Larry: Lower in the Mt.
Baker ski area near Mount Baker, with Mt. Shuksan
in the background over here with this beautiful glacier
on the top of it. Del: Absolutely gorgeous.
You don't see glaciers very often,
and they're kind of a unique thing. Larry: Well you have to get up
in the high mountains today in order to be able to see them.
And they're much smaller than they used to be.
Glaciers used to be much larger than this. Del: How big? Are we
talking about… Larry: yes.
Del: …twice that size? Or…. Larry: In the past,
glaciers have covered these mountains down even 3,000 feet
lower than we have today. But even before that,
ice sheets — which are basically glaciers on flat terrain —
covered major areas of the world. For example,
in North America the ice sheets extend clear across Canada.
They extended down into the United States.
So that period of time when that much ice was here,
that was the Ice Age. Del: Well, I think most people
probably think if you just lower the temperature you can get
an ice age. Larry: Well, it doesn't work
that way because you've got to get the water vapor
from somewhere in order to produce the snow.
So somewhere you have to have warm temperatures,
and you have to have cold temperatures.
And we believe that's what happened during
the Ice Age. That, in the past, that the oceans were much warmer
and the continents were much colder so
that when water vapor — that was evaporated out
of the ocean was — drifted over the cold continents
and then fell out as snow and ice. Del: As
an atmospheric scientist, what do you see in the past that
would have caused those unique conditions? Larry: From my perspective,
the Bible really gives us a clue as to what happened that caused
the Ice Age. The Genesis flood
was a magnificent, catastrophic, high energy event and it left
the oceans warm. And it took about a thousand
years for the ocean to cool back down to the temperature that we
have today where it's uniform. But during that period of time —
particularly right after the Genesis flood
when the oceans were the warmest — it produced
a tremendous amount of heat and evaporated water
into the atmosphere, which then fell as the snow and
the ice on the continents, forming the Ice Age.
So the Genesis flood was, actually, the cause
of the Ice Age. Del: Larry, that sounds like we
have some very, very unique conditions then. Larry: Yes, they were.
For example, we know that there [was] a lot of activity
in the ocean. The plates that we are aware of
on the surface of the earth today…
between those plates there were cracks where magma
came up — hot magma from the mantle — spewed out in
the bottom of the oceans and formed a gigantic
mountain chain. And that 40,000 mile long
mountain chain of hot magma — as it cooled —
warmed up the ocean. And we have that information
from estimates of sea surface temperature from sea floor
sediment data. And the conventional community
believes that as well, it's just they have a different
age for it: 65 to 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous
period when it was that warm. And that would have produced
a tremendous amount of evaporation,
which then drifted over the cold continents.
Now the continents, we believe, were cold because of volcanic
dust and material being lofted into the atmosphere —
into the stratosphere, high atmosphere —
which blocked off the solar radiation coming in and warming
the continents. And it kept it cold so that you
had the warm oceans, the cold continents,
therefore you had lots of water vapor evaporating and being
converted into snow and ice to form the ice sheets
and glaciers on the continents. Del: So all that warm water and
the cold continents over a long period of time, then,
produced those very, very huge ice sheets
you were talking about. Larry: In fact, some
of the modeling work I've done using conventional models —
but with a very warm ocean — produced precipitation rates
that would have produced ice sheets and glaciers five-,
six-thousand feet thick in a matter of 500 years
or less. And it may have taken another
300 or so years for them to melt back at the end of the ice age.
Now the intensity of this occurred around the time
of Job. That's why when you… when you look in the Bible
you don't find any reference to the ice age, but you hear Job —
he says out of whose womb came the ice.
Del: Hmm. Larry: So in the area
around Israel, for example, the most likely place that he
would have seen snow would have been on Mount Hermon.
Now there's ice and snow up there occasionally
in the wintertime there, but it doesn't extend down
very far, and it doesn't last very long. But during
the Ice Age, it may have been that Mount Hermon
had a permanent glacier on it. Del: So this is the age
of Abraham, as well? Larry: Well,
just even in Israel — we think of it is strictly a desert
like we see there today. Del: Sure. Larry: But there's evidence that
in the past it was a much more moist,
wetter environment. In fact, I have found
that the precipitation may have been as much as three or four
times what it is today — back during the time of Job
and Abraham — and that that whole country may
have been moist and green. You know the Bible talks about
the land of Israel being a land flowing with milk and honey.
The Jordan River Valley was green all the way down to
the Dead Sea. So it's just amazing…
amazing what a warm ocean and cold continents will do
in a very short period of time. Del: All of this brings up some
interesting things like the woolly mammoth that's
frozen and maybe even has buttercups in its mouth.
How does that fit into all of this? Larry: Well, the conjecture is
that many of them were up in the northern part of Siberia,
which was south of the Arctic Ocean.
It's likely that the Arctic Ocean was warm —
as all the other oceans were — and it would have taken, maybe,
500 years for the Arctic Ocean to finally freeze over.
And at that point, then, you begin to accumulate the snow
and the ice. Right near the Arctic Ocean
it was… maintained a relatively warm
climate so they would have been able to stay there
and repopulate the earth. But during that time the snow
and ice further south, which would have been colder,
further inland from the Arctic and kind of formed a barrier
where they couldn't escape. And eventually,
when the Arctic froze over, then the whole climate changed
and then they were frozen. Now why they ended up with fresh
buttercups in their mouth is quite a mystery.
And that implies that near that warm climate
of the Arctic Ocean, you could have had vegetation
that could have grown; they could have eaten
that and then suddenly there would have been a really strong
storm of some kind or a series — the weather changed rather
dramatically when the Arctic suddenly froze solid —
and they were frozen. Del: So we're back again
to another catastrophic event. Larry: Well the world
was continuing to change rather dramatically.
Continually — as the Ice Age developed,
and then eventually came to its maximum and then begin to melt
back again — during that time people were moving over
the whole surface of the earth. The ocean levels were changing,
the climate was changing, slowly volcanoes and earthquakes
and all of those began to decrease in intensity.
So there was a tremendous dynamic going on for a thousand
years or more after the Genesis flood. Del: Well there is a lot of talk
about climate change today. How does that fit
in to what you understand? Larry: Well there's…
some people are concerned that we may be going back
into another Ice Age. And this really helps us
to understand why some people are so concerned about the short
period of global warming or cooling. There
is a viewpoint within the community
of paleoclimatologists — these are people who study
old climates — that just before an Ice Age starts,
they believe that there is an instability so
that the climate gets very warm, and then it gets very cold and
it's oscillating. And so they see the climate
as very unstable — very sensitive to small changes.
So if we put in pollution in the atmosphere —
particulates or gases — and possibly contribute
to some instability, that it will suddenly go
to an ice age. As a young earth creationist,
I believe that the atmosphere and climate is very stable.
In fact, it took a major catastrophic event
like the Genesis flood to kick off the climate change that we
saw that produced the Ice Age. So that's why there's a major
difference in viewpoint between different people about how
unstable or stable the climate is.
We would basically say there was only one Ice Age following
the Genesis flood, not multiple ice ages or up
to 60 different ice ages. These are derived primarily
from sea floor sediment data. Ice cores don't show that many,
but they interpret the wiggles in the temperature estimates
from the sea floor sediment to get these mini ice ages.
But even those have major problems because the sea floor
sediment that is looked at is on the order of 20-30 meters or
60-to 100 feet of sediment. And you're trying to interpret
multiple ice ages that occurred over millions of years
from layers that are, on the order, of less than
a millimeter thick. And it's almost impossible
to interpret it that way. So there's a real challenge
to justifying more than one ice age. Del: Looking at this from, then,
the conventional paradigm, how do they come up
with the means by which an ice age can occur?
You're saying an ice age requires some very
unique conditions. Larry: Generally accepted
conventional explanation for the ice ages is something
called the Milankovich, or the astronomical, theory.
And it was developed back in the 1970s. Based upon
a hypothesized correlation between the way
in which the Earth orbited around the Sun in an ellipse —
and it goes into a circle, and then back to an ellipse,
or the Earth's orbit wobbling slightly,
or the earth's position in this ellipse going around
the sun — it's hypothesized that this correlation results
in about a 20,000- or a 40,000- or a 100,000-year period
between ice ages. And that's been the generally
accepted idea of what causes the ice ages.
But there's several major problems with that model.
One is that the 100,000 year period is the one that's
generally accepted as the period of the ice ages, and that's
the weakest correlation with the sea floor
sediment data. So, therefore, they have to suggest some kind
of a feedback mechanism, or some way to make this weak
signal amplified so it produces the ice age. So they suggested
this idea, and they call that the pacemaker of the ice ages.
Kind of like the heart pacemaker,
you know? It's a slight electrical impulse
to cause the heart to beat. So they're suggesting
that the one orbit that's about a 100,000 year period
has enough — just a little bit of an — energy to cause
that ice age to begin and then end in a 100,000 years.
But they don't know what that physical process is
that amplifies that signal. So it's a… it's a very
weak argument. There's not enough energy
to explain how you get the cooling you needed to occur
all year round. There's been a lot of modeling,
for example, attempted on explaining the ice
ages in a uniformitarian viewpoint;
and there's not been any success in being able to explain an ice
age with
this uniformitarian viewpoint. Del: So, again,
the conventional paradigm seeks to understand all that through
current processes. So we have almost natural events
going on that create ice age after ice age, as opposed to
what you're saying, and that is that if you need…
if you're going to get an ice age you have to have
some really, really catastrophic events,
and some very unique conditions. Larry: Very high energy events
in order to be able to cause the atmosphere to react the way
it did. Del: Yeah. Well, Larry,
that brings us to an issue that a lot of people have —
has to do with ice cores and the dating associated
with those ice cores. What has your study shown? Larry: Well, first of all,
ice cores are made generally in Greenland and Antarctica —
that's where they come from. It's a very large amount
of ice there, and it's basically maintained
itself the whole time. Cores are taken by drilling
about a six- to eight-inch core down through the ice,
drilling down — all the way down to bedrock at the bottom —
and pulling them out very gently,
maintaining them in cold conditions so they're preserved.
And then you look at the detail in the ice through
that long length: the ones from Greenland are about four
to five thousand feet long, the ones in Antarctica up
to 9,000 feet long. And in there you have visual
layers that you can look at that were formed as the ice compacted
and went from snow to ice. And it maintained the bubbles
that are in there; it has various chemicals
that are in there; dust layers that are in there.
Looking at oxygen 18 isotope ratios from all of those
various features, you can see the variation with time down
through the ice core as it accumulated material.
For one thing is that you would expect there
to be one ice age following the Genesis flood. And you see
that in the record. Where most of the evidence
is presented that there were multiple ice ages, is at
the very bottom of the core where it's the hardest
to interpret. And it shows it was disturbed
very strongly down at the bottom of the core, as well as the fact
that there was all kinds of dust and chemicals and features that
you have in a very difficult time trying to interpret. If,
in fact, the Genesis flood was caused
by a catastrophic event, and it produced all kinds
of volcanic eruptions and the Earth's surface being
disturbed greatly, you would expect to see that at
the bottom of the core. And that's exactly
what you find. And it's not just a small thin
layer down there; it's up through quite a depth through at
the bottom of the core. So that fits very naturally with
the Genesis flood idea, with the catastrophic process
that occurred there. Del: Mmm hmm.
Larry: Now, there's also some question
that's often brought up about the formation of ice
in Greenland, for example, and how that accumulated.
There was a recent incident that occurred at the end
of the Second World War which is quite fascinating.
There was a squadron of P-38s and a couple of B-17s
that were flying from North America over
to England at the end of the war. And that was over 50
years ago, now — and they got stranded out in the middle of
the North Atlantic, so they ended up crash landing
on the southern coast of Greenland.
But they were rescued about a week later. But the planes
were left behind, and there was a wealthy Texan who decided
to go looking for these planes because they were very valuable
to restore — particularly the P-38s.
So they went looking for the planes on the southern
coast of Greenland, and they couldn't find them
for about a year because they had moved; the ice
was slowly drifting toward the Atlantic and calving off
and disappearing. But they looked about 10 miles
from where they knew they had crash landed,
and found them 250 feet down in the ice. What had happened
was the average precipitation that occurred in the southern
coast of Greenland was an average of about five
feet of ice per year — solid ice that accumulates.
So in 50 years you've got about 250 feet of ice above
the airplane so they were buried down there.
Now what's that got to do with the ice age? The importance of
this was how do you get that kind of accumulation of ice
in Greenland in that short of time?
The normal amount of ice that accumulates in Greenland
is on… is less than a foot a year, typically,
in Greenland. But on the southern coast
of Greenland, where those planes happened to have landed,
was where the Gulf Stream intersects with Greenland —
which is a warm ocean current that comes up the east coast
of North America and is a large source of water vapor.
Off the coast of this cold continent,
very much like what we've talked about globally.
So this is a small-scale event that would produce an increase —
five-fold increase — in the amount of precipitation
in just that southern part of Greenland and accumulate
that amount of ice. Del: And those are the unique
conditions you were saying were required.
Larry: But it was globally…. Del: Yes.
Larry: It was global instead of just this little, local area. So it's very, very convincing. Del: A lot of people think that
you can just count those layers in an ice core like we count
tree rings. Is that true, or not true? Larry: In the upper part
of the core you can count the layers. But
when you get down further, where they've thinned
so greatly — and there's such an incredible difficulty
in interpreting all the various information —
you cannot count them as individual rings,
particularly visually; and even the chemical
compositions and the oxygen-18/-16 ratios
and so on — there is a tremendous
controversy on that. So, basically, you can estimate it
for one ice age, but it doesn't go back
to hundreds of thousands of years and you cannot count
them as annual layers. There's too much difficulty
in interpreting the record. Del: So it seems we have some
real differences in the assumptions associated
with how we count those layers. Larry: Well, if
you had a considerable amount of precipitation following
the Genesis flood, you would have had a lot more
precipitation than is normally assumed.
Down in the middle of the core, things get so thin
that you can't really interpret it correctly;
the amplitude from the oxygen-18/-16 ratios
are almost impossible to interpret in terms
of annual layers. Del: Mmm hmm.
Larry: And, in fact, these layers can be easily interpreted as storm layers,
not annual layers. So that if you assume that,
say you had a storm every three days,
you would have 120 of those layers in one year — not just
one layer. And so these interpretations are
very inaccurate. And so you can't assume
that in each individual layer is an annual layer.
It's not hundreds of thousands of years,
it could be just a few thousand years. Del: You love this work,
don't you? Larry: Oh, I've done
it for years, yes. That's why I got into it.
I love atmospheric science. Del: This is the kind of thing
that we're… I would hope that young people would begin
to see that this is a frontier
for them. Larry: Well, that's one
of the reasons I got into it. When you work
in conventional science, typically you don't get to ask
the big questions. But as a creationist, I'm able
to ask questions that nobody else is asking, because I'm
looking at what the Bible is saying and applying the Bible
to my science, and asking questions that are actually
surprising when you find the answers that you get
from your research. It's exciting to be able to do
that sort of thing.
