Volcanoes, Plate Tectonics, and the Ice Age
Secular geologists are proposing some interesting ideas about how plate tectonics caused the Ice Age. Their scenario has an interesting sequence of events where continental plates collided, volcanoes were formed, gasses were released, and the Ice Age happened. And you thought volcanoes were just hollow mountains where criminal masterminds had secret bases, didn't you?
In all this tectonic activity, rocks were exposed, carbon dioxide was absorbed from the atmosphere. Seems plausible at first, but there's a problem with the presumptions for which the evidence is interpreted. Biblical creationary scientists have a far different (and better) interpretation of the data, which involves the Genesis Flood and a young Earth. Remember, there is no "our facts" and "their facts", we all have the same facts to work with.
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| Manam volcano image credit: Jesse Allen / NASA, who are not endorsing the contents |
In the evolutionary uniformitarian (slow-and-gradual) view of earth’s history, the earth’s climate remained on a fairly even keel for hundreds of millions of years. However, it is claimed that there were some dramatic exceptions. Around 80 million years ago, the planet’s temperature supposedly plummeted, along with carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The earth is said to have eventually recovered from that cooling event, only to swing back into the present-day Ice Age 50 million years ago.To read the rest of this very moving topic, click on "Did Tectonic Activity Trigger the Ice Age?"
That’s right! You did read that correctly. Evolutionary uniformitarian geologists are saying we are still currently in an Ice Age! Perhaps you didn’t realize that when you sweated through the heat and humidity of the summer months and were told that the soaring temperatures were due to global warming or climate change!
Now geologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claim to have identified the likely cause of both the cooling event at 80 million years ago, and the onset of the Ice Age around 50 million years ago, as well as a natural mechanism for carbon sequestration. Evidently, just prior to both periods, massive tectonic collisions took place near the earth’s equator—a tropical zone where rocks undergo heavy weathering due to frequent rain and other environmental conditions. This weathering involves chemical reactions that absorb a large amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The dramatic drawdown of carbon dioxide cooled the atmosphere, they suggest, and set the planet up for the cooling event at 80 million years ago and the Ice Age beginning 50 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous and the Eocene, respectively.