The Arctic Coring Expedition (Acex), an international team of evolutionary scientists which has been drilling beneath the bed of the Arctic Ocean, announced that the North Pole was once a tropical environment. According to a BBC News report yesterday, the Acex scientists claim the North Pole enjoyed a sub-tropical climate 55 million years ago. The finding was based on the recovery of visualized algae in the cores which show that sea temperature was once about 20C, instead of the average now, -1.5C. In addition, the Acex scientists argue that the North Pole was characterized by an extremely warm climate that created a natural greenhouse effect, which caused massive amounts of carbon to be deposited in both sea and air. The Acex discovery is prompting a complete re-evaluation of the history of the arctic basin for evolutionary scientists, including speculation that the North Pole was once a relatively shallow sea, possibly a freshwater lake.

The discovery that the North Pole once experienced a very different climactic environment is no surprise to creation scientists. Many creation scientists believe that the pre-Flood world was (1)a single land mass, and(2)generally tropical because it was protected by a vapor canopy that created a greenhouse effect,resulted in the earth being watered by a dew, and produced different atmospheric conditions. Most of these same creation scientists believe that the tropical climate of the earth continued until the advent of the post-Flood ice age, which was itself a consequence of the tumultuous and radical changes wrought by God in the conditions of the earth at the time of the Flood.

What is the Fundamental Problem With the Acex Report?
Remarkable discoveries by renowned evolutionary scientists have the tendency of both mystifying and intimidating Christians. These scientists tend to be very good at reporting observable data, the problem comes in when they seek to interpret the data in light of assumptions which are entirely unprovable and accepted on faith, based on a broader (and highly religious) evolutionary chronology paradigm.

In this case, a defining presupposition of the Acex scientists is uniformitarianism—-the belief that present rates and processes are definitive when interpreting past events. It is this uniformitarianism which drives the assumption that the core samples must be millions of years old. By assuming that layers in the core samples represent vast epochs of time, laid down at present, non-catastrophic rates of deposition, they justify and interpret the data in terms of their a priori commitment—-old earth evolutionary chronology.

But what if the layering happened rapidly? What if the rates of deposition were radically different? The result might be that the core samples represent thousands, rather than millions of years.

The ability of a catastrophe to rapidly reconstruct the geological landscape was demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt at Mt. St. Helens two decades ago when hundreds of rock layers were laid down in matters of minutes and hours and days, not millennia or long ages, but creating the appearance to uniformitarians that the stratigraphy and rock deposits at Mt. St Helens are millions of years old—-when we know they are only decades old and were formed rapidly.

The problem of uniformitarian assumptions can also be tested the next time you take a typical cave tour, as I recently did in Lurray, Virginia. The tour guides are usually trained to tell you that stalactites and stalagmite took hundreds of thousands of years to form. This is a completely fallacious statement based upon the assumption that limestone has always been deposited at the present rate of deposition. But the fully formed stalactites at the base of the Washington Monument (less than a century old) or the examples of bats which were caught and entombed in limestone stalactite graves indicates these cave formations can form rapidly. It all depends on the rates of deposition, which are not constant.

What does The Bible Say About Uniformitarianism?

It is crucial that Christians become more aware of the presuppositons behind the many scientific theories foisted on the public. The bible addresses the error of uniformitarian thought in 2 Peter 3 when it declares that a day will come when men will deny the global flood and claim that everything we see today is a continuation of what has been in the past.

Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished.