Tropical Findings in Frozen Tundra

Author:
Christopher J. E. Johnson
Published: Sept 5, 2012
[creationliberty.com]

"Today the frozen Antarctic ice sheet borders the Southern Ocean. But tropical palm trees once flourished there."
-Fox News, "Antarctica once covered in palm trees, scientists discover," Aug 2, 2012, retrieved Sept 5, 2012, [http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/08/02/antarctica-once-covered-in-palm-trees-scientists-discover/?intcmp=features]

Though today's news headlines make this out to be a new discovery, it has been known for many years that warm-weathered plants and animals have been discovered in frozen tundra regions. For example, many people know of mammoths being found frozen in tundra regions of the earth, but finds of numerous other animals along with the mammoths is rarely reported by the evolutionary establishment.

"The northern portions of Europe, Asia, and North America contain bones of many other animals along with those of mammoths. A partial listing includes tiger, antelope, camel, horse, reindeer, giant beaver, fox, giant bison, giant ox, musk sheep, musk ox, donkey, badger, ibex, woolly rhinoceros, lynx, leopard, wolverine, Arctic hare, lion, elk, giant wolf, ground squirrel, cave hyena, bear, and many types of birds."
-Dr. Walt Brown, In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, 8th Edition, 2008, p. 232, IBSN 1-878026-09-7; See also Innokentii P. Tolmachoff, The Carcasses of the Mammoth and Rhinoceros Found in the Frozen Ground of Siberia, American Philosophical Society, 1929, p. 71

Most of the time, the more difficult something is to explain by the evolutionary model, the less it gets reported. The average evolutionist believes there are explanations for these frozen plants and animals in their worldview, and evolutionary biologists and geologists give it the old college try:
"An intense warming phase occured 52 million years ago, leading tropical vegetation, including palms and relatives of today's tropical Baobab trees, to grow on the continent's now frozen coasts."
-Fox News, "Antarctica once covered in palm trees, scientists discover," Aug 2, 2012, retrieved Sept 5, 2012, [http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/08/02/antarctica-once-covered-in-palm-trees-scientists-discover/?intcmp=features]

Most Christians, when seeing a statement like this in a news article, just believe it without question. Christians generally believe evolutionists automatically because we tend to worship human education instead of God, so we believe whatever we are told as long as they have their human degrees in science. We should be asking, "How do those evolutionists know a 'warm phase' occured 52 million years ago?" They don't. I know that sound very simplistic, but they have absolutely no idea. The only thing those evolutionists found that lead them to that conclusion was the existance of tropic plants found in an area where tropical plants would not grow according to the uniformitarian model of evolution.

Let's imagine we're an evolutionist for a moment, and we have discovered this frozen palm tree. How do we tell how old it is? Well, we go back to our model to find where we are supposed to put palm trees. Let's look at Britannica Online:
"The earliest fossils of palms are leaves of Sabal magothiensis and stems of Palmoxylon cliffwoodensis from the Late Cretaceous, about 80 million years ago. By the middle of the Maastrichtian, some 69 million years ago, pollen supposedly representative of Nypa fruticans and Acrocomia is present. These records place palms among the earliest recognizable modern families of flowering plants. By the beginning of the Eocene Epoch, nearly 56 million years ago, palms were widespread and abundant."
(See 'palm' under 'evolution', Britannica Encyclopedia, Britannica Online Inc, retrieved Sept 5, 2012, [http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/440038/palm/73007/Evolution]

So how do we date these palm trees if we're an evolutionist? Do we use an archeological technique, or a special dating method? Nope. You just look at the geologic time scale! We don't want to say that they were frozen like this 80 million years ago, because they were just first starting to appear on the earth, so we can't expect them to be everywhere. Also, we don't want them before the dinosaurs went extinct, (remember, we're evolutionists, so we assume dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago and nothing but that explanation is acceptable) because we don't know how dinosaurs went extinct, so we need to stay away from that to avoid contradicting ourselves in the future. So we see how the geologic time scale tells us that palm trees were abundant all around the world at 56 million years ago, so let's put a safe number on it and say 52! (or they find the nearest place they claim another "ice age" happened and throw it in there)

That is EXACTLY how it's done.
I'm not saying that trees did not grow near the poles at one time on this planet, but it certainly was not '52 million years ago' because the Bible only allows for roughly 6,000 year age of the earth. Some people may be convinced the evolutionists have something that dates these finds at 50 million years, but they have nothing except their evolutionary time scale, which is made up by pure imagination. (i.e. they know how old it is by how old they think it is)
(Read "The Carbon Dating Game" here at creationliberty.com for more details)

The kind of assumptions made about frozen palm trees are also made about mammoths. When the average American Christian thinks of a mammoth, they think of something like out of the movie Ice Age.
Why are mammoths associated with cold weather? Because some evolutionists have taken great pains to portray them in the cold, so you would believe it too. Some camels also have long hair, but it is a warm-weather animal, so mammoths having long hair does not prove they were cold-weather at all.

"The mammoth�s hairy coat no more implies an Arctic adaptation than a woolly coat does for a sheep. Mammoths lacked erector muscles that fluff up an animal�s fur and create insulating air pockets. Neuville, who conducted the most detailed study of mammoth skin and hair, wrote: 'It appears to me impossible to find, in the anatomical examination of the skin and pelage [hair], any argument in favor of adaptation to the cold.' Long hair on a mammoth's legs hung to its toes. Had it walked in snow, snow and ice would have caked on its hairy 'ankles.' Each step into and out of snow would have pulled or worn away the 'ankle' hair. All hoofed animals living in the Arctic, including the musk ox, have fur, not hair, on their legs. Fur, especially oily fur, holds a thick layer of stagnant air (an excellent insulator) between the snow and skin. With the mammoth�s greaseless hair, much more snow would touch the skin, melt, and increase the heat transfer 10- to 100-fold. Later refreezing would seriously harm the animal."
-Dr. Walt Brown, In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, 8th Edition, 2008, p. 232, IBSN 1-878026-09-7

Real scientific investigation suggests that mammoths did not live in cold weather at all, so why would so many people assume they did? That's what evolutionists have told us is true, and we believed it. It's really that simple. If evolution is true, as evolutionists claim it to be, then why do they grasp so tightly to the uniformitarian concept, and not allow that things in the past might be different than we see them today?

In the example of palm trees found in Antarctica, why do evolutionists not allow for the possibility that these palm trees may have been a unique evolutionary adaptation to living in cold climates? Why do they push so hard to convince everyone that evolution can happen quickly, turning a monkey into a man in only 3 million years, but turn around and try to convince everyone that evolution happens so slowly that palm trees won't change in 50 million years? Sounds incredibly arbitrary. It doesn't take much inquiry to realize that the evolutionists finding these frozen preserved plants and animals are simply proposing their ideas from 100% speculation based on what's convenient for their precious theory, the corresponding newspapers are publishing those speculations as if they are facts, and Christians fall for it because we worship human education over God.

As a Biblical Christian, I have theories as to why these palm trees are frozen in the Antarctic, but sharing that with an evolutionist will not help him see the error in his assumptions. The evolutionist has rejected the God of the Bible and decided how he wants to view the world and all the evidence therein, and that is not part of scientific inquiry, but simply religious fanaticism presupposed before looking at evidence.
(Read "Evolution: A New-Age Religion" here at creationliberty.com for more details)