4 ICE AGE AND THE GREAT FLOOD

Great floods of the last ice age

The largest floods known to have occurred in human history are those from the end of the last ice age, between 13,000 and 8,000 years ago. As the world's great glaciers began to melt, they left large freshwater lakes behind that had been precariously confined by retreating ice dams. When those ice dams failed, the floods that resulted were almost beyond comprehension.

The largest of these floods are estimated to have had peak discharges of nearly 20 million cubic meters per second. The Altai Flood, largest of them all, swept through what is today central Russia. Giant current ripples, like the patterns found in river sand but large enough to form hillsides, still undulate over the Kuray Basin (pictured here), evidence of an unfathomable flood.

The Ice Age is the popular term given to the so-called Pleistocene epoch, the last of the supposed geological ages of earth history as formulated in the minds of modern historical geologists. It was immediately prior to the Recent Age in which man has left written records. Most anthropologists believe man reached the true human stage ofevolution early in this glacial period, after a long process of naturalistic development from an unknown ape-like ancestor starting about 30-60 million years ago.

The Ice Age is believed by evolutionists to have started about two million years ago and terminated about 11,000 years ago. Most creationists, on the other hand, believe the Ice Age began soon after the Flood and continued for less than a millennium.

During this period, a great continental sheet of ice, centred somewhere in the north-east Canada-Greenland region, swept down over North America, reaching into what are now the States of Wisconsin, New York. etc., and leaving effects in the form of great moraines (mounds of unsorted sand. gravel and boulders), scratches and grooves on bedrock, etc. A similar ice sheet swept over northern Europe. In the Rockies and other mountain chains, permanent ice caps rested on the summits and extensive valley glaciers descended almost to the plains below.

 geologists believe that the Ice Age involved at least three advances and retreats of the ice, with warm periods in between. However, the evidences for the earlier advances are of an entirely different sort than the moraines and striations of the last one, the so-called Wisconsin stage. The former consist of certain dense clay soils, old river terraces and other phenomena that can be interpreted as water-laid formations more easily than they can as earlier glaciations.

‘pluvial period’—a period of much rain —in the lower latitudes at the same time as there was a ‘glacial period’ in the upper latitudes. Extensive rainfall assured abundant water, even m such modern deserts as those of the Sahara, the Gobi, the Arabian, and the western basins in the modern United States. Archaeological excavations have yielded abundant evidences of human life and, in fact, complex irrigation economies in these now-desolate regions.