Doug Velting
Secular geophysicists love talking about something called an ice age, but they can’t quite figure out what started it. Many believe that numerous ice ages coincided with small fluctuations in the sun’s heating over millions of years. But they have a difficult time understanding how minor blips in solar heat could cause thick ice sheets to cover much of the northern and southern hemispheres every 100,000 years.
Some researchers believe that other factors must be part of the equation. Perhaps small changes in the distance and angle to the sun. The secular world is working hard to understand what mechanisms caused so much ice to form.
By looking at the events recorded in biblical history, creationists can build a model that makes sense. The best ingredients to form an ice age are to have warm oceans but cool land masses. And this is what we find in the account of the worldwide flood. This important event caused a global catastrophic change in earth’s geology, biology, and climate.
At the beginning of the flood, the Bible explains where most of the waters came from.
In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeeth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. Genesis 7:11
The flood of Noah’s day was so massive that the earth’s crust broke apart. Earth’s original landmass created on Day 3 of creation week broke apart into enormous continental plates. Those plates were shoved around, thrusting mountains upward and causing massive cracks in the sea bed that extended for thousands of miles. Hot magma rushed into the oceans through these cracks as well as hundreds of volcanoes on the sea bed.
The ocean waters covered the continents for months and then retreated from the land into the oceans that we have today. All of these events produced so much heat that it is possible the average ocean temperatures could have reached 100°F.
These warm oceans would have triggered a series of events that would lead to the Ice Age. Some of the warm ocean water evaporated quickly, forming fierce storms and dropping heavy precipitation across the continents. At the same time, volcanic ash from the continuing crustal upheaval would have cooled the atmosphere enough to freeze the moisture in the air and prevented the accumulating snow from melting all the way back in the summer.
As the earth settled into its new equilibrium, the volcanoes became less active, spewing far less particulate matter into the upper atmosphere. Evaporation cools, so the more the oceans gave their water up, the more they cooled, slowing the storm and precipitation machine. Eventually, after several hundred years, the Ice Age would stop growing and it wouldn’t take many more years to reverse the process. The sun would start to melt the ice sheets back to the areas they still remain in today and refilling the ocean with the meltwater.
If we use God’s Word as our starting point and build our Ice Age model based on its truth, then we can answer the question of what started the Ice Age easily.
