[ The Fountains of the Great Deep > Frozen Mammoths > Details Relating to the Hydroplate Theory ]

Details Relating to the Hydroplate Theory

1. Abundant Food. Winter sunlight inside the Arctic Circle is so scarce that vegetation hardly grows, regardless of temperature. How could mammoths survive during even a warm winter? Clearly, mammoths were living at temperate latitudes before the flood.

As explained on pages 111–148, near the end of the flood, major mountains suddenly formed, so the Earth became slightly unbalanced and began a slow 34°–57° roll. Although the Earth’s spin axis did not change its orientation in space, the land at the preflood North Pole shifted to central Asia while some mammoths’ temperate habitats shifted northward to near the Arctic Circle. This roll also explains why dinosaur remains are found inside Antarctica and the Arctic Circle. [See Endnotes 84–85 on page 145 for details and evidence.]

(The shifting crust theory recognizes this problem of feeding millions of mammoths during winter months. That theory says the Earth’s crust must have shifted, moving Siberia and Alaska northward. However, no force could slide the entire Earth’s crust—rock on rock.)

2. Yedomas and Loess.  (These terms are explained on page 275. Pages 259-264 explain why the subterranean water was saturated with carbon dioxide.) The extreme pressure in the subterranean chamber accelerated the escaping carbon-rich water to hypersonic speeds, rapidly eroding rocks. Eroded dirt particles of various sizes were swept up by the water and expelled into and above the atmosphere. As you will see, the higher a muddy droplet rose, the more likely it was to lose the larger particles carried inside. Therefore, droplets that rose above the atmosphere and froze contained the powdery dirt particles that comprise yedoma hills and the world’s loess.

Visualize a water droplet jetting up through the atmosphere. Atmospheric pressure drops as it goes higher, so some water evaporates from its surface. Evaporation cools the droplet, just as evaporating perspiration cools a person. Gusts of air and water vapor strike the droplet from differing directions, each time dragging its surface around toward the opposite, or downwind side. This creates a strong and complicated circulation within the droplet and chaotic waves on its surface. Sometimes the droplet fragments into two or more pieces, but the smaller each piece becomes, the stronger the molecular forces (the surface tension) holding it together.

In the droplet are many tiny dirt particles. Within the droplet, the flow carries the smaller particles more smoothly than larger particles,¹³³ while the larger particles are sometimes shaken out of the buffeted droplet. When the droplet finally freezes high above the atmosphere, only the smallest dirt particles remain. Being encased in ice, they are protected from water erosion that would round and smooth their sharper corners.

Much of this dirt and dirty ice fell to Earth in a giant hail and windstorm as the flood began. Trees and vegetation were ripped up, pulverized, and mixed with the fallen, muddy hail. Animals froze and suffocated. The thick, muddy ice insulated much of the deeper ice when the waters temporarily flooded the land. Ice that melted, during or after the flood, left behind tiny, angular dirt particles (now called loess) and dissolved salts.

After the flood, some ice layers that had not yet melted began melting in many isolated locations. Water, collected in these depressions during the summer, accelerated nearby melting. Today’s hilly yedomas remain. Therefore, in Arctic regions where little summer melting occurs, loess, salt, vegetation, and mammoth remains are preserved in cold yedomas.

Loess is often found near formerly glaciated areas, especially downwind of ice age drainage channels, such as the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. In warmer climates, wind removed the loess, rain leached salts from the soil, and the organic material decayed.

The bottom layers of ice sheets in Greenland, Canada, and Antarctica contain up to 50 times more microparticles than the glacial ice above.¹³⁴ Ice crystals containing these microparticles are much smaller than normal glacial ice crystals. This suggests that the hail that buried and froze the mammoths was smaller than normal hail. Another study found that the lower portion of the Greenland ice sheet contains abnormally high amounts of dust, sea salt, and other chemicals.¹³⁵

3. Elevated Burials, Frozen Muck, Animal Mixes. Bones, ivory, and flesh are found on higher ground, such as in yedomas and on Arctic islands. (The preceding paragraphs explains why mammoth remains are found in yedomas.) Prey and predator may also have sought protection from the greater common enemy—rising waters from rain that preceded the muddy hail, and noxious gases evaporating from the hail. Larger animals, such as mammoths and rhinoceroses, in rushing to higher ground, crushed and buried smaller animals in mud and ice. This may explain the antelope skull under Berezovka, and why such dense concentrations of bones and ivory are found on barren islands well inside the Arctic Circle.

Fine sediments in the muddy rain and ice mixed with pulverized vegetation to form muck. This cold, soupy mixture, along with ripped up forests, flowed into valleys and other low areas, smoothing the topography into flat, low plateaus. Later this muck froze, preserving to this day its distinguishing organic component and loess.

4. Rock Ice.  Table 11 on page 281 shows why rock ice is a Type 3 ice. As stated on page 127, the subterranean waters contained large quantities of dissolved salt and carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide contributed to the carbonates found in loess.

Before the flood, the subterranean water, sealed off from the atmosphere, contained no dissolved air. As the fountains of the great deep exploded up through the atmosphere, rapid and steady evaporation from the rising liquid forced gases away from, instead of toward, each rising liquid particle. Therefore, the water that froze above the atmosphere had little dissolved air but much carbon dioxide. Both froze to become a mixture of water-ice and frozen carbon dioxide, or “dry ice.”

Ice absorbs air very slowly, especially the inner portion of a large volume of falling ice particles, so little air was absorbed as muddy hail fell to Earth. Once the ice was on the warm ground, some “dry ice” and water-ice slowly evaporated as white clouds. As ice depths increased to perhaps several hundred feet, these clouds billowed up through gaps between the ice particles, forcing out any air that might have been between them. Eventually, the weight of the topmost layers of ice essentially sealed the lower ice from the air above. This is why Herz saw the ice under Berezovka turn yellow-brown as the ice first contacted and reacted chemically with air.

The Ice Age followed the flood. Since then, the surface of the ground in Siberia and Alaska has melted slightly each summer. In some parts of Siberia and Alaska, this included several feet of rock ice. When a layer of this dirty ice melted, the water drained away, leaving particles of dirt and vegetation behind. This remaining clay and silt provided an insulating blanket, causing less ice to melt each succeeding year. Most of the unsorted clay and silt above rock ice came from melted rock ice.

5. Suffocation.  Suffocation could have occurred three ways: (a) being buried alive in muddy hail, (b) breathing too much carbon dioxide from evaporating “dry ice,” or (c) lung tissue freezing so oxygen could not diffuse into the blood and/or carbon dioxide could not diffuse out of the blood.

6. Dirty Lungs, Peppered Tusks.  The jetting fountains of the great deep produced extreme winds. Dirt filled the atmosphere for a few hours before rain, ice, and falling dirt landed. This explains why Dima’s entire digestive and respiratory tract contained silt, clay, and small particles of gravel, and why high-velocity dirt particles peppered animals and even left “shrapnel,” on one side of hard mammoth tusks.  [See Figure 126 on page 270.]

7. -150°F, Large Animals. Almost all the energy of a falling hail particle ends up accelerating air downward, not heating the particle.¹³⁷ The result was violent downdrafts of cold air.

Larger, stronger animals, such as mammoths and rhinoceroses, best withstood the driving rain and cold wind as they sought safety. Smaller animals would be tossed about more by the high winds and would suffocate sooner because their bodies process the noxious gases faster. Death, burial, and, therefore, decay in the warmer deposits would come earlier for the smaller animals.

Mammoths and rhinoceroses were still standing as the colder hail began piling up—hail with temperatures of about -150°F. This supercold ice pressing against their bodies rapidly froze even their internal organs.

Extremely cold, muddy hail fell to the bottoms of streams, rivers, and lakes, quickly freezing the water from within; cool air did not freeze the water from above. The hail did not float, because it contained dirt. [See “What Happened?” on pages 278 and 279.]

8. Summer-Fall Deaths. According to this theory, all frozen mammoths died almost simultaneously. However, the different methods investigators have for estimating the season of death give slightly different times.  Some differences may be because preflood climates differed from those of today. A larger sampling with more consistent method is needed. One possibility would be to examine the outermost growth ring on hundreds of ivory tusks. This examination should include the isotope abundances across each ring.

9. Upright, Vertical Compression.  The massive, violent hail storm buried mammoths and rhinoceroses alive, many standing up and compressed from all sides. Babies, such as Dima, were flattened. Exposed parts of adult bodies, unsupported by bone, were vertically flattened. Sometimes even strong bones were crushed by axial compression. Encasement in muddy ice maintained the alignment of Berezovka’s leg bone as it was crushed lengthwise, before or soon after death.

Ice slowly flows downhill as, for example, in glaciers. Such a downward flow, pushing Berezovka tail first as he tried to climb to higher ground, would explain his forward swept hind legs, humped back, displaced vertebrae, and spread front legs bent at the “ankles.”

10. Other/Fossils.  The hydroplate theory states that the frozen animals were buried in muddy hail as the flood began. During the following months, sedimentary layers were deposited. Those sediments and their fossils were then sorted by liquefaction.  [See pages 194–204.]

This is a severe test for the hydroplate theory, because a few crude geologic maps of Siberia imply that marine fossils lie within several miles of the frozen remains. How accurate are these geologic maps in this unexplored region, and what deposits lie directly beneath frozen carcasses? (If dead mammoths floated on the flood waters, their flesh would not be preserved, but their bones might be found above marine fossils, coal, etc.)

Sedimentary layers generally extend over large areas and sometimes contain distinctive fossils. One can construct a plausible geologic map of an area (a) if many deep layers are exposed as, for example, in the face of a cliff, (b) if similar vertical sequences of fossils and rock types are found in nearby exposures, and (c) if no intervening crustal movement has occurred. If all three conditions are satisfied, then the layers with similar distinctive fossils are probably connected. To my knowledge, such layers have not been found beneath any frozen mammoth.

Nor is there any known report of marine fossils, limestone deposits, or coal seams directly beneath any frozen mammoth or rhinoceros remains. Tolmachoff, in his chapter on the geology of the Berezovka site, wrote that “Marine shells or marine mammals have never been discovered in [deposits having frozen mammoths].”¹³⁹ Hern von Maydell, reporting on his third frozen mammoth, wrote, “despite my thorough search, not a single shell or fossil was found.”¹⁴⁰ Beneath the Fairbanks Creek mammoth, sediments down to bedrock contained no marine fossils, layered strata, coal seams, or limestone.¹⁴¹

11. Other/Radiocarbon.  According to the hydroplate theory, all frozen mammoths and rhinoceroses died simultaneously. However, their radiocarbon ages vary. [See Table 9 on page 269.] For an explanation of radiocarbon dating and its assumptions, see pages 514–518. Those pages explain why 40,000 radiocarbon years (RCY) is a typical radiocarbon age for most frozen remains, and why 40,000 radiocarbon years correspond to about 5,000 actual years. A slight amount of contamination of the remains, for example, by groundwater, would lower their radiocarbon age considerably, especially something living as the flood began. This probably explains why different parts of the first Vollosovitch mammoth had widely varying radiocarbon ages—29,500 and 44,000 RCY.¹⁴² One part of Dima was 44,000 RCY, another was 26,000 RCY, and “wood found immediately around the carcass” was 9,000 –10,000 RCY.¹⁴³ Food in the Shandrin mammoth gave radiocarbon ages that differed by 10,000 years.¹⁴⁴ The lower leg of the Fairbanks Creek mammoth had a radiocarbon age of 15,380 RCY, while its skin and flesh were 21,300 RCY.¹⁴⁵ The two Colorado Creek mammoths had radiocarbon ages of 22,850 ± 670 and 16,150 ± 230 years.¹⁴⁶ Because a bone fragment at one burial site fits precisely with a bone at the other site 30 feet away,¹⁴⁷ and the soil had undergone considerable compression and movement, both mammoths probably died simultaneously.

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