Mark Finkbeiner
Uniformitarians have muddied the waters about the Ice Age and the Missoula flood that affected the Columbia basin in eastern Washington. They teach things like this:
“Valleys behind the dam quickly filled with water to form 3,000 square mile (7770 sq km) Lake Missoula in Montana. Geologists estimate that between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago the ice containing Lake Missoula failed as many as 100 separate times, creating what are known as the Missoula Floods.”
Uniformitarianism, the belief that all geological processes act only in ordinary and gradual ways, and catastrophism, the belief that some geological events were caused by extraordinarily large events, cannot comfortably coexist. To avoid assigning any evidence to a unique event, the uniformitarians do whatever it takes to explain them as gradual events. In the case of the Ice Age, they spread things out over a supposed extended series of ice ages.
While the details vary, many uniformitarians believe there were five major ice ages, with the first ice age starting 3 billion years ago and the last one only 2 million years ago.
Here is where things get even more complicated.
“The repeated filling and collapse of the ice dam would drain an inland sea the size of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario in two days. At its greatest extent, Glacial Lake Missoula stretched eastward a distance of some 200 miles. When the lake rose high enough, it burst through the ice dam.”
These geologists say Lake Missoula was dammed up at the Clark Fork River in northern Idaho. When it breached its ice dam, all that water flowed through Idaho and the eastern end of Washington State. It flowed through the upper and lower Columbia basins and dammed up where the Wallula Junction is today, forming a second lake, called Lake Lewis.
This lake covered the area of the Tri-Cities as far as Yakima almost to Moses Lake and to Walla Walla. Eventually, this lake breached its dam at the Wallula Junction and flowed through where the Columbia Gorge is today and out into the Pacific Ocean.
That is all good, except that they teach that Lake Missoula breached its ice dam at least 40 to as much as 100 times as it filled up repeatedly over the period between 15,000 and 13,000 years. This would require the ice dam blocking the Clark Fork River and creating Lake Missoula to build itself back up all those times. This would require an ice age. Without an ice age, this is nothing but a fairytale.
While many people don’t realize this, the environment needs to be fine-tuned to allow some very specific things to happen before an ice age is even possible. There has been extensive research done to understand what it takes to create an ice age and it’s not comfortable for the uniformitarians. That’s because the recipe for an ice age requires anything but everyday conditions. The basics to create an ice age include:
- Warm oceans, and according to some serious calculations, the oceans need to be about 86°F to create enough evaporation to help block out the sunlight and to produce lots of snow inland.
- Cooler summers and colder winters.
- It’s not enough to cool the air at 32°F because even at freezing, the radiation from the sun can melt snow. So, based on some serious calculations, the air temperature needs to drop no more than 14°F and stay there for years.
- There needs to be enough snowfall for the snow to grow heavy enough to create enough pressure to turn the bottom layers of snow into ice.
Each of these things needs to be present for many years.
The Bible mentions that at the beginning of the Flood, the fountains of the great deep broke open, which implies volcanic action. The geologic record contains evidence of massive volcanism on a scale never seen today throughout and above the levels laid down by the Flood. Wherever you have volcanic action, you’re going to have water shooting up out of the ground. There is also a lot of ash, which would further block out sunlight to create a cooling effect that would eventually take us into an ice age.
In conclusion, an ice age doesn’t come easy or automatically. It can be considered catastrophic, so the uniformitarians smooth out the difficulties by imagining multiple floods at Lake Missoula. If you were to go on my field trips, you would learn more about why we know there was only one Missoula flood, which was caused by the ice age caused by Noah’s flood.
These explanations simply do not hold water.
