syndrome. Jackson, Andriashek and Phillips, whom he cites, accept the single-glaciation result for western Alberta, but document two to three glaciations, separated by radiocarbon-dated non-glacial beds, in the eastern third of the province. Oard does not address that. The article cites it for Oard's Alberta claim, set against that regional evidence. ↩
54.
Klevberg, P., and M. J. Oard. “The Little Ice Age in the North Atlantic Region.” Creation Research Society Quarterly 47–52. 2011. Part VIII, quoting Evans & Twigg (2002): “Stationary glacial margins in Iceland are capable of superimposing numerous till layers to produce large composite moraines”. Across all 28 of its conclusions, the series does not contain any treatment of paleosols, interglacial organic beds, or pollen. It also concedes twice that Great Ice Age deposits are. “considerably”. greater in magnitude than Little Ice Age ones. A series of eight parts, Parts I–VIII, on the Little Ice Age in the North Atlantic region, running from CRSQ 47(3) (2011) through 52(2):106–135 (2015). Part VIII's 28 conclusions include annual and composite moraines and stacked tills from single modern glaciations. The article uses it to show how one glaciation can build stacked tills and composite moraines. ↩
55.
Klevberg, P. et al. “Are Paleosols Really Ancient Soils?” Creation Research Society Quarterly 40(3):134–149. 2003. “Unlike most alleged paleosols, A horizons are typically present in these buried soils”. (of Dust Bowl burials). The 2007 study adds: “The only way to definitively determine whether subhorizontal soil horizons exist in the subsurface would be to excavate or drill… This would be extremely difficult.” The Balco & Rovey counterpoint at the dated sites: “paleosols are nearly always present between tills”. and Conklin Quarry's paleosol has an A horizon. The multi-method criterion is at pp. 144–145. A Creation Research Society Quarterly paper on whether paleosols, buried soils that are read as evidence of long ages, are really ancient soils. It asks whether paleosols can exist, how they may be identified, and how to investigate alleged ones. The article uses it for the criterion that agreement between independently assembled columns makes a stratigraphic correlation more likely correct, which the Missouri stack satisfies. Another paper by Klevberg and Bandy, 'Postdiluvial Soil Formation and the Question of Time—Part II: Time,' CRSQ 40(2):99–116 (2003), supplies the fast-pedogenesis field data. The 2007 field study, Klevberg, P., Bandy, R. and Oard, M. J., "Investigation of Several Alleged Paleosols in the Northern Rocky Mountains," CRSQ 44(1):4–25 and 44(2):94–106 (2007), says: ↩ ↩
56.
The Berean Archive. Checks of the secular sources in Oard's one-ice-age case. n.d. "reasonable" and cites. "demonstrated multiple events in the American Midwest," and discounts an objection because. “pre-Illinoian fluvial gravels… in Iowa contain abundant shield clasts”. Beaney's MSc thesis, University of Alberta (1998), the passage behind Beaney and Shaw (2000) with its four-paper citation list, says. “the glacial stratigraphy of the study area is unimportant for this particular study”. Derbyshire, in The Winters of the World (1979), p. 77, writes of. “the Pleistocene glaciations”. Feininger, USGS Professional Paper 750-C (1971), pp. C65–C81, writes. “the superposition of tills of different glaciations… With successive glacial advances, earlier tills are reflushed.” Jackson and Andriashek's GeoCanada 2010 abstract is the conference version of their 2011 chapter. Charlesworth, The Quaternary Era (1957), vol. 2, p. 1025, is quoted by Oard, and the passage continues: “Nevertheless, many methods are now used to correlate drift successions.” The secular sources that Oard quotes for one ice age, and what each one says. The article uses this list to show that those sources claim something smaller than Oard's case, and most of them presuppose multiple glaciations in the passage he uses. Young et al., Geology 22(8):683–686 (1994), calls the assumption. ↩
57.
Sugden, D. E., and B. S. John. Glaciers and Landscape: A Geomorphological Approach. Edward Arnold. 1976. Page 133: “a number of drift sheets and interstadial deposits… for the period prior to 50,000 bp”. Page 138: The passage opens the sub-section "Earlier Cenozoic glaciations." The authors' reason is that the mechanisms "were basically similar" to the last glaciation's. “were basically similar”. The next sentence is: “Nevertheless, some instructive comparisons with the Weichselian can be made”. Page 139: The authors write: “the marginal zones of the continental ice sheets provide abundant evidence for multiple Pleistocene glaciations… at least ten tillites, each one representing a major Icelandic glaciation and each separated by a lengthy non-glacial interval.” A 1976 geomorphology textbook on glaciers and the landscapes they shape, by D. E. Sugden and B. S. John. The article uses it because its authors give their reason for skipping the earlier glaciations that Oard quotes, and then point to abundant evidence for those glaciations. ↩
58.
Kennett, James P. Marine Geology. Prentice-Hall. 1982. Page 747: The book calls the period "the relatively short Quaternary time span (about 1.6 m.y.)" and says within it: “As many as 30 glacial episodes… [Berggren and van Couvering, 1979]”. Kennett attributes this count to Berggren and van Couvering (1979), not to his own core counts. Page 749: The book's own count of the largest glaciations is: “about 11 glacial episodes have occurred (stages 22 to 1), and these represent glaciations of greatest extent in the Northern Hemisphere.” Oard's rendering is "up to 30 different ones, each separated by interglacials, during the past 2.5 million years." It retrofits a post-2009 Quaternary base onto a 1982 sentence and drops the source's own smaller core-based count. A 1982 marine geology textbook by James P. Kennett. It discusses the glacial episodes of the Quaternary and gives two figures for them. The article uses it because Oard's "up to 30" figure comes from a sentence that Kennett attributes to another work and that covers a shorter span than Oard gives. ↩
59.
Eyles, N. (ed.) Glacial Geology: An Introduction for Engineers and Earth Scientists. Pergamon. 1983. Page 4: “scoured, but not deeply eroded bedrock… due to ineffective glacial deposition”. Page 222: Organic material and non-glacial sediments between tills, the book says, "indicate the presence of either pre-Devensian glacial deposits or readvancing ice lobes." Oard reports only the readvance. “indicate the presence of either pre-Devensian glacial deposits or readvancing ice lobes”. Oard's till-thickness claim cited to p. 222 is mislocated; that page is about Britain. Page 227: The book prices the erosion of the Canadian Shield, which is low: “Recent estimates of erosion over the Canadian shield are as low as 10 m for each major glaciation”. A 1983 textbook on glacial geology for engineers and earth scientists, edited by N. Eyles. The article uses it to test Oard's quotations: two are quoted correctly, but the chapters offer other explanations that Oard leaves out. ↩
60.
Vardiman, Larry. “The Sands of Time: A Biblical Model of Deep Sea-Floor Sedimentation.” Creation Research Society Quarterly 33(3):191–198. 1996. He reads the wiggles as real oscillations with periods of. “about 100 years”. and. “on the order of 700 years”. instead of 20,000 and 100,000. His concessions include the nutrient problem, which he states as. “can the oceans supply enough nutrients, in some 4,500 years…?” and, remarkably, that. “the author is unaware of evidences”. for the historical climate upheaval that his model's ~2,000-years-ago end of the ice age would demand. Oard, 'Ice core oscillations and abrupt climate changes,' parts 1–5, Journal of Creation 34(3)–35(3) (2020–2021), treats Dansgaard-Oeschger events as decadal volcanic pulses; his Mount Rainier analogue requires roughly the world-record snow year as a 200-year average. Hebert, 'Circular Reasoning in the Dating of Deep Seafloor Sediments and Ice Cores: The Orbital Tuning Method,' ARJ 7:297–309 (2014), concludes that creationists. “should exercise extreme caution when attempting to use oxygen isotope seafloor sediment data”. A condensed Institute for Creation Research model of deep-sea sediment, which treats most of the layers as deposited during and after the Flood and reads the oxygen-isotope wiggles as a general cooling trend. The article uses it as the most sophisticated creationist answer, which attacks the dating of the wiggles rather than denying them. ↩ ↩
61.
Blaauw, Maarten. “Out of tune: the dangers of aligning proxy archives.” Quaternary Science Reviews 36:38–49. 2012. “is potentially circular”. He demonstrates that two independent random walks can be tuned into apparent agreement, and he independently documents the MD95-2042 → MD97-2120 → Greenland tuning chains that Hebert traces. His own scope limits, usually omitted when creationists cite him, are. “I am not implying that all environmental histories obtained through tuning are wrong… many syntheses seem highly plausible”. and. “independent radiometric dating of sea level changes has largely confirmed SPECMAP's timing.” He nowhere questions the number of glacial cycles. A review by Blaauw of how fossil records are aligned, or tuned, with one another to date them, and of the dangers of circular reasoning in that work. The article uses it because the mainstream's own methodologists have published the same warning about tuning circularity. Blaauw quotes Muller and MacDonald's warning that tuning. ↩
62.
Herbert, Timothy D. “Paleoceanography: Orbitally Tuned Time Scales.” Encyclopedia of Ocean Sciences, 551–558. 3rd edition. 2019. Page 553: P. 553 carries the sentence about over-enthusiastic correlation that Hebert quotes, immediately followed by: “Several strategies exist to lessen the subjectivity and heighten the reliability of time (depth) domain tuning.” Page 555: The answer to the circularity charge is: “Although orbital tuning has often been criticized as circular reasoning, it has passed a number of tests”. “Independent age markers also provide important tests of the quality of orbital tuning.” The passage has the tests enumerated. A 2019 encyclopedia chapter by Timothy D. Herbert of Brown University on orbital tuning, the method of dating sediments by matching them to calculated orbital cycles. It is the author's update of a 2010 chapter that Hebert quotes. The article uses it because Hebert's quotations are accurately worded and correctly paged; the defect is truncation at the remedies and silence about the passed-tests paragraph. ↩ ↩
63.
Lisiecki, and Raymo. TITLE NEEDED. 2005. Section 5: “Because the LR04 stack is constructed by graphic correlation, its stratigraphic features are essentially independent of any timescale… almost any age model could be applied to the LR04 stack.” Huybers, P., QSR 26:37–55 (2007), says: “The use of age estimates not depending on orbital assumptions are required to avoid circular reasoning”. He reports 104 δ18O events and 33 of 36 deglaciations within ±90° of maximum obliquity. With Huybers and Wunsch, Paleoceanography 19:PA1028 (2004), he finds depth-derived ages. “accurate to within ±9000 years, and within this uncertainty are consistent with the orbitally tuned age estimates”. Huybers and Wunsch also published Nature 434:491–494 (2005). The LR04 stack, Lisiecki and Raymo's composite record, which the article uses to show that its stratigraphic features are a count of alternations, not a product of the age model. Huybers's work on the same question adds to it: ↩
64.
Oard, Michael J. “Planation surface and strath terraces point to a Flood origin for the Chinese Loess Plateau.” Journal of Creation 28(2):3–5. 2014. “It could be they cancel each other and the net effect would be small.” Oard's 2014 article on the Chinese Loess Plateau, which reads a planation surface and strath terraces as Flood features. It reproduces a figure from Pan et al. (2012) that labels buried soils Sm to S32, without addressing how many soil alternations that implies. The article uses it for the survey's deepest finding, an absence from the creationist literature. On Missouri, Oard's 2021 paper, 'Much Greater Cosmic Rays During the Ice Age and Before,' CRSQ 58(1):30–48 (2021), cites Balco and Rovey (2008) and concludes of his own mechanism: ↩
65.
Meese, D. A. et al. “The Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 depth-age scale: Methods and results.” Journal of Geophysical Research 102(C12):26411–26423. 1997. “The ice at 2800 m is dated at 110,000 years B.P. with an estimated error ranging from 1 to 10% in the top 2500 m of the core and averaging 20% between 2500 and 2800 m.” NOAA's archive adds: “it is clear the record is disturbed [below 2800 m]… so any ages beyond 2800 m must be used with extreme caution.” The depth-age scale for the GISP2 ice core from central Greenland, built by counting annual layers with several measured signals at once, down to 2,800 m. The layer count gives more annual detail than the official GISP2 timescale, the Meese/Sowers timescale. The article uses it for the count of 110,000 years at 2,800 m and for the error bars the authors publish on it. ↩ ↩
66.
Svensson, A. et al. “A 60 000 year Greenland stratigraphic ice core chronology.” Climate of the Past 4:47–57. 2008. The maximum counting error: uncertain layers counted at ½ ± ½ year, accumulating to. “950 years or 5%”. for the 41.8–60 ka section. Compared with the Chinese Hulu Cave speleothem record, the paper reports. “absolute age differences of less than 800 years throughout the 60 ka period”. and adds: “Such a good agreement would be unlikely if one of the records had a significant dating error.” Laschamp: 41,250 ± 814 counted vs 40,400 ± 1,000 Ar-Ar; NAAZ II: 55,380 ± 1,184 vs 54,500 ± 1,000 Ar-Ar. The paper also reports the GISP2-GICC05 disagreement of up to 2,400 years near 52 ka, where "no other chronology shows a similar behavior", and an unquantified layer-shape bias. Both are fairly citable by critics of layer counting, and both are an order of magnitude too small to help a 4,500-year chronology. A 2008 time scale for Greenland ice that extends the layer-counted GICC05 chronology by 18 ka, so that it covers the past 60 ka, with error estimates taken from the number of uncertain layers. It checks the result against a Chinese cave record and against dated volcanic and magnetic markers. The article uses it for the agreement of the layer count with independent dates over the glacial period. ↩ ↩ ↩
67.
Sigl, M. et al. “Timing and climate forcing of volcanic eruptions for the past 2,500 years.” Nature 523:543–549. 2015. The ¹⁰Be spike tied to the tree-ring-dated AD 774/5 cosmic-ray event, the paper says, “establish[es] that the ice core record should be adjusted by seven years.” Michael Baillie had predicted the seven-year error from tree rings in 2008 (GRL 35:L15813) and was vindicated. Historical validation: “24 (75%) historical validation points for which NEEM volcanic events occur within a conservative ±3-year uncertainty margin… significantly non-random at >99.9% confidence.” The famous "Thera" acid layer in Seely's 2003 paper has since been reattributed largely to Aniakchak, Alaska, a genuine tie-point error caught and corrected by tephra chemistry plus tree rings. A study of Greenland and Antarctic ice cores, dated with several measurements and independent age markers, that checks when volcanic eruptions of the past 2,500 years show up in the ice. It finds that large tropical and high-latitude eruptions were the main drivers of year-to-decade temperature swings in the Northern Hemisphere over that period. The article uses it for two checks on ice-core dating, the AD 774/5 spike and the match between dated volcanic layers and historical eruptions. ↩ ↩
68.
Oard, Michael J. “Do Greenland ice cores show over one hundred thousand years of annual layers?” Journal of Creation 15(3):39–42. 2001. He writes: “The annual layer before compression for the Ice Age portion of the core would probably average around 6 m of water equivalent per year”. At 2,000 m, he writes: “the uniformitarian model would be about 20 mm, whereas the creationist estimate would be around 2,000 mm, 100 times more.” His book-length treatment is The Frozen Record (ICR, 2005). A creationist article by Michael J. Oard arguing that many of the "annual" layers counted in the Greenland ice are multiple variations within a single year. He puts the Ice Age part of the core at rapid build-up over a 700-year ice age. The article uses it as the creationist counter-case at its best. ↩
69.
Alley, R. B. et al. “Visual-stratigraphic dating of the GISP2 ice core: Basis, reproducibility, and application.” Journal of Geophysical Research 102(C12):26367–26381. 1997. Page 26378: The text that follows the passage Oard quotes answers it with the tree-ring analogy, and puts the counting error at about 1% in the Holocene, 5% in the Wisconsinan, and under 2% against an independent ²³⁰Th-dated marker at 30,500 years. A 1997 study of how the GISP2 ice core was dated by counting its visible layers, and how reliable that counting is. The article uses it because the sentences after Oard's quotation, which he leaves out, measure the counting error. ↩
70.
Hebert, Jake. “The current state of creationist ice core research.” Journal of Creation 35(3):12–14. 2021. “In the upper halves of the Greenland ice cores, creationist and uniformitarian age assignments agree to within a factor of two or three of one another.” The bottom age of the GISP2 core rose from 85,000 to 110,000 years when the count was redone; he writes: “the researchers went back and increased the resolution of one instrument from 8 mm to 1 mm and counted 25,000 more annual layers between 2,300 and 2,800 m”. The same account appears in Oard 2019. His candid summary: “I think creationists have refuted claims that ice cores demand an old Earth. However, we have done very little actual modelling of the ice sheets.” A survey by Jake Hebert of the creationist answer to the ice-core ages, written for readers of a creationist journal. He concludes that creationists have refuted the claim that ice cores demand an old Earth, but that creationists have done very little ice-sheet modelling. The article uses it as a creationist's own concession that the upper halves of the Greenland cores agree with the mainstream ages. ↩ ↩
71.
Ohmura, A., and N. Reeh. “New precipitation and accumulation maps for Greenland.” Journal of Glaciology 37(125):140–148. Jan 1991. “The largest annual accumulation of about 1500 mm w.e. is found on the glaciers in the southeastern corner of Greenland… The mean accumulation on the Greenland ice sheet is estimated at 310 mm w.e.” Published eighteen months before the P-38 recovery. Summit accumulates ~0.24 m water-equivalent per year (Meese et al. 1994, via Seely 2003 n.46); at Summit the Laki 1783 volcanic horizon lies at 67.6 m, which is 209 years, against the Lost Squadron's 268 feet in 50 years, on the same ice sheet. A paper that maps how much snow falls on Greenland each year, measured in millimetres of water equivalent, which is the depth of water the snow would make when melted. It gives the annual snowfall for the southeastern corner of Greenland and for the whole ice sheet. The article uses it to show that the planes lie in the wettest part of Greenland, while the ice cores were drilled in the much drier interior. ↩
72.
Iizuka, Y. et al. “A firn densification process in the high accumulation dome of southeastern Greenland.” Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research 49(1):13–27. 2017. At SE-Dome (67.18°N, 3,170 m), the 1963 bomb-tritium horizon lies at 81.4–81.9 m, with Pinatubo (1991) at 43.4 m and Eyjafjallajökull (2010) at 11.7 m, giving mean accumulation of ~1.0 m w.e./yr, dated three independent ways. The Lost Squadron's 82 m of firn ≈ 53 m water-equivalent ≈ 1.06 m w.e./yr: a normal southeast-Greenland number. A study of firn, the compacted snow that lies above the ice and has not yet turned into it, at SE-Dome, a high-snowfall dome in southeastern Greenland, by Iizuka and colleagues. The layers there were dated three independent ways. The article uses it to show that the planes' 82 m of firn is a normal amount of snow for that part of Greenland, not a sign of fast ice formation at the cores' site. ↩
73.
Vardiman, Larry. “Ice Cores and the Age of the Earth.” Acts & Facts 21(4). Apr 1992. “However, life is never as simple as implied above. In making our calculations, we did not take into account the compaction of the snow into ice… Neither did we consider the thinning of ice layers… More importantly, we did not consider the average precipitation rate and actual depths of ice for different locations on the Greenland ice sheet.” He also concedes that volcanic cross-checks can be made "with a high degree of accuracy," and that. “it is relatively easy to count annual layers downward from the surface through considerable depths in the Greenland ice sheet”. An Institute for Creation Research article, Impact 226, by Larry Vardiman, that first uses the buried World War II planes to argue for fast ice build-up and then concedes that the simple calculation ignored compaction and thinning. The article uses it as an example of a creationist who made the planes argument and then withdrew much of it. ↩
74.
Hebert, Jake. “WWII Plane Found Frozen in Greenland Ice.” ICR Creation Science Update. Sep 11, 2018. “Fair enough. But creationists are arguing that very warm post-Flood oceans resulted in dramatically higher… snowfall rates, even in central Greenland… Glacier Girl, in and of itself, does not prove that the Greenland ice sheet formed quickly, but it does show that it could have formed quickly.” He also concedes: “Only ten thousand years or so are needed for thick ice sheets to form, even with today's low snowfall rates.” A short item in the Creation Science Update series of the Institute for Creation Research, by Jake Hebert, about the World War II P-38 found frozen in the Greenland ice. The article uses it as a creationist concession that the plane shows the ice could have formed quickly, but does not prove that it did. ↩
75.
Wieland, Carl. “The lost squadron.” Creation 19(3):10–14. Jun 1997. The editorial note in the article says: “Actual published ice buildup rates for that region are such that the depth of coverage for the planes in those few decades, while impressive, should not have been a major surprise.” The argument is nonetheless absent from CMI's "Arguments we think creationists should NOT use" page. Kent Hovind's "263 feet / 5.5 feet per year / 1,824 years" version, and his phone call to recovery leader Bob Cardin, are documented in Seely 2003, p. 257. A 1997 article by Carl Wieland of Creation Ministries International about the Lost Squadron, the six P-38 fighters and two B-17 bombers that landed on the Greenland ice in 1942 and were found buried under it decades later. The article uses it as the original source of the buried-planes argument, which the magazine's own later editorial note concedes was not a major surprise. ↩
76.
Oard, Michael J. “New evidence for rapid Ice Age deposition on the Greenland Ice Sheet.” Journal of Creation 33(2):13–15. 2019. “It is unlikely that the same volcanic eruption would have produced identical cryptotephras separated by 106 years. It is more likely that the two cryptotephras represent just one eruption.” A creationist article by Michael J. Oard arguing that two identical volcanic ash layers in the GRIP Greenland core, 106 counted years apart, came from one eruption, so the ice between them was laid down quickly. The article uses it as the newer creationist claim it answers, that the 106-layer gap is one eruption. ↩
77.
Cook, E. et al. “First identification and characterization of Borrobol-type tephra in the Greenland ice cores: new deposits and improved age estimates.” Journal of Quaternary Science 33(2):212–224. 2018. The two Greenland deposits are. “just 106 ± 3 years apart”. but. “The occurrence of two separate eruptions with similar ages and identical geochemical compositions”. — the Borrobol and Penifiler tephras, Bayesian-dated in Scottish lake sediments at 14,098 ± 47 and 13,939 ± 66 cal BP, about 160 years apart —. “means there is a danger of miscorrelation.” The pair predates, and is independent of, the ice-core find. A 2018 paper by Eliza Cook and four colleagues that first identifies Borrobol-type tephra, a volcanic ash, in the Greenland ice cores and gives new age estimates for it. The article uses it to show that the pair of ash layers was known from Scottish lake sediments before anyone found it in Greenland ice, so the ice cores reproduced a pair that already existed. ↩
78.
Lisiecki, L. E., and M. E. Raymo. “A Pliocene-Pleistocene stack of 57 globally distributed benthic δ¹⁸O records.” Paleoceanography 20:PA1003. 2005. The published marine-isotope-stage boundary table (https://lorraine-lisiecki.com/LR04_MISboundaries.txt) contains 102 stage boundaries within the Quaternary — 51 even-numbered (glacial) stages, MIS 2 through MIS 102. A stack, which is one averaged curve, of 57 deep-sea records of oxygen isotopes covering 5.3 million years, built from over 38,000 measurements from 57 sites. The authors built it as a common reference timescale for marine records. The article uses it for the count of 51 numbered glacial stages in the Quaternary and for the published table of stage boundaries. ↩
79.
Hallberg, G. R. et al. “Quaternary geologic map of the Des Moines 4°×6° quadrangle.” USGS Miscellaneous Investigations Series Map I-1420. 1991. The Yarmouth section, Des Moines County, Iowa, reads downward: loess 3.1 m; Sangamon paleosol 0.8 m; Illinoian till; "Yarmouth" paleosol; Hickory Hills till 5.9 m; Wolf Creek sediments; Aurora till 6.1 m; Alburnett till 2.8 m; bedrock. The "Kansan" and "Aftonian" names in the type sections date to Bain and Chamberlin in 1896, and the stacked-till interpretation predates Milankovitch theory by decades. Price was right that the classical four-stage scheme was too neat: the Kansan and Nebraskan stages were later formally abandoned, replaced by a larger number of pre-Illinoian advances, a point Oard fairly makes. A U.S. Geological Survey map of the Quaternary surface deposits of the Des Moines quadrangle, compiled by state survey teams for Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska and Illinois. Its text describes measured sections where tills are separated by buried soils, called paleosols. The article uses it for the stacked tills with buried soils in Iowa and Missouri. ↩
80.
Balco, G., and C. W. II Rovey. “An isochron method for cosmogenic-nuclide dating of buried soils and sediments.” American Journal of Science 308:1083–1114. 2008. From "Absolute chronology for major Pleistocene advances of the Laurentide Ice Sheet," Geology 38(9):795–798 (2010), the authors write: “The first recorded advance of the Laurentide Ice Sheet reached 39°N… 2.4 Ma. The next advance to this latitude took place near the beginning of the mid-Pleistocene transition, 1.3 Ma, and three more took place from 0.75 to 0.2 Ma.” The same paper also says: “paleosols are nearly always present between tills, indicating that tills were rarely significantly eroded by later ice advances.” A methods paper by Greg Balco and Charles W. Rovey II that adapts burial dating, which compares two cosmic-ray-made isotopes in buried quartz, to date buried soils and tills. They apply it to a sequence of tills and paleosols in central Missouri, and the method gives ages that agree with the magnetic dating and show ice advancing into Missouri near 1.25 Ma, near 0.8 Ma, and twice between about 0.4 and 0.2 Ma. The article uses it for the radiometric dating of the Missouri stack of buried soils and tills. ↩
81.
Ding, Z. L. et al. “Stacked 2.6-Ma grain size record from the Chinese loess based on five sections and correlation with the deep-sea δ¹⁸O record.” Paleoceanography 17(3):1033. 2002. Pages 5–4: The Quaternary sequence is 33 loess-paleosol couplets, loess L1–L33 and soils S0–S32, on a basal age of. “about 2.6 Ma”. Pages 5–1: “more than thirty of these loess-soil couplets have been identified in many thick loess sections”. Ding's Table 1 lists 37 soils because S2, S5 and S9 are each subdivided; 33 is the count of numbered couplets. The same numbering appears in Sun & Zhu, EPSL 290:438–447 (2010), p. 439, and Sun et al., QSR 34:57–65 (2012), p. 58. Pages 5–3: The Brunhes–Matuyama reversal falls typically in the lower-to-middle part of unit L8 across all five of Ding's sections and independently at Yanyu. Pages 5–18: The land-sea match is cycle-by-cycle for 0–1.8 Ma only: “correlation between the two records throughout the interval 1.8–2.6 Ma is generally poor”. because units L9, L15 and L33 are extreme regional dust events with no global ice-volume counterpart. The loess magnetic record puts the B–M at 801–816 ka, "21–36 ka older than the generally accepted age," attributed to delayed lock-in of the magnetization at depth (Yang et al., Earth, Planets and Space 59:825–840, 2007, p. 833), so the loess is good evidence for counting cycles, not for dating the reversal, and the article does not use it as a witness for the ~773 ka date defended elsewhere in this article. A study that combines grain-size measurements from five loess sections on the Chinese Loess Plateau, covering the past 2.6 million years, into one record, and matches it with the deep-sea oxygen record. Loess is wind-blown dust, laid down in cold, dry, windy glacial times, while the soils between the loess layers formed in warmer interglacials. The article uses it for the 33 loess-soil couplets that match the marine stages cycle for cycle over the last 1.8 million years. ↩
82.
Chappell, John. “Geology of coral terraces, Huon Peninsula, New Guinea.” GSA Bulletin 85:553–570. 1974. Section abstract: The abstract says: “A spectacular flight of terraces… clearly developed for more than 80 km and rise to over 600 m”. It gives dated sea-level maxima at 30, 40–50, 60, 80, 105, 120, 140, 185 and 220 kyr from 11 sections. A 1974 study of the coral terraces of the Huon Peninsula in New Guinea. The article uses it for the nine dated Pleistocene sea-level maxima that the terraces record. ↩
83.
Chappell, John et al. “Reconciliation of late Quaternary sea levels derived from coral terraces at Huon Peninsula with deep sea oxygen isotope records.” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 141:227–236. 1996. Reef VII (last interglacial) at 320 m (Kanzarua) and 403 m (Bobongara) gives uplift of 2.8 ± 0.1 and 3.3 ± 0.1 m/kyr. Per-section terrace heights and derived sea levels: Chappell & Shackleton, Nature 324:137–140 (1986), Table 1 (reproduced in full in Ota & Berryman 1995). Oldest α-spectrometric ²³⁰Th/²³⁴U ages: 183.9 kyr (terrace VIII) and 253 kyr (terrace X), from Omura et al., J. Geography 104(5):758–776 (1995), p. 769. The 31-terrace remapping to ~414 kyr: de Gelder et al., Communications Earth & Environment 3:256 (2022). A 1996 paper by John Chappell and six co-authors that resolves a gap between sea levels from the Huon Peninsula coral terraces and sea levels from deep-sea oxygen isotopes. Between 70 and 30 thousand years ago the isotope sea levels were 20–40 m lower, and new high-precision uranium-series ages for the terraces brought the two into agreement. The article uses it for the uplift rates of the Huon Peninsula terraces and for the dated sea levels they record. ↩
84.
Vaks, A. et al. “Speleothems Reveal 500,000-Year History of Siberian Permafrost.” Science 340:183–186. 2013. Repeated U-Th-dated speleothem growth phases mark the warm intervals; growth stops under permafrost. The Devils Hole discrepancy: Winograd, I. J. et al., Science 258:255–260 (1992). A paper that uses speleothems, cave deposits that grow like stalagmites and are dated by uranium-thorium decay, to reconstruct 500,000 years of Siberian permafrost history. The article uses it for Siberian stalagmites that grew only in warm intervals, each growth phase uranium-dated, recording the same repeated alternations. ↩
85.
Shakun, J. D. et al. “Milankovitch-paced Termination II in a Nevada speleothem?” Geophysical Research Letters 38:L18701. 2011. The stalagmite dates Termination II up to 10 kyr later than Devils Hole, and the paper describes that date as. “at a time consistent with Milankovitch forcing”. The paper also concedes: “the early onset of T-II in DH remains robust.” A 2011 paper that dates Termination II, the second-to-last deglaciation, from a stalagmite in Lehman Caves, Nevada, 400 km from Devils Hole. The article uses it as the counterweight to the Devils Hole record, which disagrees with the orbital timescale by roughly 10,000 years at that deglaciation. ↩
86.
Lambeck, K. et al. “Sea level and global ice volumes from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene.” PNAS 111(43):15296–15303. 2014. From about 1,000 far-field sea-level observations: “a slow fall to −134 m from 29 to 21 ka BP with a maximum grounded ice volume of ∼52 × 10⁶ km³ greater than today.” The LGM interval itself: Clark, P. U. et al., "The Last Glacial Maximum," Science 325:710–714 (2009) — 5,704 radiocarbon, ¹⁰Be and ³He ages. A 2014 paper by Kurt Lambeck and four coauthors that reconstructs global sea level and the volume of the ice sheets from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene. The article uses it for the sea-level fall of 134 m and the ice volume of 52 million km³ that the fall requires. ↩ ↩
87.
Oard, Michael J. “Evidence strongly suggests the Laurentide Ice Sheet was thin.” Journal of Creation 30(1):97–104. 2016. The second paper cited is Oard's "Non-glacial landforms indicate thin Scandinavian and British-Irish Ice Sheets," Journal of Creation 31(2):119–127 (2017). The tors, saprolites and blockfields he cites are real; the mainstream reads them as preserved under cold-based, non-eroding ice. Note the double duty: thinner ice also reduces sea-level drawdown, which his 2020 land-bridge paper needs. A Journal of Creation paper by Michael J. Oard arguing that the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the great North American ice sheet of the Ice Age, was much thinner than mainstream estimates, judged from its multi-domed shape, its unglaciated margins and observations of glacial rebound. It also concludes that the maximum sea-level drop during the Ice Age was correspondingly smaller. The article uses it as Oard's thin-ice case, which the article accepts cites real field literature on the multi-domed Laurentide. ↩
88.
Sella, G. F. et al. “Observation of glacial isostatic adjustment in "stable" North America with GPS.” Geophysical Research Letters 34:L02306. 2007. “Vertical velocities show present-day uplift (∼10 mm/yr) near Hudson Bay, the site of thickest ice at the last glacial maximum.” Equilibrium depression is (ρ_ice/ρ_mantle) × H ≈ 0.278 H: 700 m of ice buys at most ~195 m, against ~270–315 m of documented emergence. The mantle viscosity (~10²¹ Pa·s) was derived by Haskell in the 1930s from the observed Fennoscandian rebound decay; a 20-times-runnier mantle rebounds in ~200 years, and would therefore have finished long ago. A 2007 GPS study by Sella and colleagues that measures glacial isostatic adjustment, the slow rise of land after the weight of ice is removed, in "stable" North America. The article uses it for the present-day uplift near Hudson Bay, where the ice was thickest, which a 700 m ice sheet cannot have pressed down by so much. ↩
89.
Oard, Michael J. “Land bridges after the Flood.” Journal of Creation 34(3):109–117. 2020. “I once believed that the land bridge was exposed late in the Ice Age because of a lower sea level. However, now I think it more likely that it was raised early in the Ice Age… the drop in sea level at glacial maximum would have been much less than secular scientists believe. It may have been only about 50 m.” Contrast Frozen in Time ch. 13 (2004), which still used the lowered-sea-level mechanism; CMI's Creation Answers Book ch. 17 still routes animals to Australia over sea-level land bridges plus rafting. Oard's own paper rejects the southeast-Asia land bridge: “The third land bridge does not seem plausible because of the many deep, wide ocean channels.” A Journal of Creation paper by Michael J. Oard on the land bridges that carried animals after the Flood, which argues that the Bering Land Bridge was tectonically raised early in the Ice Age rather than exposed by low sea levels late in it. The article uses it as Oard's own admission that sea level may have fallen far less than mainstream estimates, which removes the low-sea-level land bridge. ↩
90.
Morton, G., and G. L. Murphy. “Flaws in a Young-Earth Cooling Mechanism.” Reports of the NCSE. 2004. “If released near the earth's surface, this amount of energy is sufficient to melt a layer of silicate rock 12 km thick or the [sic] boil away a layer of water 25 km deep over the entire earth.” Warming the ocean from 4°C to 30°C takes 1.37 × 10²⁶ J. A critical article by Glenn Morton and George L. Murphy that examines a young-earth cooling mechanism, quoting John Baumgardner's own energy estimate for the catastrophic plate tectonics that the mechanism needs. The article uses it for Baumgardner's figure of about 10²⁸ J of heat released, which is enough to boil the oceans roughly three times over. ↩
91.
Baumgardner. TITLE NEEDED. 1986. Page 211. A 1986 work by Baumgardner, a creationist who helped develop catastrophic plate tectonics, cited at page 211. The article uses it for Baumgardner's own admission that creationist Flood models have serious problems with heat disposal. Vardiman, in 2000, p. 8, also wrote: "the amount of heat generated may have been sufficient to vaporize all the waters of the oceans and melt portions of the earth's crust." ↩
92.
Hebert, Jake. “A broken climate pacemaker?—part 2.” Journal of Creation 31. 2017. “Large amounts of heat are needed to significantly warm the oceans in the Creation/Flood model, but too much heat is definitely a problem… we do not yet have a definitive answer to this question… Better to have a potent Ice Age explanation (as is provided by the Creation/Flood model) that can be 'dialed back' if need be than to have an explanation (Milankovitch forcing) that is too weak to accomplish the task.” The second part of a 2017 Journal of Creation article by Hebert on how much heat the Creation/Flood model needs to warm the oceans. The article uses it for Hebert's candid statement that the heat question has no definitive answer yet. ↩
93.
Worraker, W. J. “Heat Problems Associated With Genesis Flood Models.” Answers Research Journal 12:211–254. 2019. A creationist engineering series, in Parts 2 to 4, that confirms Flood heat disposal remains unsolved. Parts 2 to 4 appeared in Answers Research Journal volume 12, pages 211–254 (2019), volume 13 (2020) and volume 16 (2023). The article uses it as a creationist engineering check that the Flood heat problem is still open. ↩
94.
Hebert, Jake. “Revisiting an Iconic Argument for Milankovitch Climate Forcing: Should the 'Pacemaker of the Ice Ages' Paper Be Retracted?” Answers Research Journal 9:25–56, 131–147, 229–255. 2016. His admitted limits, in his own words, include that the original data were never obtained. He wrote: “repeated requests… went unanswered”. His reconstruction was digitized from printed figures. He wrote: “without access to the original data it's impossible to be absolutely sure.” His own reanalysis produced a 102-kyr peak where the original had 87, which he called. “actually a better match to the expected 100 ka value”. a result against his thesis that he reported anyway. Raymo's independent 1997 termination ages (247.9 and 423.6 ka) match the original Pacemaker values far better than Hebert's revised ones. A three-part critique by Hebert, a creationist, of the 1976 'Pacemaker of the Ice Ages' paper, which used two Indian Ocean sediment cores to support the Milankovitch theory of ice ages. He reconstructed the paper's oxygen-isotope values from its printed figures, reran its frequency analysis, and argues that its results depend on an assumed age of 700 thousand years for the last magnetic reversal, since revised to 780 thousand years. It also appeared in CRSQ 54:133–148 (2017). The article uses it as the creationist case that the main evidence for Milankovitch pacing is weaker than it looks. ↩
95.
Channell, J. E. T. et al. “Reconciling astrochronological and ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar ages for the Matuyama-Brunhes boundary and late Matuyama Chron.” Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems 11:Q0AA12. 2010. A 2010 geophysics paper that dates the Matuyama–Brunhes magnetic reversal, the boundary that Hebert's argument depends on. Five North Atlantic records placed on ice-volume age models put the reversal's midpoint at a mean of 773.1 ka. Dome C ice-core data give 771.7 and 766.4 ka from the ¹⁰Be (beryllium-10) flux peak at the reversal, a cosmogenic marker that owes nothing to orbital tuning. Independent argon-argon dates on lavas straddling the reversal, from Baksi et al., Science 256:356–357 (1992), give ~783 ± 11 ka. A real 8–24 kyr tension between the argon and astronomical scales exists, but the gap Hebert's argument needs is ~80 kyr. The article uses it because the circularity charge fails against those independent argon and cosmogenic dates. ↩
96.
Hebert, Jake. “Have uniformitarians rescued the 'Pacemaker of the Ice Ages' paper?” Journal of Creation 33(1):102–109. 2019. “To the best of my knowledge, there has been no public response to my research from uniformitarian scientists or old-earth creationists.” A Journal of Creation article by Hebert that addresses a 1997 paper by Maureen Raymo, 'The timing of major climate terminations', which he says seems to 'rescue' the Pacemaker results. The article uses it for Hebert's statement that his series had drawn no public reply from uniformitarian or old-earth creationist scientists. ↩
97.
Tweedy, Eric. “Oard's Ice Age and Settlement of Northern Europe on Masoretic and Septuagint Timelines.” Answers Research Journal 17:763–783. 2024. “The conclusion is that accepted historical glaciation extents, Oard's Ice Age model as he parameterized it, northern Europe settlement traditions, and the Masoretic biblical timeline are not consistent.” The catch-22: “Access to and from the land bridge (no glaciers in the way) might be established only at the expense of higher sea levels… arrival before the glaciers means eviction by the glaciers as they peak.” A 2024 Answers Research Journal paper that tests Oard's model of one 700-year post-Flood ice age against accepted glacial extents, northern European settlement traditions and the Masoretic biblical timeline. The article uses it for the finding that these cannot all hold together, and for Tweedy's catch-22 on the Bering land bridge. ↩ ↩
98.
Mitchell, Elizabeth. “Doesn't Egyptian Chronology Prove That the Bible Is Unreliable?” Answers in Genesis. Jul 22, 2010. Their table places the Giza pyramids at 2600–2500 BC on the traditional chronology. They write: “This so-called traditional Egyptian chronology would have the pyramids predate the flood of Noah's day.” The authors, quoting Breasted, call Manetho's history: “a late, careless and uncritical compilation”. The stated method: “The Christian should only accept revised chronology that is consistent with the Bible.” A chapter by Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell, republished from The New Answers Book 2, arguing that traditional Egyptian chronology is too unreliable to use against the Bible. The revision it proposes follows David Down, in Ashton and Down, Unwrapping the Pharaohs (Master Books, 2006). It treats the dynasties as overlapping and rejects Eduard Meyer's 1904 Sothic cycle. The article uses it as Answers in Genesis's own statement of the revision, which discards the dynasty framework, the Sothic anchor and the radiocarbon dates together. ↩ ↩
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Neller, Ron. “Why no mention of the Ice Age in the Bible?” Creation Ministries International. Mar 29, 2018. “They would not have thought of themselves as living in the Ice Age… These are labels that modern scientists have applied.” On Job 6:16, 37:10, 38:22 and 38:29–30, he says: “that reference is vague, as you say, and not necessarily confirmation of the post-Flood Ice Age.” A feedback answer by Ron Neller, a geomorphologist at Creation Ministries International, to a reader who asked why the Bible does not mention the post-Flood Ice Age. The article uses it for Neller's answer that people of the time would not have known they were living in an ice age, and for his view that the Job references are vague. ↩
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Snelling, A. A., and B. Hodge. “Did the Continents Split Apart in the Days of Peleg?” The New Answers Book 3. Master Books. 2010. Chapter 23: The division is read as linguistic, the Babel dispersion, because post-Flood runaway drift. “would be overwhelmingly catastrophic—like another Noahic Flood all over again”. A chapter in a creationist answers book, also published on the Answers in Genesis website as 'In the Days of Peleg'. The article uses it for the mainstream creationist reading of Genesis 10:25 as the Babel dispersion, not continental drift. ↩
101.
Oard, Michael J. “A classic tillite reclassified as a submarine debris flow.” Journal of Creation 11(1):7. 1997. “The striated pavement was found to have been made by rocks sliding along soft sandstone… The implication of this result is that the main diagnostic features for an ancient 'ice age' are really not diagnostic at all.” A short Journal of Creation report on the Bigganjargga 'tillite' in northern Norway, called Reusch's moraine, which a recent analysis reclassifies as a submarine debris flow, an underwater landslide. See also L. J. G. Schermerhorn, 'Late Precambrian mixtites: glacial and/or nonglacial?', American Journal of Science 274:673–824 (1974), and the six-point summary in The Creation Answers Book, ch. 16. The article uses it for the striated pavement under that rock, which Oard says was made by rocks sliding through soft sandstone. ↩
102.
Oard, Michael J. “Snowball earth—a problem for the supposed origin of multicellular animals.” Journal of Creation 16(1):6–9. 2002. “the reflectivity of white snow would cool the earth down by about 100 degrees Celsius… and the condition would likely be permanent”. An article by Oard arguing that the 'snowball Earth' hypothesis is a problem for the supposed evolutionary origin of multicellular animals. The article uses it for Oard's albedo argument, that snow's reflectivity would make a snowball Earth permanent. The albedo argument, as restated in 2016: ↩