Atlantis Beneath the Ice (22 page)

Agassiz’s adoption of Cuvier’s notion of special creation violates one of the basic principles of modern science: the concept of the invariance of physical laws. Scientists today assume that the physical laws governing our planet (for example, gravity) apply throughout the universe and are constant throughout time and space. Catastrophists assume that supernatural forces (God) can, and do, intervene in the affairs of our planet. Physical laws, in their view, are subject to the whims of supernatural forces. They also assume that the Bible is the ultimate authority as to the age of the earth. Many, even today, believe that the world was created in seven days and that it is only thousands of years old. The idea of special creation goes one step further: life is specially created
after
catastrophes.

Catastrophism (as it was understood by Agassiz and Cuvier) was an accepted geological assumption based on the teachings of the Bible. It has now been rejected by the vast majority of scientists. The tradition that eventually overtook and replaced catastrophism was created by a Scottish amateur geologist, James Hutton (1726–1797). He realized that over great periods of time, even small changes caused by the daily impact of forces such as wind and water would eventually transform the face of the earth.

However, Hutton’s motives in proposing a new approach to the earth sciences were not the strictly scientific ones that we are now led to believe. He lived in a time before the notion of progress, so fundamental to our own era, was widely accepted. The Bible was still the ultimate authority on questions of the earth’s history. The biblical account of the Great Flood was believed to be the key to understanding geology. Common thinking was that time brought only decay, not progress. It was generally assumed that the history of the planet could be divided into three phases. “Firstly, there had been a period of generation
extending from the Creation up to the Fall of Man; secondly, there was the prolonged and present period of degeneration initiated by the Fall; and thirdly, there was the eagerly awaited period of regeneration that would be ushered in by Christ’s Second Coming.”
¹⁰

Hutton challenged this view by arguing in the first volume of the
Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
that the earth’s history was very long and would extend indefinitely into the future. He wrote, “We find no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end.”
¹¹
He saw the earth as a vast machine created by the Almighty for the
purpose
of maintaining life (as opposed to the Catastrophists, who believed that the Almighty could destroy life).

His famous book
Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations
(1795) was an attempt to show that the earth was the handiwork of God. In that book, Hutton wrote,

If we believe that there is almighty power, and supreme wisdom employed for sustaining that beautiful system of plants and animals which is so interesting to us, we must certainly conclude, that the earth, on which this system of living things depends, has been constructed on principles that are adequate to the end proposed, and procure it a perfection which it is our business to explore.
¹²

Hutton rejected the biblical idea of a deluge or Great Flood
because
he believed that this was contrary to God’s design. If the purpose of the earth was to sustain life, God would not violate his plan by allowing deluges to wreak havoc with his creation. “But, surely, general deluges form no part of the theory of the earth; for, the purpose of this earth is evidently to maintain vegetable and animal life, and not to destroy them.”
¹³

What was radical in Hutton’s theory was his assumption that the earth’s design was a more accurate reflection of the Almighty’s intention than was the Bible. And even more unusual was his belief that all geological phenomena could be understood as the products of a perfectly
designed machine that was operating today as it has always operated. For Hutton, “the present was the key to the past.” Given a vast amount of time, even small changes could produce significant results. Here we have Hutton writing as most geologists would like to remember him.

Not only are no powers to be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to be admitted of except those of which we know the principle, and no extraordinary events to be alleged in order to explain a common appearance, the powers of nature are not to be employed in order to destroy the very object of those powers; we are not to make nature act in violation to that order which we actually observe, and in subversion of created things. In whatever manner, therefore, we are to employ the great agents, fire and water, for producing those things which appear, it ought to be in such a way as is consistent with the propagation of plant and life of animals upon the surface of the earth. Chaos and confusion are not to be introduced into the order of nature, because certain things appear to our partial views as being in some disorder. Nor are we to proceed in feigning cause, when those seem insufficient which occur in our experience.
¹⁴

Hutton wished to replace the chaos of the Great Flood with a world order more worthy of God. His idea of gradual change operating over vast amounts of time would come to be known as uniformitarianism.

Charles Lyell (1797–1875), in
Principles of Geology
(1830 and 1832), took Hutton’s idea of uniformitarianism, refined it, expanded it, and demonstrated it in language and with illustrations that were accessible to the nonscientist. He dealt a fatal blow to the notion that physical laws could be subject to the whims of supernatural forces. In opposition to catastrophism, he wrote, “In our attempt to unravel these difficult questions, we shall adopt a different course, restricting ourselves to the known or possible operations of existing causes: feeling assured that we have not yet exhausted the resources which the study of the present
course of nature may provide, and therefore that we are not authorized, in the infancy of our science, to recur to extraordinary agents.”
¹⁵

In his time, and for more than a century, Lyell’s prohibition against the consideration of geological forces that cannot be observed in the present served the fledgling science of geology well. But Lyell was blind to the fact that these rigid boundaries need not exclude the investigation of extraordinary upheavals that can be explained without reference to a supernatural force, that is, dramatic geological upheavals (still subject to the physical laws of the earth) that result in accelerated rates of change.

These “spurts” of change occur as a result of physical events operating within the confines of natural laws.
¹⁶
Today, Cuvier’s theory should be recognized as being far ahead of his time, but geologists grouped his ideas with those of the catastrophists, and his notion of a great geological upheaval was forgotten. His student, Agassiz, took up the banner with his theory of the ice ages.

Four years after Cuvier’s death, Agassiz was exploring Switzerland’s sheer crevices and towering mountains with two friends who were students of Alpine glaciers. The germ of an idea was planted as the two persuaded Agassiz that the dominating boulders they were climbing over had been pushed, heaved, and hauled to their positions by glaciers. Agassiz saw the possibilities at once, and in 1837 he announced his theory of the ice ages to an unsuspecting Europe. “Siberian winter,” he declared, “established itself for a time over a world previously covered with rich vegetation and peopled with large mammalia, similar to those now inhabiting the warm regions of India and Africa. Death enveloped all nature in a shroud, and the cold, having reached its highest degree, gave to this mass of ice at the maximum tension, the greatest possible hardness!”
¹⁷

Although the term
ice ages
has become part of our modern vocabulary, it was an unusual and startling concept when Agassiz first proposed it. Hand in hand with our concept of the ice ages comes the meaning of the term
glacial.
Today it is generally accepted as indicating
a ponderous, slow movement, an inch-by-inch advancement (and thus losing its original sense of catastrophe). But Agassiz, in first proposing that the earth had suffered traumatic periods of extreme cold, insisted that the ice ages had descended on the earth suddenly and catastrophically, plunging it into its darkest winter. He wrote, “A sudden intense winter, that was to last for ages, fell upon our globe; it spread over the very countries where these tropical animals had their homes, and so suddenly did it come upon them that they were embalmed beneath masses of snow and ice, without time even for the decay which follows death.”
¹⁸

To Agassiz this theory of catastrophic ice ages cleared the overgrown trail leading to the heart of the mystery of extinctions. The onslaught of a sudden deadly ice age would have entombed massive creatures where they stood, mute witnesses to a season of disaster.

When Agassiz first presented the idea of ice ages to the scientific community in 1837, he was met with great skepticism. However, he proved that the movement of glaciers could account for the placement of massive boulders. The skeptics were forced to accept that the earth had indeed once been gripped by deadly winters. The trigger for these paralyzing winters remained a puzzle. Agassiz had recognized this obstacle from the beginning.

We have as yet no clew [
sic
] to the source of this great and sudden change of climate. Various suggestions have been made—among others, that formerly the inclination of the earth’s axis was greater, or that a submersion of the continents under water might have produced a decided increase of cold; but none of these explanations are satisfactory, and science has yet to find any cause which accounts for all the phenomena connected with it.
¹⁹

This grand cycle of destruction may have been the cause of periodic bouts of mass extinctions. There have been many of these disasters, each one of which has had a profound impact upon the course of evolution. The late Pleistocene extinctions, which occurred shortly after 9600 BCE,
have been studied in detail by scientists attempting to solve the mystery of these deadly events.

One line of inquiry puts the blame on humankind. Charles Darwin’s codiscoverer of the theory of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) advanced the idea that the extinctions at the end of the last ice age were caused not only by climatic changes but also by humans. In 1911, he wrote, “The extinction of so many large Mammalia is actually due to man’s agency,
acting in co-operation with those general causes
which at the culmination of each geological era has led to the extinction of the larger, the most specialized, or the most strangely modified forms.”
²⁰

Like Darwin, Wallace was strongly committed to the Hutton/Lyell model of strict, gradual change in the earth’s history. But even Lyell couldn’t ignore the problems in resting all the terrible responsibility for extinctions on humans. “It is probable that causes more general and powerful than the agency of Man, alterations in climate, variations in the range of many species of animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, and of plants, geographical changes in the height, depth, and extent of land and sea, or all of these combined, have given rise, in a vast series of years, to the annihilation . . . of many large mammals.”
²¹

Despite Lyell’s warnings, the idea of humankind as the cause of extinctions has a great following among anthropologists and paleontologists. The modern spokesman for the “overkill hypothesis” is Dr. Paul S. Martin of the University of Arizona. He believes that human migration to the New World caused the mass extinctions. North America did experience massive extinctions at this time. The great bears, saber-toothed tigers, mammoths, and mastodons all became extinct shortly after 9600 BCE. (Many archaeologists believe that people first arrived in the New World shortly after 9600 BCE, an idea we will examine in detail in
chapter 10
.) Martin conjectures that the animals that humans encountered had not developed the necessary skills to escape the newcomers’ hunting techniques and were consequently slaughtered to extinction.
²²
In contrast, the animals of the Old World, especially in
Europe and Africa, had evolved evasion strategies to deal with hunters, thereby avoiding the fate of their counterparts in the New World.

It is perhaps a natural view to adopt in the twenty-first century, given our shameful record in annihilating so many species, but the overkill hypothesis can only explain one set of mass extinctions. It can’t explain those that occurred earlier than the Pleistocene. Nor can the overkill hypothesis explain the deaths of vast numbers of large animals that once thrived in temperate northern Siberia, land that is now barren tundra. To support these animals Siberia’s climate must have been much warmer than it is today. Russian scientists are convinced that humankind played little or no role in their extinction and that only a dramatic climate change can account for so many deaths.
²³

The physical facts are not in dispute. Various continents have experienced different rates of extinction at different times. Nearly twelve thousand years ago, North America, South America, Australia, and the Arctic regions suffered massive extinctions, while at the same time there were relatively few in Europe and Africa.
²⁴
These varying rates of disappearance would seem, at first glance, to support the overkill hypothesis. “The lack of synchroneity between the extinctions on different continents and their variable intensity, for example, heavier in America than Africa, appears to eliminate as a cause any sudden extraterrestrial or cosmic catastrophe.”
²⁵

But an earth crust displacement would cause extinctions to occur on different continents at different rates as a result of varying changes in the world’s latitudes. Some continents experience great climatic change, while others are largely unaffected. Changing climates produce extinctions as creatures succumb to different temperatures and alien seasons.