The Geological Evidence for the Great Flood Part III

The last point I would like to raise concerning the geological evidence for the Great Flood would be evidence found in one of the most inhospitable areas of the planet, or as James Montgomery Boice describes for us in his book An Expositionary Commentary, Genesis Volume I, (Genesis 1-11), Chapter 50....

"The last of these strange facts is the astonishing preservation of thousands upon thousands of mammoth bodies in Siberia. The mammoth was a member of the elephant family and looks like an elephant in reconstructed pictures. But it was larger, standing twelve to thirteen feet high at the shoulder, and was covered with a thick coat of long, coarse, black hair. Its tusks could be nine or ten feet long and measure two-and-a-half feet around the base. Each one weighed on the order of 180 to 200 pounds, as compared to the 40-pound tusks of an average elephant today. The mammoth roamed over most of North America and nearly the whole of Europe. It was particularly abundant in northern Asia.



It is almost impossible to exaggerate the number and distribution of the mammoth remains in northern Asia, particularly Siberia. This area of Russia stretches more than 2,000 miles along the Arctic Ocean. It is level, much like our (US) midwest, and is so thoroughly frozen due to the continual cold at this northern latitude that only a few feet of the topmost soil ever thaws out and that only for a few weeks in midsummer. It is here in this vast, forbidding waste that these creatures are found. Whole areas are filled with fossil bones. One island, Lachov, is said to be composed almost entirely of bones. In other areas, not merely bones but whole animals-bones, skin, tusks, hair, and all-are preserved so thoroughly that the creatures seem lifelike, even today. Moreover, a suprising number of mammoth carcasses and skeletons have been discovered in an upright, standing position, just how they lived. Clearly they were frozen suddenly and thus preserved nearly intact until now.



How many mammoths were there? It is impossible to calculate. But people have been in the business of collecting the ivory tusks of these creatures from the year A.D. 900 at least, and in one twenty-year period in which records were kept, tusks of at least 20,000 mammoths were taken from just one Siberian deposit. Experts estimate that as many as five million of these creatures may have perished all at one time. What known geologic or atmospheric cause could have overwhelmed them, young and old alike, buried them and then preserved them until today? The best possible explanation is a worldwide flood followed by a change in climate so drastic that these northern areas, which had been temperate before, now became arctic and thus preserved these magnificent creatures frozen in the ground."

I hoped you liked reading the arguments raised by Boice as much as I did. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comment box.