Was There an Ice Age?

Yes, there is very strong evidence that the world has been through an Ice Age. It affected all the world, especially the latitudes closest to the poles. Ice and snow covered Canada, much of the Northern USA, Northern Eurasia, Greenland and Antarctica. However, creationists believe the evidence shows there was a single Ice Age, not many ice ages as evolutionists believe.

The cause of the Ice Age is a mystery to evolutionists. Obviously the climate would need to be colder. But a gradual cooling of the climate would not work, because then there would be less evaporation, so less snow. How is it possible to have both a cold climate and lots of evaporation?

Creationists have a plausible mechanism for the Ice Age-that it was an aftermath of Noah’s Flood. When the “all the fountains of the great deep” broke up, this would have brought much hot water and lava to the earth’s surface. This in itself would have released much water vapour into the atmosphere-volcanic emissions often have large proportions of water. Also when these “fountains” poured directly into the oceans, it would have raised their average temperature, increasing evaporation. And all the volcanic ash in the air after the Flood would block out much sunlight, cooling the land.

So the Flood would have produced the necessary combination of cool continental climate from the volcanic ash “sunblock” and lots of evaporation from the warmed oceans. This would result in increased snowfall over the continents. If the snow fell faster than it melted, ice sheets would result.

This ice buildup would have lasted several centuries. Eventually, as the seas gradually cooled and the ash settled out of the atmosphere, the ice sheets would begin to melt. Sometimes the melting was rapid enough that the rivers which drained these ice sheets would flood. These would sometimes trap even large animals like woolly mammoths, and rapidly bury them in the river banks so they would fossilize.

This is explained by the meteorologist Michael Oard in this article as well as his technical book, An Ice Age Caused by the Genesis Flood (ICR, 1990). He has also written the book Life in the Great Ice Age (co-authored with Beverley Oard), which combines a colorful children’s novel with a simplified scientific explanation.