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--- FEBRUARY -MARCH 1995 CHALLENGING THE ICE AGE THEORY When asked what they understand' by the term "ice age", most people seem . ingly believe that ~~ was an era wilen continuous ice-sheets blanketed Arctic regions well into what now are temperate climes-as far south as approxi mately 500 N in Europe and 36°N in North America. The resultant bleak landscape is often imagined (especially by artists) as having been inhabited by such ani mals as the hairy mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and musk-ox, hunted by our fur-clad ancestors. The migin of such 'beliefs lics in the placement by geologists of such an ice age in the Pleistocene epoch, which abundant evidcrrce indicates came to an end about 11,000 years ago when oUr own era, the Holocene, began. The Ice Age itself is said to have persisted for about a million years, during which ice-sheets repeatedly waxed! and waned. Coincidentally, ice-sheets similar to those smothering Arctic latitudes also allegedly cov ercd the south polar regions. Directly associated with the notion of an ice age, and indeed largely responsible for its inception, were a number of singular geological phenomena which, because they some times occurre-d together, apparently shared a common genesis. Includcd were striated rock surfaccs, erratic boulders and immense accumuJations of frequently intractable 'drift' deposits. The geographical settings and locations of these features were also peculiar. The striations, which often occurred in groups, neady always shared a single oJ'icntatJon which commonly ignored obviously pre-existing topography~and the erratic boulders, which in some localities are very nume-rous, lie at all kinds of altitudes despite their often stupendous size and tonnage. Examples are known almost a quarter of a mile (400 m) long! All ~ccur at great distances from the nearcst natural outcrops of the particular strata composing them. The 'drift' deposits snmetimes occur on northern hill-slopes only, or on mountain peaks but not in adjacent vallcys, and, frequently, mantle chronically pulverised underlying bedrock. Generally unstratified and often contorted, the 'drift' deposits in many places also contain abundant remains of !huge trees, plants and leaves often foreign to the latitudes in which these are discovered, and countless teeth and bones of the mam moth and its contemporaries. Wood-splinterings and bone fractures are often sharp and fresh-looking. They clcarly happened geologically very recently_ This impression generally afforded by all this evidence is one of overwhelming force operating indiscriminately, suddenly, viQlently and on a colossal scale. Conventional ice age concepts-first mooted about 150 years ago-ascribe all such phenomena to remorseless, slow-acting, glacial agencies active for hundreds of thousands oJ years, but which, as shown by much recent research, ended with surprising abruptness at the end of Pleistoc_ene times. Yet, while the end of such conditions is now clearly trace able, the origin of the Ice Age, despite numerous diverse theories devised to account for it, remains obscure. It has, furthermore, been established that many northern areas formerly believed to have been overridden by these Pleistocenc ice-sheets, Ithemselves conceived of as thousands of ,feet thick, were never glaciated at all. Such detaills, allied to the discoveries of frozen remains of upright dead trees in Arctic latitudes presently incapable dimatical1y of sup porting such trees (which could never have survived the deep refrigeration of such mas sive glaciation there) and of the occurrence of striated rock surfaces and erratic bourdcrs as far south as equatorial latitudes (regarded as always having been ice-free by even the most ardent gilacialists), cast serious doubt on the reality olf an ice age like that pnstu'lated by orthodoxy. NEXUS • 11