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Our “Tropical” Arctic?

Our “Tropical” Arctic?

Intermediate

The common perception of the Arctic is that it is a frozen, uninhabited wasteland.  Truthfully, most of it is.  Evolutionists claim it has been like this for millions of years but that there is evidence that it was warmer and wetter in the past.  In 1985, Paul Tudge of the Geological Survey of Canada spotted tree stumps on the Canadian Arctic island of Axel Heiberg while conducting a helicopter survey.  A year later, a team of geologists, paleobotanists, and graduate students returned and found enormous tree stumps they interpreted as being still rooted in the soil they grew in (Basinger, 1987).

A recent SciTechDaily article discussing three new walnut species identified among the Axel Heiberg fossils says, “Paleontology and geology records indicate there was more CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere at the time, which resulted in temperatures that were much higher than they are now.  This global greenhouse, in turn, created warm ocean circulations that kept the Arctic Ocean free of ice” (Lang, 2024).  Note the claim that there was more atmospheric CO2 when these forests were growing than now, and it was not because of humans burning fossil fuels.  In short, secular scientists explain polar forests by claiming that more CO2 in the atmosphere produced a global greenhouse that caused warm oceans, keeping the Arctic Ocean ice-free. 

The fossil forests of Axel Heiberg have been compared to the modern cypress swamps of the Everglades in Florida (Basinger, 1987).  Even with warm oceans providing what secular scientists call a tropical rainforest climate where many types of trees could grow, it still experienced a polar daylight cycle.  Secular scientists claim that the warm oceans may have prevented freezing temperatures during the long winter nights and that the growing season would have been short like it is today, but long summer days would have allowed for rapid growth (Lang, 2024).

However, climate models run in the early 1990s failed to reproduce the warm, wet climate secular scientists believe existed at the poles.  Therefore, the paleobotanists believe the climate models must be wrong.  However, the climate models at the time were greatly improved over earlier versions and may have been basically correct while the paleobotanists clung to a uniformitarian model that did not work (Oard, 1995a).  Models have, in many regards, improved even more in the last 35 years.  Perhaps they should be run again in a creationist study.

The fossils discovered on Axel Heiberg, rather than being petrified, compressed into coal, or burned and preserved as charcoal, are in their original state.  They are waterlogged and shallowly buried in sediment, and once excavated, they begin to deteriorate quickly (Helder, 2000).  They include wood, leaves, cones, fruit, seeds, and nuts and are eroding out of the sediments so they can be picked up off the ground, which is how many current specimens were collected.  Some of the nuts have holes gnawed in them by animals.  Secular scientists interpret these fossil forests as having been buried rapidly by sediments laid down by water but that the sedimentation occurred in a swamp or lake environment about 45 million years ago, during the Eocene epoch, when global temperatures were supposedly higher than they are now (Lang, 2024).  Creationists would agree that the sediments were laid down by water but disagree with the long-age timescale.

In the forests on Axel Heiberg, the largest trunk diameter is one meter with a root mass extending several meters.  Horizontal logs up to 11.5 meters long are associated with the stumps and also illustrate how large the trees may have grown.  These fossil forests are only found in a few of the upper peat beds on Axel Heiberg.  Some scientists think the peat was transported from elsewhere, and others think it grew in place.  The roots of the trees do not penetrate into the layers below the peat, which are interpreted as paleosols (ancient soils).  There is also no difference in the amount of decomposition in the leaf litter with depth.  In other words, the deeper leaf litter should be more decomposed, and the tree roots should penetrate deeper than they do, but that is not the case (Oard, 1995a).

Secular dating of the fossils is primarily based on index fossils, specifically a type of spruce cone (Picea banksii), and more recently, on pollen (Oard, 1995a).  These dating techniques involve a lot of assumptions and circular reasoning.  The index fossils are found in rock layers believed to be certain ages based on uniformitarian deep time and radiometric dating, which both rely on many unproven assumptions about the past.  Because the index fossils are believed to match the secular ages of the rocks, when they are found elsewhere with no other convenient method available to date the layer, the index fossils are used to date the rocks.

For a long time, the Eureka Sound Formation, the upper part of which contains the fossil forests, was considered entirely terrestrial in origin because of the plant fossils.  However, marine fossils including crinoids, foraminifera, and dinoflagellates had been reported as early as the 1970s, indicating that much of the formation was probably deposited by the Flood (Oard, 1995a).

It is important to understand how this fits into a biblical Flood model.  Many creation scientists believe the Flood laid down all of the rock units extending from the Precambrian/Cambrian up to the Paleogene/Neogene (Tomkins, 2023), which includes the Eocene sediments on Axel Heiberg.  If this is a pre-Flood forest buried where it was growing, it was buried toward the end of the Flood as the last bit of high ground was inundated.  However, the Flood destroyed all of the pre-Flood forests.  It is also unlikely that these forests grew in place after the Flood, since they occur in repeating compressed layers of vegetation and sediment likely laid down by sheet flows over a large area (Oard, 1995b).

The most likely explanation for these Arctic fossils and their Antarctic counterparts is that they are a Flood deposit.  The Axel Heiberg fossil forests are made up of various types of warm- and cool-climate trees that don’t grow together today and are reminiscent of the fossil forests of Yellowstone (Oard, 1995a).  The Genesis Flood, with its tsunamis and rapidly moving currents, would have stripped enormous masses of vegetation from the land.  This would have formed floating mats of debris containing plants and animals from a wide range of habitats.  Many trees that flared out at their bases likely floated upright while other logs floated horizontally, similar to the trees in Spirit Lake after the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.  The trees would have rubbed against each other as they floated to mid and high latitudes, stripping the bark off each other.  Over time, things would have become waterlogged and begun dropping out, forming layers of organic matter that were subsequently buried by Flood sediments and fossilized or compressed into coal (Oard, 1995b). While vegetation was able to germinate and grow in the wet soil as the Flood receded, large forests probably did not have time to grow at the poles before the Ice Age settled in.

It is evident that the forest remains of Axel Heiberg Island give us lots to think about.

References

Basinger, J. F. (1987). Our “Tropical” Arctic. Canadian Geographic, 106(6), 28–37.

Helder, M. (2000, July 1). Flip Side of the Midnight Sun. Dialogue. https://www.create.ab.ca/flip-side-of-the-midnight-sun/

Lang, M. (2024, September 9). Frozen in Time: Scientists Discover 45-Million-Year-Old Ancient Walnuts on Remote Arctic Island. SciTechDaily. https://scitechdaily.com/frozen-in-time-scientists-discover-45-million-year-old-ancient-walnuts-on-remote-arctic-island/

Oard, M. J. (1995a). Mid and high latitude flora deposited in the Genesis Flood part I: Uniformitarian Paradox. Creation Research Society Quarterly, 32(2), 107–115.

Oard, M. J. (1995b) part II: A creationist hypothesis. CRSQ, 32(3), 138–141.

Tomkins, J. P. (2023). The Post-Flood Ark Dispersal and Early Pleistocene: Exegetical and Geological Notes on Genesis 8:13–22. Creation Research Society Quarterly, 60(1), 29–37.


Andrea Reitan
January 2025

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