Mt. St. Helens Filming, Day 4

Sometimes things occur so quickly that you barely have time to register what is happening. I was sitting on my deck, enjoying the Colorado blue sky, sparkling air and the butterscotch smell of the ponderosa pines. I had a turkey sandwich in my right hand and in my left I was reading an email on my red smartphone. Out of nowhere, a hummingbird appeared, hovering in front of my nose. I could feel the wash of air from its wings and hear their familiar buzzing… louder than usual because we were eye to eye. It then darted to my sandwich, hovered for a second, then back to my nose. Pausing only briefly, it then flitted to my red phone, hovered, and then in the blink of an eye, thrust its beak down the earphone hole. Just as quickly, it pulled out and was gone. I sat there with my mouth hanging open. I am sure I will never see anything like that again. It couldn’t have taken much more than five seconds from beginning to end, but it will last forever in my memory. These are times you just have to thank the Lord for the experience. There are no photos, no video, no witnesses… just the humming bird and me brushing up against each other in a moment in time in a creation that defies explanation. I have often thought of the exquisite design of the hummingbird. They are remarkable in their flight capabilities. Not only can they hover, but they can dart up, down, left, right, forward and backwards (the only bird that can do so). They can fly just as easily upside down. They can spot potential food targets and zoom in, pull up, hover, sample, and exit in the blink of an eye. They remember every flower (and phone) they’ve every sampled and they seem to know how long it takes the flower to rejuvenate the nectar they’ve taken. They have a third set of eyelids that act as flying goggles to protect them as they zoom around, sometimes as fast as 65 feet/second, which is about 45 miles per hour. Now you may not think that is not all that fast because you can drive faster than that, but they reach those speeds almost instantly… and they can stop almost instantly, hover, and then zoom off in another direction. They have been clocked at 60 mph while diving, with the same ability to stop on a dime. They beat their wings up to 200 times per second… that’s why they “hum”. They are the tiniest bird in the world and they can flash their colors or hide them at will. Their hearts beat up to 20 times per second and while at rest, they breathe four times per second. Their wings can rotate in a full circle. The Ruby-Throated Hummingbird has been known to travel across the Gulf of Mexico to breed…. 500 miles and 20 hours of flight time. Job 12 counsels us to ask the birds and they will explain it all to us. “Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this, in whose hand is the life of every living thing, and the breathe of mankind?” Job 12:9 The hummingbird’s favorite color is red. Buy yourself a red smartphone and go sit on your deck and learn from the creation. {Read more: Ask the Puffer Fish]

I just got home from filming a segment for the documentary “Is Genesis History?” We were with Dr. Larry Vardiman in northwest Washington State. Snowshoes required. Mt. Baker holds the world’s record for annual snowfall: 1140 inches…nearly 100 feet of snow. That is why we were there. There is a gorgeous glacier on a sister peak, Mt. Shukstan, (my picture above) that was breath-taking. Our purpose was to talk about the Ice Age and the issue of Ice Core dating. There is too much to relate here, but the key thing that we talked about was that you don’t get an Ice Age by merely turning down the temperature. That is a misconception. A cold earth, by itself, would not get you an “Ice” Age. It might get you a “Cold” Age, but it couldn’t produce the amount of snow and glacier ice that is associated with an “Ice Age” as we commonly think of it. Cold air holds less moisture and the colder it gets, the less it holds. The old saying “It’s too cold to snow" is technically true. So how do you get an Ice Age? There are two key prerequisites that have to be present: a very warm ocean and, at the same time, cold continents. This seems to be incompatible. But that is the point. An Ice Age isn’t easy to come by. Normal conditions don’t get you there. An Ice Age isn’t something that just happens every once in a while with the normal, small fluctuations in the earth’s climate. That is why scientists who follow the conventional paradigm confess that the Ice Age is a puzzling phenomenon. This mystery has resulted in many different theories (68 at one count) and multiple Ice Ages (as many as 30 or more). But the reason for the lack of clarity is primarily due to the extremely unique and contradictory factors that must be in place in order to have an Ice Age. A uniformitarian view of earth history isn’t going to get it. You need something strange to happen…very strange and very abnormal. Like a catastrophe. So what could have created very warm oceans and cold continents simultaneously? Dr. Vardiman is a “paleoclimatologist”. That means his specialty is in studying the earth’s climates in the past. He is convinced that we have only had one Ice Age and it occurred immediately after the catastrophic events of the Flood. That catastrophe, recorded for us in the ancient records, provides exactly the kind of unique conditions necessary to bring about an Ice Age…for which, by the way, we have a great deal of evidence all around the world. At the start of the Flood, there were massive eruptions in the oceans, “the great deep”. Some of those released water bound up below and others released hot magma. If you study a map of the ocean floors, you will find the remnant of this in what looks like a huge “baseball seam” that extends around the world. The hot magma, and possibly the high friction caused by the movement of the tectonic plates, heated the oceans to almost 100 degrees. There is sufficient evidence in seabed cores that substantiate ocean temperatures this high. At the same time, the volcanic ash, among other particulates, reflected the sun’s heat and lowered the temperatures on the continents. This created both elements necessary for an Ice Age. The warm oceans, even in the Arctics, then produced huge amounts of evaporations and the colder continents and the atmosphere turned this water vapor into massive amounts of snow. The earth’s climate during this 500-year period was radically different that today. The air currents over the oceans and continents produced a continual series of huge snowstorms that laid down thousands of feet of snow. As the snow depth grew, the weight compacted the snow below, pressed out the air, and created layers and layers of ice. Some of that ice became glaciers (which move) and some became ice sheets (more stagnant)…even as far south as St. Louis, Missouri in North America. This single Ice Age was a transitional epoch that extended from the end of the Flood for hundreds of years until the oceans cooled sufficiently to end the high rate of evaporation. Dr. Kurt Weis, whom we filmed earlier, spoke of this unique period as the “Arpachshad Epoch”, named after Arpachshad, one of Noah’s grandsons. It was a period in which the earth continued to “tremble” for hundreds of years after the deep catastrophe of the Flood. It was marked with massive secondary floods from trapped water, but more importantly, significant and numerous volcanic eruptions. These eruptions would have kept injecting high amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere, blocking the sun and keeping the continents cold while the ocean remained warm enough to continue evaporating large volumes of water into the atmosphere. Climate models, when seeded with the assumptions of the catastrophic Flood, predict a massive amount of ice and snow, sufficient to explain all of the Ice Age evidence that we find around the world. Those models also predict that some portions of the earth would have been devoid of glaciation and some areas would have been actually dry enough toward the end of the Ice Age to create huge dust storms. Dr. Varidam and others believe these dust storms are partially responsible for some of the post-Flood extinctions and also provide an answer for the disappearance of the wooly mammoths and how some have been found strangely preserved, frozen in the permafrost of Siberia and Alaska. I was also fascinated by our discussion of the evidence in the ice cores. The conventional paradigm tells us that the ice cores in Greenland and the Antarctica prove not only multiple ice ages, but also long time periods…in the hundreds of thousands of years. But Dr. Vardiman was adamant that the evidence doesn’t support those conclusions.  In fact, he excitedly told me that the ice in Greenland has preserved everything from the beginning of the Ice Age following the Flood and that an examination of the ice cores show the high volume of volcanic ash at the bottom, just as would be predicted from a Genesis paradigm. I am increasingly amazed at the intelligence and dedication these scientists have. They have faced a tough road in our current scientific world. The conventional paradigm has tons of money that can fund its research. Creation scientists get none of that. Many are hounded or thwarted during their university studies, exceedingly so, as has been documented by various studies, including Bergman’s “Slaughter of the Dissidents”. But these men have remained faithful and are increasingly convinced that the evidence, if looked at without bias, points to the historical narrative that we have been given in Genesis. [For those of you who have asked, we hope the film will release this Fall.] [Previous]