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Phaeton's Legacy The Earth Nearly Died When Mounting geological evidence proves that sudden, cataclysmic transformation — rather than slow, gradual change — has been responsible for shaping our planet. hen asked what they understand by the term "ice age", most people seem- ingly believe that it was an era wien continuous ice-sheets blanketed Arctic regions well into what now are temperate climes—as far south as approxi- mately 50°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 origin of such beliefs lies in the placement by geologists of such an ice age in the Pleistocene epoch, which abundant evidence 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- ered 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 occurred together, apparently shared a common genesis. Included were striated rock surfaces, erratic boulders and immense accumulations of frequently intractable ‘drift deposits. The geographical settings and locations of these features were also peculiar. The striations, which often occurred in groups, nearly always shared a single orientation which commonly ignored obviously pre-existing topography—and the erratic boulders, which in some localities are very numerous, 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 gccur at great distances from the nearest natural outcrops of the particular strata composing them. The ‘drift’ deposits sometimes occur on northern hill-slopes only, or on mountain peaks but not in adjacent valleys, and, frequently, mantle chronically pulverised underlying bedrock. Generally unstratificd 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 clearly happened geologically very recently. This impression generally afforded by all this evidence is one of overwhelming force operating indiscriminately, suddenly, violently 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 of years, but which, as shown by much recent research, ended with surprising abruptness at the end of Pleistocene 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 Pleistocene ice-sheets, themselves conceived of as thousands of feet thick, were never glaciated at all. Such details, allied to the discoveries of frozen remains of upright dead trees in Arctic latitudes presently incapable climatically 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 boulders as far south as equatorial latitudes (regarded as always having been ice-free by even the most ardent glacialists), cast serious doubt on the reality of an ice age like that postulated by orthodoxy. _ ©1995, J, B. Delair and D, S, Allan Extracted with permission from When the Earth Nearly Died ' Published 1995 by Gateway Books, Bath, United Kingdom. Available in Australia through ASTAM Books, Sydney; in USA, through Atrium _ Publishers Group, Lower Lake, California. NEXUS ¢ 11 CHALLENGING THE ICE AGE THEORY FEBRUARY - MARCH 1995