Dotting the “I”s and Crossing the “T”s – Part I

We received the following comment recently: “I know you believe in Noah's flood and a young earth, but you keep using these erroneous ages of 30,000 years, etc. If there was a Noah's flood then the Ice Age had to occur after the flood. If the Ice Age happened between 3,000 BC and 2350 BC then those dates are all wrong. So the question is was there a mile deep glacier at the time of the Jaredites in North America or do you believe the glaciers were gone by 10,000 BC?” I.T. 
    Response: In this two-part series, we will discuss some of the problems we encounter in dealing with this type of thing, for in most cases we are responding to comments from people who do believe in the accepted “mainstream science” belief of an ancient 4.55-billion-year-old Earth, and though we try to make it clear that we do not, we use their dates to show that their argument does not work on the points they raise.
    Obviously, when people who feel the Earth is much younger as such the reader who commented above, or as we do that it is about 13,000 years old, any argument with “mainstream science” beliefs is automatically discarded by such old Earth people, and any points being made are rejected as irrelevant. Consequently, to counter the comment(s) being made, we use their dating system to show that their points are not correct.

An earlier comment from a reader suggested a map much like this one where he claimed there were bays open to the Atlantic Ocean from the Great Lakes Area and that the St. Lawrence Valley was flooded, providing easy access to the Great Lakes

As an example, the previous three articles were in answer to a point made in an earlier reader’s comment that between the end of the last Ice Age and when Lehi reached the Great Lakes (in their theory): 1) The Great Lakes had access to the sea via large inland bays of the Atlantic that reached the Great Lakes area, and 2) That the St. Lawrence valley was flooded and provided a so-called river access from the sea to the Great Lakes.
    This, they claim, which was based on a couple of articles they read and submitted for “proof” of their view, and supported, they felt, their belief in Lehi and the Nephites settling in North America. Consequently, the previous 3-part series dealt with the view of “mainstream science” or a portion of it, using their dates and events, to show that their information was inaccurate and downright fallacious based on the best “mainstream science” available of the events they were describing.
    Consequently, “mainstream science” claims the last Ice Age “ended” between 13,000 B.C. and 10,000 B.C., or as some claim, “years ago,” making it between 11,000 B.C. and 8,000 B.C. We do not treat those dates as facts, merely as their starting point. Thus the arguments in the previous three articles showed that, according to “mainstream science,” there were no bays of the Atlantic Ocean stretching anywhere inland near the Great Lakes, that the Ice Age filled in the land clear to the present area of New York City, etc., and even at one time beyond—as an example, as found in K.O. Emery and L.E. Garrison, (Science Vol.167, 1967, p684; and A.C. Redfield, S. Redfield, p687), among other supporting factors, “evidence that the shore lines along the eastern sea coast of the U.S.A. were right out to the edge of the continental shelf at the beginning of the down warping stage only a few thousand years ago,” which would have covered the time frame of Lehi’s voyage.
    In addition, the St. Lawrence Valley was never so flooded as claimed, and that the river was pretty much as we know it today, both narrow and shallow, again showing that Lehi in Nephi’s ship could not have sailed from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Ontario.

Originally there was one great ice sheet in the Northern Hemisphere, which tore in two when Panagaea split from the weight of the ice and (yellow lines) dividing (dotted red arrows) forming two large ice sheets: 1) Laurentide in Canada, which included Cordilleran and Greenland sheets; and the Fennoscandia in Europe and Asia, which included Kara, Barents and Scandinavian sheets

As for the Ice Sheets, there were two great land masses formerly covered with ice which suddenly lost their ice caps and began suddenly to uplift in order to restore “isotosy” (vertical balance). These land masses comprise a great half-moon shaped, glacial denuded (“shield”) zone in northeastern Canada and another one in Europe and Asia called “Fennoscandia.”
    Both of these land masses began to rise (following a sudden denudation of ice) at precisely the same time and have followed identical land-rise curves ever since. They are both still in the process of vertical adjustment (uplifting) and will be so for some time yet because of the "relaxation time” of the earth’s crust is in the thousands of years (relaxation time is the time it takes for the Earth to relax to the changed surface mass distribution which in some cases is longer than the periods of ice cycles). The date assigned to the beginning of these famous uplifts was about 10,000 years ago (W. A. Heiskanen and F.A. Vening-Meinesz, The Earth and Its Gravity Field, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1958; and W.R. Farrand and R.T. Gajda, “Isobases of the Marine Limit in Canada,” Geological Bulletin, No.17, Canadian Dept of Mines and Technical Surveys, Ottawa 1962).
    Incontrovertible evidence shows that at one time a single land mass existed upon which both of these Ice Sheets were connected in a single Sheet. In fact, the detailed patterns of the uplifted regions themselves bear this out; the land masses inward from these shorelines have exhibited gradually decreasing uplifts. Therefore, the depressed continental shield zone under the ice caps would have sloped downward toward the present shorelines.
    Under such circumstances the ice caps could not have remained stable but would simply have slid off into the seas if the two land masses had not then been joined together.
    It should also be noted that the outermost “isobase” and the present arctic and Atlantic shorelines define a semi-circular-shaped zone in northeastern Canada with the straight part of the half circle corresponding to the shoreline. Similar “isobases” in Fennoscandia define a similarly shaped zone for that (also uplifting) region. Most remarkable is the fact that the two zones fit together to complete a roughly circular one when fitting the continents back together as they were before they were divided off from the original continent.
    Thus the two semi-circular-shaped zones form a roughly circular zone corresponding to a roughly circular single ice sheet for the northern hemisphere of Pangaea.
    In addition, Geological evidence developed in1937 by Dr. Alexis DuToit, South African geologist, and reviewed in 1961 by Dr. A.J. Eardley, Professor of Geology, University of Utah, showed that the split that initiated continental drift (a rift zone predicted as to location by Alfred Wegener many years before it was found and identified) began along these identical shorelines evidently at the southern tip of Greenland, forking northward to define this presently ice-bound continent, the Arctic in and the far northern Atlantic basin, and southward to Antarctica to define the most of the present Atlantic  basin and Atlantic shorelines.
    According to Melvin A. Cook, formerly of the University of Utah, “An ice cap of the size described by geologist for the ‘Wisconsin ice age’ was large enough to have caused the disruption of Pangaea. As a matter of fact, this is the only mechanism yet suggested which can account for the force required to rupture the earth’s approximately 20-mile thick crust and force apart its continental fragment the required several thousand miles” (Prehistory and Earth Models, Random House TBS, Colchester Essex UK, 1966).
    It should also be noted that “mainstream science” believes that there have been at least five major ice ages in the Earth's history (the Huronian, Cryogenian, Andean-Saharan, Karoo Ice Age, and the current Quaternary glaciation). It is claimed by “mainstream science” that the current ice age, called the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation, started about 2.58 million years ago during the late Pliocene, when it is believed the spread of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere began. 
   Since then, it is claimed, the world has seen cycles of glaciation with ice sheets advancing and retreating on 40,000- and 100,000-year time scales called glacial periods, glacials or glacial advances. Further, that within the ice ages (or at least within the current one), more temperate and more severe periods occur. The colder periods are called glacial periods, the warmer periods interclacial periods, interglacials or glacial retreats, such as the claimed Eemian Stage (115,000 to 115,000 years ago).
(See the net post, “Dotting the “I”s and Crossing the “T”s – Part II,” for more information on this and why factual science shows that there was only one Ice Age.)