[ The Fountains of the Great Deep > Frozen Mammoths > Some Specifics ]

Some Specifics

We cannot minimize the frozen mammoth mystery by saying, “Only a few complete mammoths have been reported.” One good case would be enough. Undoubtedly, hundreds of past discoveries went unreported, because many Siberians believed that looking at a mammoth’s face brought death or misfortune. Fear of being forced by scientists to dig a mammoth out of frozen ground suppressed other discoveries. Also, Siberia and Alaska are sparsely populated and relatively unexplored. Flowing rivers are the primary excavators, so man has seen only a tiny sample of what is buried. Siberian geologists report that “work at the gold mines uncovers frozen corpses every year, but because the arrival of scientists can delay and complicate the mining, most [frozen mammoths] are lost to science.”⁵¹

Widespread freezing and rapid burial are also inferred when commercial grade ivory is found. Ivory tusks, unless frozen and protected from the weather, dry out, lose their animal matter and elasticity, crumble, crack, and become useless for carving.⁵² Between about 1750 and 1917, trade in mammoth ivory prospered over a wide geographical region, yielding an estimated 96,000 mammoth tusks.⁵³ The extent and speed of freezing and burial was probably greater than most people have imagined.

The Benkendorf Mammoth.⁵⁴ In May 1846, a surveyor named Benkendorf and his party camped along Siberia’s Indigirka River. The spring thaw and unusually heavy rains caused the swollen river to erode a new channel. Benkendorf noticed a large object bobbing slowly in the water. As the “black, horrible, giantlike mass was thrust out of the water [they] beheld a colossal elephant’s head, armed with mighty tusks, with its long trunk moving in an unearthly manner, as though seeking something lost therein.” They tried to pull the mammoth to shore with ropes and chains but soon realized that its hind legs were frozen in the river bottom in a standing position.

Twenty-four hours later, the river bottom thawed and eroded, freeing the mammoth. A team of 50 men and their horses pulled the mammoth onto dry land, 12 feet from shore. The 13-foot-tall, 15-foot-long beast was fat and perfectly preserved. Its “widely opened eyes gave the animal an appearance of life, as though it might move in a moment and destroy [them] with a roar.” They removed the tusks and opened its full stomach containing “young shoots of the fir and pine; and a quantity of young fir cones, also in a chewed state ...” Hours later and without warning, the river bank collapsed, because the river had slowly undercut the bank. The mammoth was carried off toward the Arctic Ocean, never to be seen again.

The Berezovka Mammoth.  The most famous, accessible, and studied mammoth is a 50-year-old⁵⁵ male, found in a freshly eroded bank, 100 feet above Siberia’s Berezovka River in 1900. A year later an expedition, led by Dr. Otto F. Herz, painstakingly excavated the frozen body and transported it to the Zoological Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.⁵⁶  [See Figure 155 on page 266.]

Berezovka was upright, although his back was excessively humped and his straightened hind legs were rotated forward at the hips into an almost horizontal position. This strange, contorted position was further exaggerated by his raised and spread front legs. Several ribs, a shoulder blade, and pelvis were broken.⁵⁷ Amazingly, the long bone in his right foreleg was crushed into about a dozen pieces, without noticeably damaging surrounding tissue.⁵⁸ “There had been considerable bleeding between the muscles and the fatty and connective tissues.”⁵⁹ His shaggy, wirelike hair, some of it 20 inches long, was largely intact.⁶⁰ His erect penis was horizontally flattened.⁶¹ (This organ in a live elephant is round, S-shaped, and never horizontal.)⁶²

What can we conclude from these unusual details? To crush a slender rod, which the long leg bones resemble, requires axial compression while the rod (or bone) is encased in some material that prevents bending and snapping. To demonstrate this, place a long, straight stick vertically on a table and see how difficult it is to compress and break it into a dozen or so pieces. Instead, it will snap at the weakest point. If the stick has a slight bend, as do the long leg bones, crushing becomes almost impossible. Something must prevent the stick or bone from bending as the compressive load increases. Evidently, Berezovka’s leg bone was severely compressed lengthwise while rigidly encased.⁶³ The “considerable bleeding” shows that this crushing occurred before or soon after death.

Slow suffocation of males can produce penile erection.⁶⁴ Tolmachoff concluded that, “The death [of Berezovka] by suffocation is proved by the erected male genital, a condition inexplicable in any other way.” ⁶⁵ But why was the penis horizontally flattened? It had to be pressed between two horizontal surfaces, one of which was probably his abdomen. Again, considerable vertical compression must have acted within some medium encasing the entire body.

Suffocation is also implied with four other frozen giants. Vollosovitch (Table 10) concluded that his second buried mammoth, found with a penile erection on Bolshoi Lyakhov Island, had suffocated.⁶⁶ A third example is provided by Dima, whose “pulmonary alveoli suggested death by asphyxia” after “great exertion just before death.” ⁶⁷ The Pallas rhinoceros also showed symptoms of asphyxiation.

The blood-vessels and even the fine capillaries were seen to be filled with brown coagulated blood, which, in many places still preserved its red colour. This is exactly the kind of evidence we look for when we want to know whether an animal has been drowned or suffocated. Asphyxia is always accompanied by the gorging of the capillaries with blood.⁶⁸

Von Schrenck’s rhinoceros was found with expanded nostrils and an open mouth. Investigators concluded, “that the animal died from suffocation, which it tried to avoid by keeping the nostrils wide asunder.” ⁶⁹ In all, three mammoths and two rhinoceroses apparently suffocated. No other cause of death has been shown for the remaining frozen giants.⁷⁰

Sanderson describes another strange aspect of Berezovka.

Much of the head, which was sticking out of the bank, had been eaten down to the bone by local wolves and other animals, but most of the rest was perfect. Most important, however, was that the lips, the lining of the mouth and the tongue were preserved. Upon the last, as well as between the teeth, were portions of the animal’s last meal, which for some almost incomprehensible reason it had not had time to swallow. The meal proved to have been composed of delicate sedges and grasses ...⁷¹

Another account states that the mammoth’s “mouth was filled with grass, which had been cropped, but not chewed and swallowed.” ⁷² The grass froze so rapidly that it still had “the imprint of the animal’s molars.”⁷³ Hapgood’s translation of a Russian report mentions eight well-preserved bean pods and five beans found in its mouth.⁷⁴

Twenty-four pounds of undigested vegetation were removed from Berezovka and analyzed by Russian scientist V. N. Sukachev. He identified more than 40 different species of plants: herbs, grasses, mosses, shrubs, and tree leaves. Many no longer grow that far north; others grow both in Siberia and as far south as Mexico. Dillow ⁷⁵ draws several conclusions from these remains:

At normal body temperatures, stomach acids and enzymes break down vegetable material within an hour. What inhibited this process? The only plausible explanation is for the stomach to cool to about 40°F in ten hours or less.⁷⁶ But because the stomach is protected inside a warm body (96.6°F for elephants), how cold must the outside air become to drop the stomach’s temperature to 40°F? Experiments have shown that the outer layers of skin would have had to drop suddenly to at least -175°F!  ⁷⁷

Independently, Sanderson concluded, “The flesh of many of the animals found in the muck must have been very rapidly and deeply frozen, for its cells had not burst. ... Frozen-food experts have pointed out that to do this, starting with a healthy, live specimen, you would have to suddenly drop the temperature of the surrounding air to well below minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit.”⁷⁸

The ice layer directly under the Berezovka mammoth contained some hair still attached to his body. Below his right forefoot was “the end of a very hairy tail ... of a bovine animal, probably [a] bison.”⁷⁹ Also under the body were “the right forefoot and left hind foot of a reindeer ... The whole landslide on the Berezovka [River] was the richest imaginable storehouse of prehistoric remains.”⁸⁰ In the surrounding, loamy soil was an antelope skull,⁸¹ “the perfectly preserved upper skull of a prehistoric horse to which fragments of muscular fibre still adhered,”⁸² tree trunks, tree fragments, and roots.⁸³ This vegetation differed from the amazingly well-preserved plants in the mammoth’s mouth and stomach. 

Geographical Extent.  We should also notice the broad geographical extent over which these strange events occurred. [See map on page 268.] They were probably not separate, unrelated events.  As Sir Henry Howorth stated:

The instances of the soft parts of the great pachyderms being preserved are not mere local and sporadic ones, but they form a long chain of examples along the whole length of Siberia, from the Urals to the land of the Chukchis [the Bering Strait], so that we have to do here with a condition of things which prevails, and with meteorological conditions that extend over a continent.

     When we find such a series, ranging so widely, preserved in the same perfect way, and all evidencing a sudden change of climate from a comparatively temperate one to one of great rigour, we cannot help concluding that they all bear witness to a common event. We cannot postulate a separate climate cataclysm for each individual case and each individual locality, but we are forced to the conclusion that the now permanently frozen zone in Asia became frozen at the same time from the same cause.⁸⁴

Actually, northern portions of Asia, Europe, and North America contain “the remains of extinct species of the elephant [mammoth] and rhinoceros, together with those of horses, oxen, deer, and other large quadrupeds.” ⁸⁵  So, the event may have been even more widespread than Howorth believed.

Rock Ice.  In Siberia and Alaska, scientists have found a strange type of ice in and under the muck containing mammoth remains.⁸⁶ Tolmachoff called it rock ice.⁸⁷ Rock ice often has a yellow tinge and contains round or elongated bubbles. Some bubbles are connected, while others, an inch or so long, are vertically streaked.⁸⁸ When exposed to the Sun, rock ice showed “a polyhedral, granular structure at the surface, and these granules could usually be easily rubbed off with the finger.” ⁸⁹ It looked “like compacted hail.”  ⁹⁰ Mammoth remains have been found above, below, beside, partially in,⁹¹ and, in one case, within⁹² rock ice.

Horizontal layers of rock ice are most easily seen in bluffs along the Arctic coast and nearby rivers.⁹³ Some subsurface ice layers are more than 2 miles long and 150 feet thick.⁹⁴ A several-foot-thick layer of structureless clay or silt is sometimes above the rock ice. How was this clay or silt deposited? If it settled out of a lake or stream, as normally happens, it should have many thin layers, but it does not. Furthermore, the slow settling of clay and silt through water should have provided enough time for the water to melt all the ice below. Sometimes rock ice contains plant particles⁹⁵ and thin layers of sand or clay. Had the water frozen in a normal way, the dirt would have settled out and the vegetable matter would have floated upward. Obviously, this rock ice froze rapidly and was never part of a lake or stream.

Several feet beneath the Berezovka mammoth was a layer of rock ice, sloping more than 180 feet down to the river. Herz and Pfizenmayer,⁹⁶ after digging into it, reported perhaps the strangest characteristic of rock ice.

Deeper down in the cliff the ice becomes more solid and transparent, in some places entirely white and brittle. After remaining exposed to the air even for a short time this ice again assumes a yellowish-brown color and then looks like the old ice.⁹⁷

Obviously, something in the air (probably oxygen) reacted chemically with something in the ice.  Why was air (primarily oxygen and nitrogen) not already dissolved in the ice? Just as liquid water dissolves table salt, sugar, and many other solids, water also dissolves gases in contact with it. For example, virtually all water and ice on Earth are nearly saturated with air. Had air been dissolved in Herz’s rock ice before it suddenly turned yellowish-brown, the chemical reaction would have already occurred.

Table 11 compares the characteristics of rock ice with those of the three generic types of ice. A careful study of this table suggests that rock ice is a Type 3 ice. Because such thick layers of rock ice still exist, an enormous amount of water probably froze while moving through cold air or outer space.

Yedomas and Loess.  In Siberia, frozen mammoths are frequently found in strange hills, 30 – 260 feet high, which Russian geologists call yedomas (yeh-DOME-uhs). For example, the mammoth cemetery, containing remains of 156 mammoths, was in a yedoma.⁹⁸ [See line 48, Table 10, page 269.] It is known that these hills were formed under cold, windy conditions, because they are composed of a powdery, homogeneous soil, honeycombed with thick veins of ice. Sometimes the ice, which several Russian geologists have concluded was formed simultaneously with the soil, accounts for 90% of the yedoma’s volume.⁹⁹ Some yedomas contain many broken trees “in the wildest disorder.” ¹⁰⁰ The natives call them “wood hills” and the buried trees “Noah’s wood.”  ¹⁰¹ Yedoma soil is similar to muck.¹⁰² It contains tiny plant remains, is high in salt and carbonate,¹⁰³ and has more than two and a half times the carbon that is in all the world’s tropical forests!¹⁰⁴ The Berezovka mammoth was found in a similar soil.¹⁰⁵ This soil has been identified as loess¹⁰⁶ (a German term, pronounced “LERSE”). Little is known about its origin. Most believe it is a windblown deposit spread under cold, glacial conditions over huge regions of the Earth. However, Siberia was scarcely glaciated, and normal winds would deposit loess too slowly to protect so many frozen animals from predators. Loess often blankets formerly glaciated regions, such as Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, and Alaska. It lacks internal layering (strati

fication) and is found at all elevations—from just above sea level to hillsides at 8,000 feet elevation. Because loess is at many elevations and its tiny particles are not rounded by thousands of years of exposure to water and wind, some have proposed that loess came recently from outer space.¹⁰⁷ Loess, a fertile soil rich in carbonates, has a yellow tinge caused by the oxidation of iron-bearing minerals after deposition.¹⁰⁸ China’s Yellow River and Yellow Sea are so named because of the loess suspended in them. Why is there an apparent relationship between frozen mammoths, yedomas, and loess?  

Conclusion.  This brief survey raises several intriguing but perplexing problems. How could mammoths have lived at Arctic latitudes, especially during the dark winters? What killed them, and how were they buried in such a peculiar manner? Some must have frozen within hours after their deaths, because significant decay or mutilation by scavengers did not occur. However, just before the mammoths were frozen, during that late summer or early fall, conditions in Siberia were not cold.  What happened?

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