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Hope of Israel Ministries (Ecclesia of YEHOVAH):

Earth Rings and FrozenMammoths!

In II Peter 3:6, 7, 13, the apostle Peter talked aboutthree worlds. The first is described in Genesis. We areliving in the second world and it is to be followed by athird world -- described by Peter as, "a new heavensand a new earth." This article on the mammoths showsthe effect of the first world transitioning to the present,and gives us a glimpse of what that first world was allabout.

By John D. KeyserMost us have heard of the frozen mammoths whose perfectly preserved remainshave been discovered in the Arctic regions. We have seen pictures of these furrygiant elephants huddled together in the raging blizzard of a snowy plain, foragingthrough the snow to try to find sustenance. We have been told that they evolvedtheir furry coats to help them survive the great Ice Age, and that from time to timeone of them fell into a snow filled crevasse, or an icy river, where they becamefrozen and preserved in the state we find them today.

Well, those are the MYTHS, now for the FACTS:

(1) The mammoths lived in a sub-tropical climate:

There is abundant evidence that the earth once enjoyed a uniformly warm climate.Coal seams in the polar regions show that lush forests once grew where now thereis only snow and ice. A fallen 90-foot fruit tree, with ripe fruit and green leaves stillon its branches, has been found in the frozen ground of the New Siberian Islands,where only 1-inch high willows grow now. Palm tree fossils have been found inAlaska. Grasses, bluebells, butter-cups and wild beans as fresh as the day they

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were eaten, have been found in the mouths and stomachs of the frozenmammoths.

The most famous, accessible, and perhaps studied mammoth is a fifty-year-oldmale, found in a freshly eroded bank, 100 feet above Siberia's Berezovka River in1900. A year later an expedition, led by Dr. Otto F. Herz, painstakingly excavatedthe frozen body and transported it to the Zoological Museum in St. Petersburg,Russia.

Much of the head, which was sticking out of the bank, had been eaten down to thebone by local wolves and other animals, but most of the rest was perfect. Mostimportant, however, was that the lips, the lining of the mouth and the tongue werepreserved. Upon the last, as well as between the teeth, were portions of theanimal's last meal, which for some almost incomprehensible reason it had not hadtime to swallow. The meal proved to have been composed of delicate sedges andgrasses.

Another account states that the mammoth's "mouth was filled with grass, which hadbeen cropped, but not chewed and swallowed" (A. S. W., Nature, Vol. 68, July 30,1903, p. 297). The grass froze so rapidly that it still had "the imprint of the animal'smolars" (Lister & Bahn, Mammoths: Giants of the Ice Age , p. 74). Hapgood'stranslation of a Russian report mentions eight well-preserved bean pods and fivebeans found in its mouth (Charles H. Hapgood, The Path of the Pole, 1970, p.267).

Twenty-four pounds of undigested vegetation were removed from the Berezovkamammoth and analyzed by the Russian scientist, V. N. Sukachev. He identifiedmore than forty different species of plants: herbs, grasses, mosses, shrubs, andtree leaves. Many no longer grow that far north; others grow both in Siberia andMexico. Dillow draws several conclusions from these remains:

o The presence of so many varieties [of plants] that generally grow much to thesouth indicates that the climate of the region was milder than that of today.

o The discovery of the ripe fruits of sedges, grasses, and other plantssuggests that the mammoth died during the second half of July or thebeginning of August (Joseph C. Dillow, The Waters Above: Earth's Pre-Flood Canopy, 1981, pp. 371-377).


Abundant food requires a temperate climate -- much warmer than northern Siberiatoday. Only a small percentage of the food found in Berezovka's mouth andstomach grows near the Arctic Circle today. Furthermore, the flower fragments in itsstomach show that it died during warm weather. Despite the popular misconception,the mammoth was a temperate, not an Arctic, animal.

The artists -- who showed the mammoths living in snowy, Arctic regions -- wereinfluenced by earlier opinions based on the mammoth's hairy coat, thick skin, and a3.5 inch layer of fat under the skin. However, animals with these characteristics donot necessarily live in cold climates. Let's examine these characteristics moreclosely:

The mammoth's hairy coat no more implies an Arctic adaptation than a woollycoat does for a sheep. The mammoth lacked erector muscles that fluff-up ananimal's fur and creates insulating air pockets. Neuville, who conducted themost detailed study of the skin and hair of the mammoth, wrote: "It appears tome impossible to find, in the anatomical examination of the skin and [hair], anyargument in favor of adaptation to the cold" (H. Neuville, "On the Extinction ofthe Mammoth," Annual Report Smithsonian Institute, 1919, p. 332). Thelong hair on a mammoth's legs hung to its toes. Had it walked in snow, snowand ice would have caked on its hairy "ankles." Each step into and out of snowwould have pulled or worn away the "ankle" hair. All hoofed animals living in theArctic, including the musk ox, have fur, not hair, on their legs. Fur, especiallyoily fur, holds a thick layer of stagnant air (an excellent insulator) between thesnow and skin. With the mammoth's greaseless hair, much more snow wouldtouch the skin, melt, and increase the heat transfer 10-100 fold. Laterrefreezing would seriously harm the animal.

The skin of the mammoth and elephant are very similar in thickness andstructure. Both lack oil glands, making them vulnerable to cold, damp climates.Today, it appears that all Arctic mammals have both oil glands and erectormuscles -- equipment absent in the mammoths.

The amount of fat under the skin says little about an animal's habitat. Someanimals living in temperate zones, such as the rhinoceros, have thick layers offat, while many Arctic animals, such as reindeer and caribou, have little fat.Thick layers of fat under the skin simply show that food was plentiful. Abundantfood also suggests a temperate climate.

The elephant -- a close approximation to the mammoth -- is a tropical, not an Arcticanimal. It requires "a climate that ranges from warm to very hot," and "it gets astomachache if the temperature drops close to freezing" (Ralph S. Palmer,"Elephant," The World Book Encyclopedia, Vol. 6, pp. 178, 178d). Newbornelephants are susceptible to pneumonia and must be kept warm and dry at alltimes. Hannibal, who crossed the Alps with 37 elephants, lost all but one due tocold weather.

A typical wild elephant requires about 330 pounds of food per day and spendsabout 16 hours a day eating. Therefore, vast quantities of food would have been


required to support the estimated 5,000,000 mammoths that lived in just a smallportion of northern Siberia. The Adams mammoth (a male), discovered in 1799,"was so fat...that its belly hung below its knees."

The average January temperature in northeastern Siberia is about -28 degrees F(60 degrees F below the freezing point)! During the ice age, it was colder. Thelong, slender trunk of the mammoth was particularly vulnerable to cold weather. Asix-foot-long nose could not survive even one cold night, let alone an eight-month-long Siberian winter. For the more slender trunk of a young mammoth, the heat losswould be even more harmful. Elephants usually die if their trunk is seriously injured.

If the mammoth lived in an Arctic climate, its drinking water in the winter must havecome from eating snow or ice. A wild elephant requires 30-60 gallons of water eachday. The heat needed to melt snow or ice and warm it to body temperature wouldconsume about half a typical elephant's calories. Unlike other Arctic animals, thetrunk would bear much of this thermal stress. Nursing elephants require about 25%more water.

How would a mammoth that lives in an Arctic climate satisfy its considerable saltappetite? Elephants dig for salt using their sharp tusks. In the rock-hard permafrostthis would be almost impossible, summer or winter, especially with the curved tusksof the mammoth.

The easiest and most accurate way to determine an extinct animal or plant'senvironment is to identify familiar animals and plants buried nearby. For themammoth this includes rhinoceroses, tigers, bison, horses, antelope, a 90-foot-tallfruit tree, and temperate species of grasses. All live in warm climates. Some frozenremains are of burrowing animals, such as voles, who would not burrow in rock-hardpermafrost. Even larvae of the warble fly have been found in a frozen mammoth'sintestine -- larvae identical to those in tropical elephants today. No one argues thatthe animals and plants buried near the mammoths were adapted to the Arctic. Whythen do so for the mammoths?

Clearly, the first world was one of a sub-tropical climate with lush foliage andabundant food for all.

(2) An estimated FIVE MILLION mammoths lie entombed in Arctic soils:

The soil of Siberia is so full of mammoth bones that ivory mines were working formany years, and at least 20,000 tusks were taken from one mine alone. Besidesmammoths, the Arctic soils contain the remains of over 60 animal species,including the woolly rhinoceros. camels, horses, tigers, and antelopes. Many ofthem lie in frozen silt, mixed together with boulders and tree roots.

If we look for the bones and ivory of the mammoth, not just preserved flesh, thenumber of discoveries becomes enormous, especially in Siberia and Alaska.Nikolai Vereshchagin, the Chairman of the Russian Academy of Science'sCommittee for the Study of Mammoths, estimated that more than half a million tonsof mammoth tusks were buried along a 600-mile stretch of the Arctic coast alone(John Massey Stewart, "Frozen mammoths from Siberia Bring Ice Ages to VividLife," Smithsonian, 1977, p. 68). Since the typical tusk weighs 100 pounds, thisimplies that more than five million mammoths lived in this small region. Even if this


estimate is high and represents thousands of years of accumulated remains, wecan see that large herds of mammoths must have thrived along the Arctic coast.Many more existed elsewhere. Mammoth bones and ivory are also foundthroughout Europe, North and Central Asia, in North America, and as far south asMexico City.

This area of the Arctic coast may well contain the highest density of mammothremains, since the rich New Siberian Islands lie offshore. The coastal zone of theLaptev Sea, which includes the western area of Vereshchagin’s estimate, isregarded as one of the largest mammoth cemeteries in the world.

Dense concentrations of mammoth bones, tusks, and teeth are also found onremote Arctic islands. Obviously, today's water barriers were not always there.Many have described these mammoth remains as the main substance of theislands. Even if these reports are exaggerated, what could account for anyconcentration and preservation of bones and ivory on barren islands well inside theArctic Circle? More than 200 mammoth molars were dredged up with oysters fromthe Dogger Bank in the North Sea.

Peppered Mammoth Tusk. Scientists are finding, over wide geographical areas, mammoth tusksembedded on one side with millimeter-size particles rich in iron and nickel. The British BroadcastingCorporation stated, “Startling evidence has been found which shows mammoth and other great beastsfrom the last ice age were blasted with material that came from space.”

The number of woolly mammoths is more concentrated in northern Siberia.Mammoth remains are amazingly abundant on the Lyakhov Islands and on the otherNew Siberian Islands, 140 miles (230 km) north of the mainland. While the early


report of one of the New Siberian Islands being totally composed of bones is anexaggeration, the many bones found on these islands indicate that Siberia and theadjacent continental shelves with their islands was once a vast plain dotted withwoolly mammoths and other animals. Vereshchagin and Kuz’mina state:

"The shelf of the Laptev and East Siberian Seas [along the Arctic continentalshelf] in some places…is covered with bones of horse, reindeer, bison, muskox, and mammoth washed up by tidal waters. Occasionally, bones of wolf,brown bear, cave lion, and (rarely) woolly rhinoceros, moose, and saigaantelope are also found."

One can see that a wide diversity of animals accompanied the woolly mammoth inSiberia, as well as elsewhere across the Northern Hemisphere. This Ice Ageenvironment has been called the mammoth steppe, which is a vast grassland.

Based on many reports, it appears that estimates of millions of woolly mammoths inthe Siberian permafrost are correct. Lister and Bahn note that some scientists putthe number at ten million mammoths in the Siberian deep freeze (Mammoths:Giants of the Ice Age). This makes the question of how they could have possiblyfound enough food and water in such a cold area even more enigmatic.

Woolly mammoth fossils are not only commonly found in Siberia, but they are alsofound in unconsolidated sediments all across the mid- and high latitudes of theNorthern Hemisphere. Sometimes their remains are dredged up from thecontinental shelves in some locations. Although associated with the Ice Age, theyare rarely found in previously glaciated areas. They are mostly found in non-glaciated areas of Siberia. They spread from Siberia into the non-glaciated portionsof Alaska and the Yukon by way of the Bering Land Bridge. This land bridge wasdry or mostly dry during the Ice Age. From the Yukon, the mammoths migratedthrough western Alberta by way of the ice-free corridor and spread souththroughout the northern United States. The Columbian mammoth is usually foundfarther south -- in the southern United States, Mexico, and Central America. Thenumber of woolly mammoth individuals fossilized worldwide probably exceeds 15million.

(3) The mammoths (and other animals) were struck suddenly by an icycatastrophe:

An article in an old copy of The Readers' Digest Book of Strange Stories andAmazing Facts, reported that frozen-food experts had been asked their opinionon the frozen mammoths. Their verdict? "To deep freeze a huge living mammoth,insulated in thick fur...stupendously cold temperatures of below -101 degrees C. (-150 degrees F.) would be required. Such temperatures have never been recorded-- not even in the Arctic." The article goes on: "Apparently, at one moment themammoth was munching away peacefully at the grass and butter-cups growing lushin the sunshine of a temperate plain. The next it was subjected to cold so bitter thatit was deep frozen where it stood" (ibid.) Many of the frozen mammoths have beenfound in a standing position, surrounded by frozen silt. Their body tissues andstomach contents had not even begun to decompose.

Before examining other facts, we can see three curious problems. First, northern


Siberia today is cold, dry, and desolate. How could thousands, if not millions, ofmammoths and many other animals feed themselves? Apparently theirsurroundings were more temperate and moist. If so, why did the climate change?

Second, the well-preserved mammoths and rhinoceroses must have beencompletely frozen soon after death or their soft, internal parts would have quicklydecomposed. Guthrie has observed that "an unopened animal continues todecompose after a fresh kill, even at very cold temperatures, because the thermalinertia of its body is sufficient to sustain microbial and enzyme activity as long asthe carcass is completely covered with an insulating pelt and the torso remainsintact" (R. Dale Guthrie, Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe, 1990, p. 84).Since mammoths had such large reservoirs of heat, the freezing temperaturesmust have been extremely low.

Finally, their bodies were buried and protected from predators, including birds andinsects. But burial could not have occurred if the ground were frozen as it is today.Again, this implies a major climate change, but now we can see that it must havechanged suddenly. How were these huge animals quickly frozen and buried --almost exclusively in muck, a dark soil containing decomposed animal andvegetable matter?

Muck is a major geological mystery. It covers one-seventh of the earth's landsurface -- all surrounding the Arctic Ocean. Muck occupies treeless, generally flatterrain, with no surrounding mountains from which the muck could have eroded.Russian geologists have in some places drilled through 4,000 feet of muck withouthitting solid rock. Where did so much eroded material come from?

Oil prospectors, drilling through Alaskan muck, have "brought up an 18-inch longchunk of tree trunk from almost 1,000 feet below the surface. It wasn't petrified --just frozen" (Anonymous, "Much About Muck," Pursuit, Vol. 2, pp. 68-69). Thenearest forests are hundreds of miles away. Elsewhere, Williams describes similardiscoveries in Alaska:

"Though the ground is frozen for 1,900 feet down from the surface at PrudhoeBay, everywhere the oil companies drilled around this area they discovered anancient tropical forest. It was in frozen state, not in petrified state. It is between1,100 and 1,700 feet down. There are palm trees, pine trees, and tropicalfoliage in great profusion. In fact, they found them lapped all over each other,just as though they had fallen in that position" (Lindsey Williams, The EnergyNon-Crisis, 2nd. Edition, 1980, p. 54).

How were trees buried under a thousand feet of hard, frozen ground? We arefaced with the same series of questions that we first saw with the frozenmammoths. Again, we are driven to the conclusion that there was a sudden anddramatic change in climate accompanied by rapid burial in muck, now frozen solid.


Fossil Forest, Kolyma River. Here, driftwood is at the mouth of the Kolyma River, on the northern coastof Siberia. Today, no trees of this size grow along the Kolyma. Leaves, and even fruit (plums), havebeen found on such floating trees. One would not expect to see leaves and fruit if these trees had beencarried far by rivers. Why didn’t these trees decay?

Widespread freezing and rapid burial are also inferred when commercial gradeivory is found. Ivory tusks, unless frozen and protected from the weather, dry out,lose their animal matter and elasticity, crumble, crack, and become useless forcarving. The trade in mammoth ivory has prospered since at least 1611 over a widegeographical region, from which an estimated 96,000 mammoth tusks have beenexported. Therefore, the extent of the freezing and burial is wider than most peoplehave imagined.

In May 1846, a surveyor named Benkendorf and his party were camped in Siberiaon the Indigirka River. The spring thaw and the unusually heavy rains caused theswollen river to erode a new channel. Benkendorf noticed a large object bobbingslowly in the water. As the "black, horrible, giant-like mass was thrust out of thewater [they] beheld a colossal elephant's head, armed with mighty tusks, with itslong trunk moving in an unearthly manner, as though seeking something losttherein." They tried to pull the mammoth to shore with ropes and chains but soonrealized that its hind legs were anchored, actually frozen, in the river bottom in astanding position.


Twenty-four hours later, the river thawed and eroded the river bottom, freeing themammoth. The team of fifty men and their horses pulled the mammoth onto dryland, twelve feet from the shore. The 13-foot tall, 15-foot long beast was fat andperfectly preserved. Its "widely opened eyes gave the animal an appearance of life,as though it might move in a moment and destroy [them] with a roar" (William T.Hornaday, Tales from Nature's Wonderlands, 1926. Translated from theRussian report). They removed the tusks and opened its full stomach containing"young shoots of the fir and pine; and a quantity of young fir cones, also in achewed state..." (ibid.) Hours later and without warning, the river bank collapsed,because the river had slowly undercut the bank. The mammoth was carried offtoward the Arctic Ocean, never to be seen again.

The mammoths must have been overwhelmed suddenly with a rapid deep freezeand instant death. The sudden death is proved by the unchewed bean pods stillcontaining the beans that were found between the teeth of the Berezovkamammoth, and the deep freeze is suggested by the well-preserved state of thestomach contents and the presence of edible meat [for wolves and dogs].

At normal body temperatures, the stomach acids and enzymes break downvegetable material within an hour. What inhibited this process? The only plausibleexplanation is for the stomach to cool to about 40 degrees F in ten hours or less.But since the stomach is protected inside a warm (96.6 degrees F for elephants)body, how cold must the outside air become to drop the stomach's temperature to40 degrees F? Experiments have shown that the outer layers of skin would havehad to drop suddenly to at least -175 degrees F!

Independently, Sanderson concluded, "The flesh of many of the animals found inthe muck must have been very rapidly and deeply frozen, for its cells [had] notburst...

"Frozen-food experts have pointed out that to do this, starting with a healthy,live specimen, you must drop the temperature of the air surrounding it down to


a point well below minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit" (Ivan T. Sanderson, "Riddleof the Frozen Giants," Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 16, 1960, pp. 82-83).

(4) The mammoths covered a wide geographical area:

We should also notice the broad geographical extent over which these strangeevents occurred. They were probably not separate, unrelated events. As Sir HenryHoworth stated:

"The instances of the soft parts of the great pachyderms being preserved arenot mere local and sporadic ones, but they form a long chain of examplesalong the whole length of Siberia, from the Urals to the land of the Chukchis[the Bering Strait], so that we have to do here with a condition of things whichprevails, and with meteorological conditions that extend over a continent.

"When we find such a series ranging so widely preserved in the same perfectway, and all evidencing a sudden change of climate from a comparativelytemperate one to one of great rigor, we cannot help concluding that they allbear witness to a common event. We cannot postulate a separate climatecataclysm for each individual case and each individual locality, but we areforced to the conclusion that the now permanently frozen zone in Asia becamefrozen at the same time from the same cause" (Henry H. Howorth, TheMammoth and the Flood, 1887, p. 96).

Actually, northern portions of Asia, Europe, and North America contain "the remainof extinct species of the elephant [mammoth] and rhinoceros, together with those ofhorses, oxen, deer, and other large quadrupeds" (A. G. Maddren, "SmithsonianExploration in Alaska in Search of Mammoth and Other Fossil Remains,"Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections , Vol. 49, 1905, p. 87). So the eventmay have been even more widespread than Howorth believed.

Evolutionists, whose beliefs are based on gradualism (uniformitarianism), have nosatisfactory explanation for the mystery of the frozen mammoths. To quote again


from The Readers' Digest Book of Strange Stories and Amazing Facts: "Onlya sudden cataclysm of hitherto on proportions could have been responsible." Thegreatest cataclysm of all time was, of course, the Biblical flood. This certainlyexplains how the mammoths were buried in silt, together with other animals, treeroots and boulders. But, what about the sudden freezing?

(5) The Collapse of the last Earth ring:

Since the times of Isaac Newton, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Pierre Simon Laplace,Carl Friedrich Gauss and other great mathematicians of the Renaissance Era, therehas been an inherent belief in the scientific community that the Earth is capable ofretaining a stable ring system in orbit around it for millions of years.

In an article published by ex-NASA astronomer Dr. John A. O'Keefe in Naturemagazine back in 1980, he hypothesized that the Earth once had a Saturn-like ringthat could explain many of the events during past Earth ages. (Dr. O'Keefe is notedfor discovering the Earth's slight pear-shape in the 1950s).

A Danish astronomer stated in Science Frontiers (Issue #76, Jul-Aug. 1991) that"in the past, the Earth had a ring system just like Saturn, Uranus and Neptune." Hewent so far as to say that our planet boasted rings on 16 separate occasions in thepast.

As recently as September 2002, Sandia National Laboratories published an articleby two University of New Mexico researchers who again reinforced the notion ofpast Earth rings. In that study, the authors supposed the existence of a thin systemof rings -- perhaps of similar opacity to Saturn's B-ring -- may have caused pastclimatic changes on the Earth.

However, a pioneer in the concept of Earth-rings was Isaac N. Vail. In response toan article appearing in the Scientific American Mr. Vail wrote the following --

"To the Editor of the Scientific American:

"I have read with great interest in your issue of April 12 the note on the recentdiscovery of the body of a mammoth, in cold storage, by Dr. Herz, in theicebound region of Eastern Siberia. This, it seems to me, is more than a"Rosetta Stone" in the path of the geologist. It offers the strongest testimony insupport of the claim that all the glacial epochs and all the deluges the earthever saw, were caused by the progressive and successive decline of primitiveearth vapors, lingering about our planet as the cloud vapors of the planetsJupiter and Saturn linger about those bodies today.

"Allow me to suggest to my brother geologists that remnants of the terrestrialwatery vapors may have revolved about the earth as a Jupiter-like canopy, evendown to very recent geologic times. Such vapors must fall chiefly in polarlands, through the channel of least resistance and greatest attraction, andcertainly as vast avalanches of tellurio-cosmic snows. Then, too, such acanopy, or world-roof, must have tempered the climate up to the poles, andthus afforded pasturage to the mammoth and his congeners of the Arctic world-- making a greenhouse earth under a greenhouse roof. If this be admitted, wecan place no limits to the magnitude and efficiency of canopy avalanches to


desolate a world of exuberant life.

"It seems that Dr. Herz's mammoth, like many others found buried in glacierice, with their food undigested in their stomachs, proves that it was suddenlyovertaken with a crushing fall of snow. In this case, with grass in its mouthunmasticated, it tells an unerring tale of death in a snowy grave. If this beconceded, we have what may have been an all-competent source of glacialsnows, and we may gladly escape the unphilosophic alternative that the earthgrew cold in order to get its casement of snow, while, as I see it, it got itssnows and grew cold.

"The above represents the earth stripped of its annular appendage and with itslast lingering canopy suspended over the regions of both poles as vast clouds.Over the tropics and much of the temperate zones the vapors had become sothin that the clear sky could be seen at times in certain places. The sun shoneinto this thin vapor sky and made it a most brilliant illuminator. The sun itself wasdimly seen in this effulgent heaven as a conquering hero waging victoriouscontest with vapor foes.

"During the igneous age the oceans went to the skies, along with ameasureless fund of mineral and metallic sublimations; and if we concedethese vapors formed into an annular system, and returned during the ages ingrand installments, some of them lingering even down to the age of man, wemay explain many things that are dark and perplexing today.

"As far back as 1874 I published some of these thoughts in pamphlet form,and it is with the hope that the thinkers of this twentieth century will look afterthem that I again call up the 'Canopy Theory'."

ISAAC N. VAIL.

Professor Vail further comments in Waters Above the Firmament --


"Taking a geologic view of the physical conditions of the earth immediatelyprior to the great revolution that swept the mastodon and a world of other hugepachyderms from existence, we are amazed at its apparent completeness. Itwould seem that if man were to be the resident of a perfect clime and to liveand enjoy the immunities guaranteed by a greenhouse world, he might wellhave begun his career at that time. The great primitive elephant, almost a thirdlarger than that of this age, luxuriated in regions now apparently the eternalhome of the glacier. Tropical vegetation flourished under the very Arcticcircle...the Canopy is a competent cause of such tropical conditions just as wenow see one enveloping the planet Jupiter. Just such a Canopy must haveembraced the Earth again and again before our oceans reached their home onits surface" (Stonehenge Viewpoint, Santa Barbara, CA 1988, p. 101).

These were the conditions that were extant from the time of Adam to that of Noahwhen catastrophe struck:

"But what closed this universal tropic scene? We see a great elephant frozenup in the Arctic snows. We find him embedded in great masses of solid glacierice. We find his bones scattered profusely all over the north polar world, hiscarcass many times buried entire in the frozen soil. Some all-involving andsweeping catastrophe has fallen upon this once luxuriant land. I say luxuriant forthese animals were struck down and buried on the spot where they roamed andfed. They have been found with the food in their stomachs undigested. Theyare found without the least show of transportation after death. The climate thenwas warm enough to support vegetation for their existence. Besides, all overthe polar world where the feet of the explorer have trod are abundant proofs ofa former vegetation now overwhelmed. Here and there is seen the wreck offorests. Trees swept by mighty floods into the Arctic Ocean and piled up intovast hills and frozen in mud and sand, speak of deluge and death. Sometimes,as on the northern parts of Alaska, submerged forests tell the tale" (ibid., p.101).

Professor Vail goes on to explain the CAUSE of this tremendous change in the firstworld climate --

"Let us surmise the cause of this stupendous change. I have intimated thatCanopy vapors that fell in the polar regions must necessarily fall as snow. Ineed not dwell long on this circumstance for it would seem to be an evidentnecessity. Attenuated vapors high in the terrestrial heavens, though in the fullglare of the sun must have been congealed even though they enwrapped aworld of bloom. But when these fell in regions where the sun could have butlittle direct influence, as in the polar lands, snows must have accumulatedbeyond measure....The cause of a tropical climate must be the cause of itsdestruction. If a Canopy makes a greenhouse clime, that clime disappears onlyas the Canopy disappears. If Canopy vapors protected the huge quadrupedsof pre-glacial times, the fall of Canopy vapors crushed them out ofexistence" (ibid.).

Continuing, Vail notes that

"the very condition in which these animals in the north polar world are found


proves that they were destroyed by the accumulation of snows. That is, the pre-glacial animals were destroyed by the fall of the Canopy and the consequentaccumulation of snows and the terrific impact of winter. In some instances themammoth and Arctic rhinoceros have been found in the very snows of theCanopy times packed around them. Frozen in glacier ice that once fell as snow,they have remained in that condition since the very day of their death, since thevery hour the snows broke in upon them, while on their forage ground.Immediately frozen up they have remained in their icy matrix till the day of theirdiscovery. Their flesh is untainted after hundreds of centuries, and the verypupil of the eye is preserved. Some have particles of food lodged in their teeth.All these facts show that the snows that fell and entombed them have remainedaround them to this day. More than this: These facts show with a positivedemonstration that the snows that entombed them fell with a down rush andsuddenness; that Canopy snows ONLY could do" (Ibid.).

In the year 1874 Isaac N. Vail first published a pamphlet entitled The Earth'sAnnular System. Annular means having the form of rings, or ring-shaped, and hasreference to successive rings or canopies of aqueous vapor which surrounded theearth and which fell upon the earth at different periods. A brief summary of theannular theory, as hypothesized by Mr. Vail, is given here:

1). The primitive earth was once a molten mass rapidly rotating through space.

2). The intense heat from the molten earth expelled all vapors, whether aqueous ormetallic, and these were carried into the skies.

3). Both heat and centrifugal energy caused these vapors to accumulate in theskies, particularly in the equatorial region.

4). These red hot vapors contained all the fusible and vaporizable minerals knownto the earth.

5). As the earth cooled, the heaviest of these vapors formed into rings nearest theearth and the lighter substances formed numerous other rings according to theirweight and density.

6). These rings or belts were separate and well defined.

7). The rotation of these near the polar belts was slower than at the equator.

8). As these rings, formed of aqueous vapors and heavily laden with carbon, cooleddown they rotated near the earth until they fell, the nearest and heaviest one fallingfirst and leaving those more distant and lighter to move on in their respective orbitsabout the earth.

9). Each one of these rings, in due course, cooled and fell to earth.

Professor Vail then reasons that while all of these rings contained quantities ofcarbon, and other mineral substances expelled from the earth by the great heat, thelast one of these rings was composed chiefly of water; that the light penetrating thering or rings around the earth in due time caused this canopy, which enveloped theearth, to produce a hothouse condition -- thus making plants and animal life flourishat the poles equally with any other part of the earth; that these rings encircling the


earth rotated more rapidly than the earth rotates upon its axis, but in time the coolingprocess would cause them to fall to the earth; and that the falling of the last one ofthese aqueous canopies occurred after man was created, and produced the greatflood of Noah's time. The following is a quotation from Mr. Vail's The Earth'sAnnular System:

"All terrestrial waters were held in suspension during that age of inveterate heat,far removed from the surface of the boiling, flaming and smoking mass of theearth.

"This suspended ocean of vapors rotated as a part and parcel of the earth, aprimeval atmosphere of great complexity of materials, in the same time that theearth then rotated, just as our present atmosphere now does.

"This suspended matter in the course of time gathered in the earth's equatorialheavens, and upon condensing necessarily contracted and segregated intorings, which revolved independently about the earth, thus causing a great lapseof time between the descent of the first, or primitive, ocean of water nearest theearth, and those waters most remote in the annular system.

"This illustration [to the left] shows a full-face view of the earth and its annularsystem. Here A is the earth, B the earth's atmosphere, C the heavy carbonsand their accompanying mineral sublimations, D the lighter carbons and hydro-carbons, E glacial snows and their accompaniments, F outer vapors, principallyaqueous and likely in a frozen state. From this outermost ring came the polarsnows that chilled the Eden earth, and afterwards caused the deluge.

"The waters remaining on high, after the interior waters or first ocean fell to theearth, fell in a succession of stupendous cataclysms, separated by unknownperiods of time. The first ocean was necessarily impregnated with mineral andmetallic salts, or filled with mineral and metallic particles, to a far greater extentthan any other section or division of waters or exterior vapors, for the simplereason that in the system the heaviest vapors would settle lowest or nearest theearth as it cooled down.

"All such changes required a great length of time, and a progressive motion ofdeclining matter from the equator, polar-wise; also the bands and belts of the


earth's annular system necessarily presented the same general aspect thatJupiter's and Saturn's do today.

"A succession of concentric rings necessarily requires a vast lapse of timebetween the declension of one ring of vapors into the outskirts of theatmosphere, and the fall of the next succeeding one; so that each fall, or eachring, after it reached the attenuated atmosphere continued to revolve as a beltabout the earth with an ever-decreasing velocity as it spread toward the polesand over-canopied the earth.

"The smoke or unconsumed carbon that arose from the burning worldcommingled with the upper vapors, darkened them, and formed inevitably darkbands or belts among bright vaporous ones, as we now see on some otherplanets.

"After a ring of vapors had fallen into the air, it is likely that it may have over-canopied the globe and finally descended to the earth, leaving the atmosphereclear, before another ring reached the atmosphere in its persistent decline.

"The apparent retardation of the moon is but a gradual recession of oursatellite, caused by diminished attraction as the annular system declined; andthe necessary check put upon the revolving rings necessarily caused them tosink and finally fall to the earth, if no other cause of their fall existed; and further,this retardation proves the former existence of an annular system about theearth.

"The Achaean metalliferous deposits are so located as to be inexplicable bythe old theory of aqueous denudation, but beautifully in accord with the new.

"The Silurian beds, and particularly the order of their occurrence in the earth,utterly refute the idea that they were derived from pre-existing beds. Hence it isevident that during the Silurian age there was an annular system about theearth. In other words, it is evident that all the primeval waters did not fall beforethe dawn of life on the globe" (The Earth's Annular System, pages 72-74).

A very forceful argument is advanced by Mr. Vail to the effect that all planets areformed by universal or inexorable law; and since we now can see the ringssurrounding Saturn, and can also see Uranus forming toward the uncompletedannular system, we must conclude that the earth also was developed by theprogressive and successive collapse of aqueous canopies.

The birth, growth and development of worlds are regulated by inexorable laws ofYEHOVAH God; and if one planet was ever surrounded by rings, a sister planetunder the same circumstances, ruled by the same dynamic and static conditions offorce, in process of development, must also be attended by rings during somestage of its career. Not that we should ignore the fact that circumstances must varythe resulting phenomena of ruling forces, but the great principles of planetarygrowth must be THE SAME on all planets.

It should be noted that while the vapors were being driven upward from the moltenEarth, they would all tend to congregate over the equator -- or in that part of theatmosphere where the greatest force would drive them. As high as the atmosphere


would be -- as driven by the force of heat expulsion -- the region of the equatorwould extend even higher because of the centrifugal force acting on the mass. Withsuch a mass containing this energy of rapid rotation, very little of the Earth's originalemissions would be left over the polar regions. As a result, in the formative periodof the Earth's rings there was a general tendency for all of the vapors to pass fromthe polar regions toward the equator.

Now, when the Earth cooled down and the vapors began to return to the surface ofthe Earth, this motion was reversed . The remaining vapor would begin to returnfirst at the poles. With the absence of centrifugal force there, all falling matterwould plummet toward the polar regions at a tremendous velocity -- following thepath of least resistance.

The regions of the Arctic and Antarctic circles would be those of the greatestannular downfalls, and from these regions the wreck of rings radiated over theEarth. With the collapse of the last ring canopy at these regions, the moderatetemperatures of the pre-flood world at the poles plummeted in an instant --enveloping anything that lived in a coffin of ice.

The speed of the freezing is vividly demonstrated by two reports that relate to thefrozen mammoth problem. Each report was accepted as credible and published byan eminent scientific authority. Each involved the sudden freezing of a river inapparent defiance of the way bodies of water freeze. Each contained frozenanimals in transparent ice, yet natural ice is rarely transparent. Each discovery wasin a cold, remote part of the world. One was in the heart of Siberia’s frozenmammoth country.

The brief reports will be given exactly as they were written and translated. The firstwas published by the former Soviet Academy of Sciences. Alexander Solzhenitsyn,winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, recalled this report (as best hecould remember it) in the first paragraph of his preface to The GulagArchipelago. Unfortunately, Solzhenitsyn did not give the report’s date, so asearch had to be made for it. The report was finally found in Moscow’s Lenin StateLibrary.

Y. N. Popov, author of this report, was discussing the scientific importance offinding mammals frozen in Siberia. He then described some frozen fish:


Fish Frozen in Underground Ice

"There are some cases of finds of not only dead mammals, but also fishes,unfortunately lost for science. In 1942, during road construction in theLiglikhtakha River valley (the Kolyma Basin) an explosion opened asubterranean lens of transparent ice encasing frozen specimens of some bigfishes. Apparently the explosion opened an ancient river channel withrepresentatives of the ancient ichthyological fauna [fish]. The superintendent ofconstruction reported the fishes to be of amazing freshness, and the chunks ofmeat thrown out by the explosion were eaten by those present" (Y. N. Popov,“New Finds of Pleistocene Animals in Northern USSR,” Nature, No. 3, 1948,p. 76).

The second report comes from M. Huc, a missionary traveler in Tibet in 1846. SirCharles Lyell, often called the “father of geology,” also quoted this same story inthe 11th edition of his Principles of Geology. After many of Huc’s party hadfrozen to death, survivors pitched their tents on the banks of the Mouroui-Oussou(which lower down becomes the famous Blue River). Huc reported:

"At the moment of crossing the Mouroui-Oussou, a singular spectaclepresented itself. While yet in our encampment, we had observed at a distancesome black shapeless objects ranged in file across the great river. No changeeither in form or distinctness was apparent as we advanced, nor was it till theywere quite close that we recognized in them a troop of the wild oxen. Therewere more than fifty of them encrusted in the ice.


Frozen Oxen Found in Tibet in 1846

No doubt they had tried to swim across at the moment of congelation [freezing],and had been unable to disengage themselves. Their beautiful heads,surmounted by huge horns, were still above the surface; but their bodies wereheld fast in the ice, which was so transparent that the position of the imprudentbeasts was easily distinguishable; they looked as if still swimming, but theeagles and ravens had pecked out their eyes" (M. Huc, Recollections of aJourney through Tartary, Thibet [Tibet], and China, During the Years1844, 1845, and 1846. Vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1852), pp. 130-131).

Any explanation for these strange discoveries must recognize that streams freezefrom the top down. The ice formed floats and then insulates the warmer liquid waterbelow. The thicker the ice grows, the harder it is for the liquid’s heat to pass upthrough the ice layer and into the cold air. Freezing a stream fast enough to trapmore than fifty upright oxen in the act of swimming across seems impossible,especially because a stream’s velocity varies considerably across its width.Therefore, different parts of the stream should freeze over many days or hours.Freezing a river so fast that large fish are frozen, edible, and underground, defiesbelief. However, the similarities with the frozen mammoths are so great that thesereports are definitely related.

To freeze the fish and oxen in such a manner in bodies of water could ONLY havebeen accomplished by the incredible instant drop in temperature that accompaniedthe plummeting of the last Earth ring canopy over the polar regions of the Earth.

(6) Man and mammoth coexisted:

Mankind coexisted with the woolly mammoth and the other denizens of the pre-flood age. Writes George E. Lankford --

"Mammoths and mankind lived together in North America millennia ago. One


human even carved the image of a mammoth on a shell...in the Delaware RiverValley....one archaeologist urged the examination of Native American legendsfor examples of the retention of the mammoth in oral tradition" ("PleistoceneAnimals in Folk Memory," Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 93, Issue 369.1980, page 293).

In 1998 fossil hunter Neville Hollingworth uncovered mammoth bones and a flintaxe in a gravel pit in Latton, Wiltshire, England. Some of the bones showedevidence of cut marks -- possibly caused by the flint axe found alongside themammoth bones. During the next year ice gravel experts Daryl Maddy and SimonLewis of Cheltenham and Gloucester College excavated more bones and severalmore hand axes indicating, once again, that mammoth and man coexisted at thistime.

Mammoths and early man existed together. Archaeological evidence shows thatwoolly mammoths were butchered and men relished its flesh and chopped the ivoryfor making a framework for their dwellings and utility items for its durability andhardness.

Woolly mammoth cave art from Dordogne, France

There are many figurines of animals and humans that early man crafted whether forreligious or as a hobby is not known. Then came the collapse of the last earthcanopy and the demise of vast numbers of these pre-flood animals.

With the pre-flood vapor canopy removed the earth's climate would never be thesame again, and those creatures from the first world would remain preserved --further evidence of YEHOVAH God's divine judgment. (See Genesis 7:11 andIsaiah 24:18-20.)

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