Russia Has the Ultimate 'Elephant Graveyard'? And South Africa's Karroo Fossil Deposits Are Enormous!
Many Christians are drawn away from the idea that there was a Great Flood because, frankly speaking, scientists just hate the thought, it would seem. Two thousand years ago so very many cultures that are spoken of in surviving writings possessed historical legends about the great flood, some terrible and catastrophic flood that only a handful of people survived. But then 'enlightenment' happened. Doesn't scripture say that Satan masquerades as a being of light? But, when scientists follow the principles of 'Scientific Experimentation and Inquiry' they discover so many marvelous things that we imagine that they have applied these same skills of intense methodical investigation to arrive at their explanations of Earth history, geographical dating, and the history of creature 'evolution'. Not so! Evolution (outside of designed variegation) does not exist as they describe and teach it. The inner workings of a cell are far, far too complex for the first one to have ever formed itself, for one thing. Cells are a complete and utter miracle of well-functioning complexity. Nope...cells forming themselves never happened. They were definitely DESIGNED. No explanation in the world can begin to explain a rational scenario where they accidentally popped into being. Even the simplest known cells are bafflingly complex.
But concerning the flood, the Great Flood of the Bible, are there proofs...possible proofs?
Well, it's a very long subject, but let's consider it in short simple terms. Here are two examples that ought to inspire a great deal of confidence that something horrific and catastrophic happened back in time a way. How far back in time? the Bible really doesn't allow for it to have been more than 4,500 years ago if it was the Great Flood. Around 2,350 B.C. is a pretty good estimate. But the scientist will explain that it is this or that many hundred million years ago. But...let's just name the items...the areas of our planet, that might be worthy of your consideration. And it will be brief, because you can look into these occurrences pretty easily if you want to investigate more deeply.
One of the New Siberia Islands
First, north of Russia just a short distance out in the sea from the mainland are the New Siberia Islands. Why are they of interest? Dead elephants! So many that for better than a century they were the chief source of ivory on planet Earth. Dead frozen elephants encased in mud. Big old tusks, not fossilized, in commensurate abundance. People went there and 'mined' them, you might say. And this was an age when ivory had many uses. It was a popular product. Yet it was so much easier to go there and dig up the ivory than it was to hunt living African elephants or walruses that for more than a century it was 'the place!'.
So why were there dead elephants (mammoths) there? It appears to some people that vast herds of these mammoths moved to high ground, as if to escape a flood, and sort of 'flash froze'. Scientists tend to claim that they accumulated there over the course of 200,000 years or so. And they say that they are not all that densely concentrated in the sedimentary material. (But I ask myself this: for 200,000 years these carcasses and their ivory stayed so frozen that they didn't decay badly, yet mammoth kept going there during all of that time even though they are plant eaters and plants don't really grow well in perpetually frozen places? And the mammoth remains are not that highly concentrated, yet it was a gold mine for ivory hunters? Well, ...OK I guess!) Here are a couple of paragraphs from the Wikipedia article on the New Siberian Islands:
Digby[11] also noted that some early papers published about the New Siberian Islands incorrectly describe them, often along with other Arctic islands (e.g. Wrangel Island), as being made either up almost entirely of mammoth bones and tusks or of ice, sand, and the bones of mammoths and other extinct megafauna. Some of these papers were written by persons (e.g. D. Gath Whitley)[14] who had never visited the New Siberian Islands and relied upon anecdotes of traders and travelers and local folklore for their descriptions of them, and other articles were written by explorers and ivory hunters untrained in either geology or other sciences. Such statements have been shown to be fictional in nature by detailed studies of the geology of the New Siberian Islands by professional geologists, paleontologists, and other scientists.[2][13][15][16]
Ivory deposits[edit]
As noted by Baron Eduard V. Toll in his account of the New Siberian Islands,[17] sizeable and economically significant accumulations of fossil ivory occur within them. The ivory, along with mammoth and other bones, are found in recent beaches, drainage areas, river terraces and river beds. The New Siberian Islands are unique in the burial and preservation of fossil ivory "in such a wonderful state of preservation that the tusks so found cannot be distinguished from the very best and purest ivory".
The abundant bones, even skeletons, of mammoth, rhinoceros, musk-ox, and other megafauna along with the mammoth ivory found in these islands are preserved by permafrost, in which they are encased.[2][12][15][18] The permafrost periodically developed in Late Pleistocene loess, solifluction, pond, and stream sediments as they accumulated. The radiocarbon dating of bones, ivory, and plants, optically stimulated luminescence dating of enclosing sediments, and uranium-thorium dating of associated peats demonstrate that they accumulated over a period of some 200,000 years. Radiocarbon dates obtained from the collagen of 87 mammoth tusks and bones collected from Faddeevsky, Kotelniy, and New Siberia islands ranged from 9470±40 BP to greater than 50,000 BP (14C).[19]
Then certain people hypothesize the silty water rose, covered the mammoth carcasses, then receded, leaving them encased in silt, which has remained frozen nearly every summer since that long ago unknown date. Honestly, you can find several explanations. Yet, why are so many carcasses there? They are not found in other places in that abundance, right? Perhaps an area of the world experienced something sudden and catastrophic which herds of mammoths tried in vain to evade? Or maybe not.
The Location of the Karroo Area (Wikipedia)
Next, the Karroo (or Karroo) fossil beds of South Africa. The Karroo is a pretty dry area of south to southcentral South Africa which has a great deal of sedimentary rock which is bizarrely stuffed to the gills with fossils. Various rises, plateau and canyons make it plain that the layer of sedimentary rock containing these densely concentrated fossils is hundreds of square miles in extent. And the fossils are not just on the surface but extend downward a great distance as well. Some descriptions of it make it to seem like the describers believe that a great floating mat of dead animals settled down there as waters receded. Once again, scientists do not seem to like this explanation. But here is the interesting part: The estimates of how many animals are encased there are mind boggling. Some estimates by some people suggest the number may be close to 200,000,000,000. That's right! 200 billion creatures. Fairly large creatures for the most part, species supposedly representative of the Permian and Triassic ages as scientists would classify it...the Carboniferous Age. There are 7 billion or so humans on Earth. This region has maybe 200 billion fossils in relatively dense occurrence within the sedimentary rock? Miles deep in some areas?
If these animal (mostly reptile) bodies had accumulated naturally over millions of years the predators and scavengers would have done their job on the corpses, one day at a time, one week at a time, over vast millennia, as they died, right? They would have been consumed by the various 'eaters of the dead' such as existed in that area in whatever era this was. This therefore was probably a fairly rapid deposition of corpse filled slime or mud. Could it have indeed been a large 'island' of bloated corpses brought to a focused area by ad-hoc currents meeting each other in a sea that had not until recently existed? They say that in our day there is an 'island' of mostly plastic garbage about the size of Texas in the ocean where currents converge. Again, whatever caused this, it was EPIC in scope in terms of lives lost in the animal kingdom. Does it have to have been 'the Great Flood'? No. But could it have been? I believe so, and others have also speculated that it could well be.
So, is there evidence of the Great Flood to be found on Earth today? Well, scientists generally will not allow it to be so under any circumstances. But they have their own strongly anti-Creationist (anti-God is honestly a closer description) bias. And their dating methods aren't the same for these more ancient dates. There is no coin or pottery to verify the date that their machine spits out, if in truth they even rely on such instruments. It appears that they literally spit-ball the dates a lot of times, stating some generality that the other scientists will be comfortable with based on the type of dinosaur bones there to be found. But hey, doesn't tiny little England have historical references to around 200 animals that seem, by description, to be candidates for belonging among the dinosaur fauna? And if you look at a globe, England is not a very large place. Many creatures have passed from the stages of history forever during the brief reign of sport hunting, animal eating, "don't-endanger-my-children or-my-livestock" humankind. So don't be frightened away from being a literal believer in the Bible because of the modern-day men and women of science. They may come around, you know. You cannot very easily step on the toes of a more eminent and more established and respected scientific colleague and expect your career to go well. You may rest assured that there are many in the scientific community who believe in history as told by the Bible a lot more than you hear about. The old generation of professors must retire before the new generation can safely broach such considerations. You may be seeing a shift towards Scientific congruence with the Bible in days to come because if the Bible's story is true (and it is!) and you may be sure that science, properly conducted in an unbiased manner, must eventually find its way in fits and spurts to the conclusion that the Bible is true.