by Kurt Johmann
Written: December 1999
About a month ago, in November 1999, I was reading the book Cataclysm by D. S. Allan and J. B. Delair.[1] This book is somewhat Velikovskyian, in that it concludes that the cataclysms that happened roughly 11,500 years ago were caused by a planet-sized object that passed close to Earth, resulting among other things in a bombardment of the Earth and an axis tilt.
The idea of a recent close-approach planet-sized object, and a recent axis tilt for the Earth, has been debunked repeatedly by many others over the last few decades, and I will just say that I agree with them. However, that the Earth’s biosphere experienced some major changes roughly 11,500 years ago is not disputed; the establishment explanation is that such changes were due to the end of the last Ice Age.
At the time of this writing, most educated people know what is meant by the phrase Ice Age. The following quote captures the essence of the Ice Age, as it is commonly taught to society (at least to the American society of which I am a part):
At the peak of the last ice age ... a layer of ice up to 2 miles thick in places extended all the way from the North Pole down to where London and New York are today. So much water was locked up as ice that the sea level worldwide was about 450 feet lower than it is now—this opened up “land-bridges” which made it possible for prehistoric humans to spread around the world.[2]
The above quoted passage captures what I consider to be the three fundamentals of the Ice Age belief system:
There were giant ice sheets that covered much of Europe and North America. The primary evidence given for the past existence of these alleged ice sheets is the existence in the affected regions of drift deposits and directed striations on rock faces. The claim is that the ice sheets were, in effect, glaciers whose undersides slowly dragged along rocks, boulders, trees, and such, resulting in drift deposits in those places where this dragged debris accumulated, and resulting in directed striations (in effect, scratch marks) on those fixed rock faces across which the ice sheet had slid (the scratches being caused by rocks that were dragged along underneath the ice sheet).
There was a greatly lowered sea level, because the water in those alleged ice sheets had to come from somewhere. Given the estimated land area covered by the alleged ice sheets, and given their alleged average thickness, it is a straightforward procedure to calculate how much lower the Earth’s oceans would have been.
Given the alleged greatly lowered sea level, the Bering Strait land-bridge makes its miraculous appearance. This alleged bridge, connecting Siberia to Alaska, is the alleged means by which the Americas were populated with its Indian peoples.
One may call these three beliefs—the alleged giant ice sheets, the alleged greatly lowered sea level, and the alleged Bering Strait land-bridge by which the Indians came—the holy trinity of the Ice Age.
For the average educated American the truthfulness of this holy trinity goes unquestioned. After all, not only is one brainwashed with it in school, but that brainwashing is reinforced by the many books and magazines, and TV shows (including both fiction shows such as movies, and so-called science shows), that take the reality of the Ice Age for granted. And thus, like Pavlov’s dog, the mere mention of the phrase Ice Age should make one salivate the holy trinity: the ice sheets, the lower sea levels, and the Bering Strait land-bridge across which the Indians came.
Up until my recent reading of the book Cataclysm, I had assumed there were ice sheets, just as the Ice Age belief system teaches, and just as I had been brainwashed to believe. However, the authors of Cataclysm say that the imagined ice sheets are a fiction, because the drift deposits and scratch marks, which constitute the primary physical evidence for the ice sheets, are better explained as the result of moving water (in effect, a great flood), rather than moving ice.
In terms of physical causation, there is no doubt that moving water can transport great boulders and all the smaller items found in drift deposits; and there is no doubt that scratch marks on fixed rock faces can be made by rocks carried along by water. So why was the moving-water explanation rejected in favor of moving ice? I would guess that most readers of this essay can see the answer just as easily as I can: a great flood means catastrophism, whereas a great ice sheet means gradualism. This battle of catastrophism versus gradualism was fought by the establishment in the 19th century, and the doctrine of gradualism won—presumably because the doctrine of gradualism better served the interests of the establishment than catastrophism.
Although catastrophism has been banned by the establishment for more than a century—giving science-ignorant cranks, such as Velikovsky, a chance to fill the void—catastrophism has undergone a recent rehabilitation, because mass extinctions are now accepted to be the result of impacts by comets and/or asteroids. And once the door was opened regarding large impactors, then the potential effects of all the smaller potential impactors could be considered. Thus, for example, establishment scientists have run simulations of Atlantic-ocean impacts by an asteroid in the kilometer-sized range, showing a flooding of large parts of America. There are thousands of these kilometer-sized rocks in Earth-crossing orbits.
Given that a great flood washing across large continental regions now has a simple explanation in terms of oceanic impact, which is known to happen, then this means that the primary physical evidence for the alleged ice sheets has an alternative explanation that does not require the existence of ice sheets. So what other physical evidence is there, if any, for there having been these alleged ice sheets?
In an effort to determine if the ice sheets had nevertheless been real, I first focused on the claim of a greatly lowered sea level. Realizing that I could not recall ever reading of any direct physical evidence for this claim, I searched the Internet in vain trying to find such evidence. Finally, during my Internet searching, I came upon a document titled as follows: The Future of Marine Geology and Geophysics; Draft Report of a Workshop; Ashland Hills, Oregon; December 5–7, 1996; Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Division of Ocean Sciences.[3] In this document, in its Chapter 4, Report of Thematic Working Group #3, I finally found what appeared to be a clear answer—albeit shrouded in technical language—as to why I was unable to find mention on the Internet of any direct physical evidence for the Ice Age claim of a greatly lowered sea level:
An important shift in our understanding of the history and mechanism of sea-level changes has occurred over the last decade. Earlier ideas of global, simultaneous sea-level change, known as eustasy, hinged on a direct linkage between the last great ice sheets and the world ocean level, a concept known as glacio-eustasy. Glacio-eustasy was generally thought to be a relatively gradual process. As researchers from around the world compared geologic archives of sea-level change during the 1970's and 1980's it became apparent that a varied and locally-dominated sea-level history is preserved in Holocene and post-glacial records at different areas. ... By the middle and end of the 1980's the role of glacio-eustasy as the great driving mechanism of global sea levels had been supplanted by an understanding that few coastal margins are truly stable and that the goal of defining a single, detailed eustatic record of the last interglacial cycle is unattainable.[4]
In effect, what the above quote is saying is that there is no clear physical evidence for the Ice Age claim of a greatly lowered sea level. And this explains why my search trying to find a mention and/or a description of such physical evidence was fruitless; it appears that such evidence does not exist. Thus, the claim of a greatly lowered sea level appears to be nothing more than an inference, dependent upon the assumption that the ice sheets existed in the first place.
After my above described Internet search, I realized that the alleged ice sheets were probably a fiction—but one consideration remained: from such sources as the Greenland ice cores establishment science claims to have a good record of average global temperatures for a long time into the past, including the time of the alleged last Ice Age. So, the reasonable question is this: are the alleged average global temperatures at the time of the alleged last Ice Age sufficiently cold to infer that the alleged ice sheets were really present, at least to some extent? The short answer to this question is no, not even close. Consider the following statement (from an online document titled Climate Change: Causes, Impacts and Uncertainties; identified as being the “Testimony of Stephen H. Schneider,” who is a “Professor, Department of Biological Sciences” at “Stanford University”; dated “July 10, 1997”):
The Ice Age, which at its maximum some 20,000 years ago was about 5 degrees to 7 degrees C (around 10 degrees F) colder than our current global climate, disappeared in, what is to nature, a relatively rapid period of about five to ten thousand years. ... Explanations of the Ice Age vary, the most popular one being a change in the amount of sunlight coming in between (a) winter and summer and (b) the poles and the equator. These changes in the distribution of seasonal or latitudinal sunshine are due to slow variations in the tilt of the earth's axis and other orbital elements, but these astronomical variations alone cannot totally explain the climatic cycles. If these orbital variations and other factors (such as the increased reflectivity of the earth associated with more ice) are combined, our best climate theories (embodied through mathematical models that are comprised of the physical laws of conservation of mass, energy and momentum) suggest that the Ice Age should have been several degrees warmer than it actually was—especially in the Southern hemisphere.[5]
As the above statement makes clear, the coldest that the alleged last Ice Age got was only “5 degrees to 7 degrees C (around 10 degrees F) colder than our current global climate.” This given temperature range is what establishment science believes its analyses of Greenland ice cores and other physical samples indicate as to what the past temperatures were. And it is also interesting to note that the above statement mentions that computer models for the time period in question actually estimate that the average worldwide temperatures should have been “several degrees warmer than it actually was.”
Regarding computer models, the reason that I came across Schneider’s above statement is because I was specifically searching for any claims for the existence of computer models that show that the alleged ice sheets could have actually formed when given the environmental conditions believed to have been present during the time period in question. However, I was unable to find any such claims regarding computer models; probably because no reputable scientist is making such a claim.
That there appear to be no computer models that give us the alleged ice sheets is not surprising, because simple back-of-the-envelope calculations do not support the growth of the alleged ice sheets. For example, in New York City—an ice sheet is alleged to have covered New York City—the average temperature for the summer months of June, July, and August is about 24 degrees C (76 degrees F). Now, 24 – 7 is 17 degrees C, and the freezing point of water is 0 degrees C. Thus, obviously, no matter how much it may have snowed in the preceding months, it will all melt away during those three summer months whose average temperature is 17 degrees C. As another example consider the fact that Siberia, which has average temperatures roughly 20 degrees C below those of New York City, is not covered with an ice sheet. Thus, given such simple considerations, and given the lack of computer models claiming otherwise, it seems safe to say that lowering the world’s average temperature by 7 degrees C will not give us the alleged ice sheets claimed by the Ice Age belief system.
At this point in the discussion it seems safe to conclude that the alleged ice sheets never existed. However, given the extensive brainwashing that educated Americans have undergone with regard to the Ice Age, I would expect the average person who has received that brainwashing to grasp at whatever straws are at hand to dismiss what I have said and cling to his brainwashed Ice Age beliefs. Such is the power of establishment fiction when it is poured into the minds of the young, and then reinforced by endless media repetitions (often these media repetitions consist of nothing more than an affirmative use of the phrase Ice Age).
At this point I would like to comment on the political reasons for the great emphasis placed by the American establishment on the alleged Bering Strait land-bridge and the alleged origin of the native Indian populations.
Over the course of roughly two centuries the American empire reduced the native Indian population, roughly estimated at 12 million before the assault began, to a population of only about one-quarter million at the end of the 19th century. For the most part the native Indian population was reduced by means of murder and starvation. The American empire over its long life has a pattern of falsifying the history of its victim nations, and that is where the Bering Strait land-bridge comes in. In the imagination of the average American, by believing that the native Indians were recent arrivals who came across the Bering Strait land-bridge, that lessens the Indians’ claim to be here, and it makes them look like vagabond interlopers who had no more right to America than the European newcomers. Consider the words of historian Vine Deloria Jr., a Native American Indian:
Scientists, and I use the word as loosely as possible, are committed to the view that Indians migrated to this country over an imaginary Bering Straits bridge, which comes and goes at the convenience of the scholar requiring it to complete his or her theory. Initially, at least, Indians are homogenous. But there are also eight major language families within the Western Hemisphere, indicating to some scholars that if Indians followed the trend that can be identified in other continents, then the migration went from east to west; tourists along the Bering straits were going TO Asia, not migrating FROM it.[6]
Although the alleged Bering Strait land-bridge is specifically aimed at the American Indians, the Ice Age belief, as a whole, is aimed at humanity as a whole, because it is a belief that erases human history. After all, lands covered by alleged mile-thick ice sheets are lands where no one can live. Thus, by creating the imaginary fiction of massive ice sheets covering the lands for millions of years, the Ice Age belief system helps to support the larger campaign by establishment science to hide the fact that mankind has been on the Earth for millions of years, instead of the mere thousands of years that the establishment wants people to believe.
Regarding the physical evidence for mankind’s presence on the Earth for millions of years, see, for example, The Hidden History of the Human Race, by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson; or see my discussion of the subject in the section The Age of Modern Man According to Cremo and Thompson, in my book A Soliton and its owned Bions (Awareness and Mind).
footnotes
[1] Allan, D. S., and J. B. Delair. Cataclysm!: Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C. Bear & Company, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1997.
[2] Copied from an online document titled The Vostok ice core data (the document has no author name or date), at:
[3] At: http://www.joss.ucar.edu/joss_psg/project/oce_workshop/fumages/contents.html
[4] At: http://www.joss.ucar.edu/joss_psg/project/oce_workshop/fumages/chapter4.html
The quoted text can be found under the heading titled C. Key Questions / Unresolved Issues, within the text that answers its question 1: What are the dominant processes controlling global sea-level change on the time scale of the late Quaternary? What is their timing and magnitude?
[5] At: http://www.senate.gov/~epw/105th/schn0710.htm
[6] At: http://www.indigenouspeople.org/natlit/vine.htm