The Global Flood and Antarctica - Can we have both?

by mavie 44 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Forscher

  Now that letter you mention Daniel-P is most interesting. anybody else remember that one?
  Forscher
• 

  daniel-p

  "Now that letter you mention Daniel-P is most interesting. anybody else remember that one? "
  
  I made a seperate thread so we don't hijack this one - and also hopefully get more reports.
• 

  Forscher

  Thanks Daniel.
  I think I might want to make it clear that I am not interested in a knock down drag out with my first post. All I am looking for is a well reasoned an if possible sourced answer to the questions posed. If I post any follow up questions, that is what they will be, follow up questions for a clearer unDerstanding of the answer.
  I wanted to make that clear before the fur started to fly.
  :-)
• 

  Qcmbr

  A qualified yes I think:
  
  1/ Ice core dating is wrong - ice hasn't been there that long (backed up by rates of snow deposition where in a single snow storm seven or eight distinct snow layers have been accumulated - countered by analysis of what is in each layer - take your pick)
  2/ Ice was far more widespread before the flood and covered most of the earth - the flood itself is what ended the last ice age - rain falling at the equator to fuel the flood would be matched by snow falling at the poles.The ice melted but the quantity of ice caused the poles to remain ice bound i.e. the current poles contain layers of ice laid down during the flood.
  3/ Ice at the poles floated and then resettled - so preserving the structure.
• 

  Swan

  For me it was taking the tours of Wind Cave Nat'l Park and Jewel Cave Nat'l Monument in South Dakota. One of the rangers leading the tours mentioned that the caves were hollowed out by countless eons of rain water eroding limestone. A dub response, filtered by years of dub conditioning, popped into my mind automatically and I whispered to my mother, "Or it could have a catastrophic flood 6000 years ago?" But as the tours progressed, I saw no evidence of a violent flood. The delicate formations had to have been formed by individual droplets. Literature from the gift shops furthered my doubts.

  Then I was thinking about the Badlands we had see a few days before. Once at the bottom of an ocean, the layers of sediments were clearly visible. The fossils of dinosaurs were found in those hills. How could these have been upthrust violently by the great flood as was claimed in "Is the Bible Really the Word of God?" Wasn't the scientific explanation of a prehistoric world slowly submerged and then gently emerging and eroding more plausible?

  Then there were other parks and magazine articles that made no sense with what I had been told. Petrified wood was a real stumper! Marsupials in Australia. Fossils discovered in areas that would have taken far longer to erode than the few 7000 year creative days claimed by the Watchtower society. Glacial erratics.

  So where are the glaciers that should still be here if the world-wide flash flood had quick frozen as the WTBTS claimed? An ice age doesn't melt and recede that fast.

  I had remembered asking about dinosaurs when I was a child. My mother and the PO showed me a book in the KH library from the 1940's. Green it was, I think. It had pictures of the dinosaurs and the explanation that they had been destroyed in the flood. So why didn't any preflood remains of Noah's neighbors appear alongside the dinosaur remains?

  More and more things just didn't add up, and soon I started looking at everything through a more plausible, scientific filter. When I did this, things began to make sense. Everything began to fit together, and the grand timescale of the Earth's history made me feel very small. If they were wrong about the flood, were they also wrong about the creation timeline? It appeared so. Then I wondered if they were right about creation itself?

  From there on things began to unravel more and more.

  Tammy
• 

  SixofNine

  
  

  wtf do you think they look at with ice cores anyway?

  "How far back does the observed data really go? Ten years? Twenty? Forty? Sixty?"

  160,000 years, plus or minus 15,000. Do you know what "observed" means?

  At the time of the data gathering, they did not have the more rigorous Forscher P38 standards to meet. Of course, those crazy godless scientist spend so much time trying to prove carbon dating is accurate, when they really should just submit to the WT's rigorous standards, that they probably didn't have time to consult with you on dating the ice cores, Forscher.

  Experimental Methodology

  The ice core was sliced into 1.5-2.0 meter segments. A discontinuous series sampled every 25 meters and a continuous series from 1,406 to 2,803 meters were then sent in solid form to Grenoble, France for further analysis.

  At Grenoble the ice was put into clean stainless steel containers. The samples were crushed and then melted with the gases given off collected and saved for further analysis. The melt water was tested for chemical composition and then electrolysised.

  The methods used in the determination of the ages include 18O/16O isotopic analysis [1], independent ice-flow calculations [1], comparison with other ice cores [1], paleoclimatic comparison [1], comparison with deep sea cores [1], 10Be/9Be isotopic analysis [2], deuterium/hydrogen isotopic analysis [3], comparison with marine climatic record [3], CO2 correspondances between dated ice-cores [4] and CO2 correspondances with dated oceanic cores [4].

  The results determined from these various samples were consistent between the continuous and discontinuous slices within the sections that overlapped. They were also consistent with Greenland ice-cores, other Antarctic ice-cores, dated volcanic records, deep sea cores, and paleoclimatic evidence.

  Results

  While unable to provide specific dates (within a millenia), the analysis show definate evidence of the the last two ice ages. Using the methods listed above the bottom of the ice-core was laid down 160,000 +- 15,000 years ago. It should be noted that all of the methods listed above were consistent with the above results.

  I don't think I am being entirely unreasonable.

  I don't think you are even attempting to think, with respects global warming. Fellating captains of industry and vile neo-cons and their sockpuppets is a time-consuming job, but please, multi-task. Your mother needs you.
• 

  rockhound

  Fellow poster Allan F presented a lot of his research on the following site under the subject of The Flood

  www.geocities.com/osarsif/index2.htm

  The following is part of his research:

  General Description Of The Flood

  The events of the Flood according to the Genesis account and Watchtower publications are:

  From Genesis:

  1. The flood was a global cataclysm.

  2. It lasted about a year.

  3. The highest mountains were covered by the floodwaters.

  4. The draining of the floodwaters took about eleven months.

  5. The source of the waters was the "floodgates of the heavens" and the "springs of the watery deep."

  From the Insight 1 book:

  6. The source of the flood was the water above the "expanse" created on the second creative day of Genesis.

  7. Prior to the flood there were no high mountains, no deep sea basins, and no icecaps.

  8. During or after the flood the earth's crust shifted, mountains were created, and the shallow sea basins were deepened.

  From the Aid 2 book:

  9. There was no rain prior to the flood.

  10. The polar regions were suddenly plunged into a deep freeze.

  11. Great gorges and drifts of debris were created.

  The evidence presented in Insight on the Scriptures and in Aid to Bible Understanding is in three categories: the scriptures, legends, and physical evidence. The scriptural evidence is not an issue since the Bible clearly says there was a Flood. Hence, I will discuss the physical evidence in detail, as well as each of the above listed points, and bring in other references to the Flood in the Society's publications as needed. Legends are difficult to objectively assess, and therefore I will have less to say about them. Note that Genesis says nothing that can be proved or disproved by reference to physical phenomena. A miracle could have occurred and there would be no way to detect it. The problem in that case is how such a global cataclysm could leave no physical traces.

  Then under the heading:

  More Evidence for the Ice Ages

  Could the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps have formed after the Flood, 4400 years ago? Evidence from fossil animals in Arctic Ocean sediments show "that at no time over the past several million years has the Arctic Ocean been ice-free." 237 A large part of the Antarctic continent is below sea-level, with the rock floor of some ice-buried valleys more than 8200 feet below sea level. 238 The Antarctic ice is up to 15,000 feet thick; Greenland ice up to 12,500. How could such a thickness of ice build up in less than 4400 years? How could the ice contain layers that correspond to a year by year accumulation going back hundreds of thousands of years and show detailed evidence of climatic change? How could the build-up be done in such a manner as to depress the Antarctic continent by an average of two thousand feet in such a short time? Remember that, although the earth's crust is ductile, it will flow only over a long time scale, like window glass. Scandinavia and the Hudson Bay area are still rising at significant rates after 7000 to 10,000 years of being ice free. On the other hand, Antarctica is neither rising nor sinking, showing that it is in equilibrium with the rest of the earth's crust. This is consistent with its very low rate of accumulation of snow, which would not have been all that different during an ice age, so that there would not have been much change in ice volume after the ice age had ended and therefore little change in the load on the land. But Canada and Greenland, which are in relatively more temperate regions, would have had a much larger change in total ice volume, and so the load on the land would change a great deal.

  Much evidence, some of which I've already presented, shows that continents respond to loading over periods measured in tens of thousands of years. A good account of crustal response to loading by ice is given in Scientific American, February, 1984, "The Earth's Orbit and the Ice Ages." If all the ice in Antarctica formed in less than the time since the Flood, how could the continent come to be in equilibrium? There is no way it could get into equilibrium after 4400 years, after having accumulated up to 3 miles of ice. If you claim the ice caps were around before the Flood, how could they have survived it, given that ice floats? Surely a floating, continent sized ice sheet would break up and the pieces would float all over. Then there should be evidence in the form of ice-rafted erratics and sediment all over the world that this took place. Yet such evidence is not found. And what does this mean for the idea the earth was under hothouse conditions?

  I hope this information is helpful in making up your mind.

  ROCKHOUND
• 

  ballistic

  Never thought about it. I guess if there were ice sheets around when a global flood occured, they would float to the surface like giant ice cubes and move around in the oceans currents.
• 

  Forscher

  I can do without the gratuitous insults Sixofnine. If you'd stop long enough to read my other posts you'd realise that you are being a first-class jerk. Since I once handed AlanF his guts for garters for that kind of idiocy, I have no need to prove myself to you. However, I will thank you for the only intelligent thing in that post, the quoted stuff.
  Thanks for the information and the links Rockhound. I'll certainly look them over.
  Forscher
• 

  SixofNine

  Mavie, I had a similar epiphany about 5 years ago, about the flood (or lack thereof), when I came across a Time magazine article about a lake in Japan, lake Suigetsu, on which there is an algea bloom every year, and that algea bloom settles to the bottom of the lake every year.

  It's been doing it for 43,000 years.

  Which means at least two things wrt the flood, a) it certainly didn't disturb a certain lake in Japan, and b) in spite of the governing body's protestations otherwise, carbon 14 dating is calibrated very nicely for dating things that lived between now and 43,000 years ago.