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Icecore and other related dating schemes:
Part VII

Present melting rates of Greenland icecaps indicate they would not have
survived the hipsothermal:

Now, this long discussion regarding ice cores may leave the impression
that I accept that Greenland and Antarctica had large icecaps during
Velikovsky's time frame. I have merely been pointing out problems with the
uniformitarian ice-layering process that has been proposed by Ellenberger
and Mewhinney.

What I wish to emphasize is that there is physical evidence that
contradicts this gradualistic interpretation. What would happen in
Greenland during the hipsithermal, running from about 8000 to about 3000
BP, under a temperature regime 4 or 5 F hotter than the present?

According to Milankovich supporters, this temperature rise would end an
Ice Age and melt away the glaciers over North America and Europe. However,
when the climatologists discovered this type of temperature rise over the
entire Arctic region, they stated that Greenland icecap survived. The
continental icecaps melted away rapidly at the end of the Ice Age, but
Greenland did not.

Borisov had told us that the Siberian permafrost sank from 200 to 300
meters. Think of what would happen if this occurred all over the Arctic
region. According to Clyde Orr, Jr., "the annual precipitation in the
Arctic is less than in some desert areas.

The Arctic gives the appearance of being a wasteland of lakes, bogs and
marshes only because the ground, permanently frozen a few feet down,
impedes drainage."48 But this did not stop drainage during the
hipsithermal. Not only could water drain away but, with the sea ice
removed, the Arctic climate became moist: "Coastal-area climates are
especially influenced by the sea, where the prevailing winds blow inward
over the land,...tending to be marine in nature. They are, thus, subject
to lesser extremes of temperature."49

Consider, then, the entire Arctic Ocean without ice most the year and with
longer, warmer spring, summer and fall seasons. There would be both more
snowfall and more warm rainfall removing the snow cover and the ice cover.
A marine climate would create a more temperate environment because water
vapor over the Arctic region would act as a greenhouse gas, holding the
day's heat within the atmosphere. Consider, then, 24 hours of sunlight,
based on the present tilt of the Earth, for several months in a warm,
marine, Arctic environment.

The rainfall would occur often, removing the snow and ice due to the
warmer air. Winters would still be dry periods because the cold allows for
little snowfall. In such a climate, the icecap over Greenland would be
removed rapidly.

According to Borisov:

The British paleoclimatologist, C. Brooks, holds that a rise
of only [1 C] in the surface temperature of the Earth would be
enough to make the entire ice sheet of the Arctic Basin unstable.

The thermal processes are especially effective on the
borderline between the melting and freezing of water. The phase
conversions [from water to snow to ice], within one degree, are
accompanied by big changes in the absorption of solar radiation
at the surface of the sea.

It has been calculated that, as a result of the melting of the
sea ice, eight times as much heat is absorbed from solar
radiation by the Arctic Basin as is necessary to reduce the
thickness of the continental ice at the rate of 0.5 [meters] a
year.50

According to Orr, Jr:

A [one-degree] shift in mean annual temperature is equivalent to roughly
[100] miles of latitude; one degree is the difference between the climates
of Baltimore and Philadelphia....A [five-degree] rise, if maintained a few
thousand years, would surely melt some of the six million square miles of
ice and snow now collected at the poles, thereby raising the levels of the
oceans throughout the world. Such an increase would, very likely, bring
tropical conditions to most of the Earth.51

He described what has happened on the Earth based on only a 1 to 2 F rise
over the last century and into the present one:

During the last century, temperatures have risen in the
Northern Hemisphere, as a whole, somewhere between [1 and 2 F].
The general change has been in the form of milder winters, with
the colder areas receiving the most increase and warm areas
being less affected. Spitsbergen and eastern Greenland have, in
recent years, experienced average winter temperatures between [6
and 13 F], warmer than they were at the turn of the century.
Spitsbergen's harbor used to be icebound from October through
June; now it is open seven months a year. 

The growing season in
Finland has increased some [20] days during the last [100]
years. Lakes in northern Russia freeze seven days later and
break up an average of five days earlier. Subzero temperatures
are only half as common now in Montreal as they were in the late
1800s; the snowfall, which averaged 130 inches in the 1880s, has
in recent years reached only about 80 inches. With only a few
exceptions, glaciers from the Alps to Alaska have been
shrinking. Some hotels built in Switzerland at the turn of the
[last] century to front upon scenic wonderlands of ice now do
not have glaciers in view. The Thames and Tiber rivers, once
habitually ice-covered in winter, have not frozen over for
years....

That the northern hemisphere has been warming is shown most
dramatically by its fauna and flora. Birds, justly famous for
reading weather signs, have shifted northward. The cardinal,
tufted titmouse, mockingbird, and hooded warbler, once regarded
as southern habitants, have been found in recent years in the
northcentral states and even in New England. Species that used
to migrate south with winter now stay north throughout the year.

Northern Europe is being invaded by Mediterranean birds. Fifty
years ago, the opossum was rarely seen north of Virginia; now
opossums are common as far north as Boston. Deer, moose and
badgers are moving north also. Even fish are migrating; whiting,
king mackerel, halibut, and haddock range further north than
they have ever been known to do before. The cod, once unknown in
Greenland, is currently a food staple of the Eskimos.

Larch, spruce, yellow birch, sugar maple, black ash and white
pine-trees that demand cold weather--have been growing farther
north also. Our Midwestern corn belt extends [500] miles further
north; wheat cultivation has advanced some [200 to 300] miles
into Canada. Once frozen Russian steppes that never knew a plow
have been brought into production in recent years. Scandinavian
mountainsides that were covered with ice for centuries are
presently being plowed; forests have been inching up the
mountain sides....

In Waterton Glacier International Park, along the United
States-Canadian border, during the first half of this century,
several of the largest glaciers completely disappeared while
others shrank anywhere from [60 to 75%].52 (Emphasis added.)

With a 1 to 2 F temperature shift, the average winter temperature rose 6
to 13 F over Spitsbergen and Greenland. According to Borisov, between 1890
and 1940, there was a 1 to 2 F rise over the Earth which averaged 0.6 C.53
But what was its rise in the polar latitudes?

The rise in the air temperature was particularly noticeable in the high
latitudes, especially in winter. In the 40-odd years [between 1896 and
1938]...the mean annual temperature [in the Arctic basin] had risen 3.9 C,
the December temperature [rose] 9.4 C [and] the summer temperature changed
hardly at all.54 (Emphasis added.)

Confirming this, Brooks stated that the "magnitude of the change in the
Arctic is shown by the mean winter temperatures of Spitsbergen, which rose
by 16 F between 1911 [to] 1920 and 1931 [to] 1935. The edge of the main
area of Arctic ice receded toward the pole by some hundreds of miles."55
It is clear that small temperature rises over the Earth have their most
pronounced effects not in the tropics or temperate zones but in the polar
regions.

With an overall circulation model, R. L. Newson showed that if the Arctic
icecap melted and the ocean temperature was kept at the freezing point of
ocean water, the winter air temperature over Canada and Siberia would rise
10 to 30 C and, over the Arctic Ocean, it would rise 20 to 40 C.56
Employing a different circulation model, M. Warshaw and R. R. Rapp found
that the temperatures over the Arctic basin would be similar to those
found by Newson.57

What, then, would ensue with a 4 to 5 F rise? According to James L. Dyson,
during the hipsithermal, the "mean annual temperature of Svalbard
[Spitsbergen] rose above the freezing point."58 The end result: a
temperate climate.

Measurements on Greenland's northeastern glaciers, carried out between
1952 and 1954, showed that they were losing nearly 100 gm/ cm2 [grams per
square centimeter] averaged over the whole glacier surface for one
year--equivalent to a depth of water of nearly one meter. Since all parts
of the glacier showed a greater loss of ice in one year than was
compensated by accumulation of snow, the whole of the glacier is said to
be in the ablation area.59

The ablated ice is replaced by ice farther in, toward the center of the
Greenland icecap.

During the early Middle Ages, according to Borisov, the Arctic "summer
temperatures were [1 to 2 C] higher."60

According to Brooks:

Icelanders settled in Greenland in the [10th century
AD]....The settlers brought with them cattle and sheep, which
were successfully reared at first, and they even attempted to
grow grain, but, before very long, the colonies became dependent
on supplies from Norway. Norway, itself, was passing through a
time of stress, however, and the visits of ships became fewer
and fewer, until some time in the [15th] century [when] they
ceased altogether and the colonies were lost sight of. For many
centuries, their fate was unknown, but the history of the
Eastern Settlement has now been made out by excavations of a
Danish archaeological expedition at Herjolfsnes, near Cape
Farewell. 

The most important evidence is derived from the
excavation of the church yard, in soil which is now frozen solid
throughout the year, but which, when the bodies were buried,
must have thawed for a time in summer, because the coffins,
shrouds, and...bodies were penetrated by the roots of the
plants. At first, the ground thawed to a considerable depth, for
the early coffins were buried...deeply. After a time, these
early remains were permanently frozen in, and later burials lie
nearer and nearer to the surface....Finally, at least [500]
years ago, the ground became permanently frozen and has remained
in that condition ever since, thus preserving the bodies.61

This is what occurs with a 1 to 2 C rise over four centuries. The central
icecap was unable to maintain the ice in the ablation zone during this
longer period. What would happen to Greenland with a 4 to 5 F rise in
Earth temperature for, perhaps, 5,000 years?

As J. B. Charlesworth explained:

During the Optimum period [hipsithermal], the distribution of
ice in Europe was drastically different from now. This snowline
in Norway was [400 to 500 meters] higher and the Scandinavian
glaciers melted away almost completely....[O]nly the highest
summits reached the snowline. In Iceland, the Vatnajokull shrank
possibly to a few icecaps on the highest lava-cones....The ice
in Spitsbergen is, likewise, a distinct [and relatively new]
glaciation, though it may have persisted in Northeast Land since
kames and till are associated with raised beaches.62

Charlesworth presented a broad picture of the fact that, during the
hipsithermal, there were warmer seas and warmer lands, reduced to
completely removed glaciers all across the Arctic and near-Arctic regions:

The postglacial warm period has been the subject of two international
congresses, a botanical one...and a geological one....A. G. Nathorst, on
the evidence of the flora, the freshwater and marine mollusks, and a few
invertebrates, showed that it extended over the North Atlantic region....

Warm mollusks inhabited the "raised beach sea" about the North Atlantic.
Alien species, no longer living in the local waters, tenanted Spitsbergen
seas.... Marine algae...also spread as far north as these islands and
Atlantic algae in the northern part of the White Sea....During the
same...period,...other warm shells lived off King Charles Land, Franz
Joseph Land, Novaya Zemlya, North Siberia, and in the White Sea, where
[temperate shelled species] today [are] restricted to its warmer parts....

The same warm sea is registered by the occupance of [temperate-type
mollusks] in the raised beaches of Ellesmere [Island] and of warmer shells
in Baffin [Island], Melville Peninsula and Southampton Island....

Greenland shells, when the sea stood 10 [meters] higher than now, were
then thicker and bigger and included more southerly forms. [The mollusks,]
whose present northern limit is Newfoundland, ranged north of the Arctic
Circle and...into east Greenland, where the sea temperature was [the same
as that] of a latitude [520 miles] farther south....

This general sea in the colder portion of the North Atlantic is [borne]
out in other ways. The modern ice in [southwestern] and [northeastern]
Greenland, and in Spitsbergen, has moraines which contain marine
shells--including at Green Bay,...which no longer dwells in Spitsbergen
waters....63

The evidence indicates that the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans had a
temperature shift corresponding to the temperature range of warmer water
located, at present, 750 miles farther south. It is believed that the
Greenland icecap existed in such a warm temperature regime. But what about
the land temperatures, as explained by the plants that grew in these
northern latitudes? Charlesworth stated that higher land temperatures
during the hipsithermal are exhibited by land vertebrates, such as
reptiles, in Denmark and Scandinavia whose present distribution is
Mediterranean-Pontian:

A number of marsh and freshwater plants...had a wider distribution toward
the north, as had the water chestnut,...e.g., in Denmark, Sweden, Finland
and Russia where the short autumns make it impossible to ripen the fruit
today....

Trees grew [even farther north] in Norway's outermost islands and as far
as Ingo Island, off North Cape....

The submediterranean oak,...whose northern limit today runs the Alsace,
the Jura Mountains, east Alps, Bohemia and Hungary,...extended in the
Optimum time possibly as far as the North [and the Baltic seas]....

Additional evidence is given by...peats and relics in Greenland--the
northern limits may have been displaced northward through several degrees
of latitude...and [by] other plants in Novaya Zemlya, and by peat and ripe
fruit stones [fruit pits]...in Spitsbergen that no longer ripen in these
northern lands. Various plants were more generally distributed in
Ellesmere [Island and] birch grew more widely in Iceland....64

The point to stress is that large trees should never be able to grow on
islands north of the Arctic Circle. As explained by Ivan T. Sanderson,
"pieces of large tree trunks of the types [found]...do not and cannot live
at those latitudes today for purely biological reasons. The same goes for
huge areas of Siberia."65 As Charlesworth explained above, fruit does not
ripen during short autumns at these high latitudes. 

The spring and summer seasons had to be much longer for any seeds from
these temperate trees to germinate and grow. Peats were found on
Greenland, however, we are told that peat is formed "chiefly in temperate,
humid climates by the accumulation and partial decomposition of vegetable
remains under conditions of deficient drainage."66 According to Brooks,
"peat bogs...require a rainfall of at least 40 inches a year and a mean
temperature above 32 F."67

According to E. C. Pielou, there were temperate forests on the Seward
Peninsula, in Alaska and the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula, in Canada's Inuvik
Region, facing the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean; and at Dubawnt Lake,
in Canada's Keewatin Region, west of Hudson Bay.68

In essence, we have temperate forests near the Arctic Ocean, across from
Siberia to Norway and from Alaska to Hudson's Bay. Temperate forests were
also found on Spitsbergen, the outermost islands of Norway, and there was
rich vegetation on Ellesmere Island and Novaya Zemlya.

Temperate conditions existed for thousands of years both east and west of
Greenland and at all the Greenland latitudes. This, of course, would
explain why mammoths and other large animals were able to live, during
this period, throughout these land regions. Therefore, it is more than
reasonable to expect that Greenland did not escape the fate of all these
regions, that it lost its icecap and grew a lush vegetation.

But it is assumed Greenland was glaciated all this time and no plants that
do not grow there now ever lived there during the hipsithermal.
Nonetheless, during an expedition to northeast Greenland, from a dike
ridge of a glacier, crushed plant parts were being exuded through the ice.
According to Louise A. Boyd, the material contained silt, which gave off a
powerful odor like that of decaying vegetable matter and could be sensed
820 feet from the source.

The silt was examined for fossils by Dr. Esa Hyyppa of the Geological
Survey of Finland, who reported the following:

Macroscopic Fossils. The silt examined contained two whole
leaves, several leaf fragments and two fruits of Dryas
octopetala; [also] a small, partly decayed leaf of a shrub
species not definitely determinable...and an abundance of much
decayed, small fragments of plant tissues, mostly leaf veins and
root hairs....No remnants of tree vegetation were found."69

Scientists claimed that there could be "little doubt that the silt is
being squeezed up from the base of the ice. As the local bedrock is
gneiss, it seems probable that the source is a superficial deposit on the
valley floor. The modern aspect of the flora precludes a preglacial time
of origin for it."70

Northern Greenland had the same rich type of vegetation on lands where the
glaciers had practically melted away. Then this region was covered over by
ice, which pushed the vegetation toward the Greenland coast where it is
being exuded through the ice.

The northeastern corner of Greenland is actually the coldest region of
this great island. Lister stated that it has a "continental climate [and
is] remote from the influence of the sea...."71 The ocean ameliorates a
land climate. That is why regions like the northcentral United States have
such long, cold and bitter winters compared to the eastern seaboard.
Northeastern Greenland, therefore, would have the coldest climate of the
entire island.

Not only did peat grow in abundance on Greenland, but, at the northeastern
end of the island, the icecap did not exist so as to permit these plants
to grow. However, Greenland is an island about 1,400 miles long north to
south. If the coldest portion of the Greenland glacier melted completely
away and permitted a rich vegetation to thrive, what must have happened
500 or 1,000 miles to the south of the island, where it was even warmer?

It seems highly probable and reasonable to suggest that the melting away
of glaciers in northeastern Greenland and in Ellesmere Island was
accompanied by the melting of nearly all the Greenland icecap. If the
coldest portion of the Greenland icecap melted away, it seems highly
probable that the more southern, warmer regions also melted away and
supported the same types of vegetation found along the Arctic Ocean--from
Siberia to Norway to Hudson's Bay to Alaska.

Icecaps in the northern hemisphere melt from the southern to the northern
ends because the southern region is warmer. But glaciologists and
climatologists expect us to accept that the coldest region of Greenland
completely melted away while all the warmer regions did not. This is not
only illogical, but also geophysically and thermodynamically absurd.

According to Lister, during 1952 to 1954, Greenland was losing a meter of
water in its ablation zone (or over a meter of ice, since ice is less
dense than water) per year.72 As pointed out by Borisov, a 1 C rise of the
Earth's surface temperature, when calculated, results in the melting of
the sea ice, so eight times as much heat is absorbed from solar radiation
but will "reduce the thickness of the continental ice at the rate of 0.5
meters a year."73

If we accept these calculations as reasonable, since one reflects what was
measured at Greenland, and apply them to the Greenland icecap during the
hipsithermal, we discover a most interesting result: the Greenland icecap
would have melted away completely. Furthermore, Charlesworth told us that
the hipsithermal was a "xeric" or "xerothermic" period, meaning a dry
weather period, which implies that there was less snowfall to generate new
ice.<>
Icecore and other related dating schemes:
Part VII

Greenland icecores less than 6000 years old, with or without Velikovsky
and/or catastrophism:

Another aspect of this evidence that must be pointed out: Ice does not
melt from below unless volcanism is heating the rock in contact with the
ice at the bottom of a glacier. Ice melts from the top or sides, downward
and inward. There can be no doubt that much or all of the Greenland and
Antarctica icecaps melted during this 3,000-to-5,000-year warm period. Of
greatest significance is that the icecaps melted from the top downward.

This simply means that the icecap melted and flowed away as water and
that, during this entire period, no ice layers could have ever formed.
Since more ice was being lost than was forming during this timeframe, no
ice layers from before 8,000 to 3,000 years ago could have remained even
if Velikovsky's theory is completely disregarded. The layers of ice that
Ellenberger and Mewhinney are presenting as evidence against Velikovsky,
based on their own gradualistic processes, could never have existed, yet
this has not stopped them from arguing that the layers are there.
Ellenberger and Mewhinney have dismissed this fundamental melting
evidence!

In addition, since the hipsithermal melted many icecaps from top to
bottom, then the ice core record would have a gigantic hiatus between the
formation of more modern ice and ancient ice. While turning their
assumptions to fact, ignoring this required hiatus, the ice core advocates
claim that there is a full record of year-by-year ice layers going back to
the ancient past. This is neither reasonable nor possible. The immense
melting of the icecaps during the hipsithermal would have melted away
untold thousands of years of ice, if not all of it.

The hipsithermal lasted about 5,500 years. If we employ a very
conservative 1.5 meter loss of ice per year, we get 7,500 meters of ice
lost in 5,000 years, or over 24,500 feet of ice lost. If we assume that
the ablation of the icecap lasted for only 4,000 years, we still lose
6,000 meters or over 19,500 feet of ice. For 3,000 years, we lose 4,500
meters, almost 15,000 feet of ice. The 4 to 5 F rise clearly melted the
ice even more than these figures suggest. Since the Greenland glacier
presently averages a depth of about 5,000 feet, with a few high points at
10,000 feet, at one-third of our melting figures, the present icecap would
either melt away completely or almost completely. We would get the same
results with 0.5 meters per year of melt.74

What stopped this higher temperature from melting away nearly the entire
icecap? Why did such a long period of greater heat not melt away several
thousands of feet of ice?