Mammoth Extinction and Global Warming
It gets a mite
disconcerting for "deep time" adherents to promote their uniformitarian
views in the light of conflicting evidence, but they keep on doing it.
This time, it's the extinction of the woolly mammoth and other animals
that is causing a problem.
The
common image of woolly mammoths, sabre-tooth tigers, and other critters
in icy wastelands is somewhat misleading, as there were warm periods
during the Ice Age and plenty of food available for grazers. Three basic
ideas for the mass extinctions include climate change, hunting them to
death, and illnesses from humans. None of those make sense. Proposing
that they were killed off because of global warming (sorry, no way to
make it anthropogenic) is really grasping at straws.
Although it's dismissed out of hand without examining the evidence and plausibility, the post-Genesis Flood Ice Age model proposed by biblical creation scientists offers much more reasonable explanations than uniformitarian conjectures.
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| Image credit: FreeImages / Ainhize Barrena |
Although it's dismissed out of hand without examining the evidence and plausibility, the post-Genesis Flood Ice Age model proposed by biblical creation scientists offers much more reasonable explanations than uniformitarian conjectures.
The woolly mammoth is the poster child for the Ice Age just as the polar bear is the poster child for global warming. A woolly mammoth is likely a member of the elephant kind with long hair up to 1 meter long, a hump on its head and top of its back, and a sloping lower back. It was once thought the woolly mammoths did not have oil glands in their skin, disastrous in a cold climate, but better samples show they did have them. The woolly mammoth lived all across the mid and high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere during the Ice Age. Both the Ice Age and the many millions of woolly mammoths buried in Siberian permafrost, permanently frozen sediment, have been major uniformitarian mysteries for about 200 years despite numerous theories. Another type of mammoth, the Columbian mammoth, lived farther south in the United States and Central America.To read the rest of the article, click on "Was Mammoth Extinction Caused by Rapid Global Warming?"
End-Ice Age Extinctions
Woolly mammoths lived alongside woolly rhinoceroses, cave bears, cave lions, saber-tooth tigers, ground sloths, dire wolves, the “Irish elk,” various types of horses, several types of bison, and many others. The Northern Hemisphere, even Siberia during the Ice Age, was considered to be like the Serengeti of Africa. Dale Guthrie of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks has called it the “mammoth steppe,” characterized by a wet spring and a dry summer with tall grass. Except for the carnivores, the Ice Age animals were grazers.
At the end of the Ice Age, many of the animals over 100 pounds (45 kg) as well as many carrion birds went extinct or disappeared from entire continents. There was a 70% loss in North America, 40% in Eurasia, 80% in South America, 90% in Australia, and only 20% in Africa. According to the uniformitarian paradigm, most of these animals were extinct by the end of the “last” ice age. Today, secular scientists think that within the past 2.6 million years of the Pleistocene there were about 50 ice ages of various severities. Between these ice ages or “glacials” were “interglacials,” warm periods after the ice melted. According to them, we are living in an interglacial period called the Holocene.