Lifestyle 
| The Greenhouse Effect |
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Page 1 of 3 By Clyde Snobelen
When they examined core samples from shallow wells they were amazed to find remnants of green palm branches. Well, these stories are not really unusual any more. We have all seen pictures and heard accounts of giant mastodons found with green food still in their mouths, all preserved for thousands of years in the ice. But it is amazing, when you just stop to think. In the past this earth was tropical from pole to pole. Palm trees growing in Alaska! Giant herbivores grazing on lush green tropical growth around the Arctic Circle. The age of the dinosaurs, certainly. But when was it and why did it end so suddenly? The evolutionist has a problem with this one. Those who believe that change took millions of years just cannot resolve the problem of green plants being found in the ice. This phenomenon illustrates rapid not slow evolutionary change. Sometime in the past the earth was overtaken by rapid disastrous change. The giant animals were caught in flight and frozen where they fell or stood. The green plants in the polar regions did not have time to die and decay. They were frozen rapidly, instantaneously. Well there may be an explanation offered in the Bible. Now the Bible is not a scientific book. It does not set out to tell HOW the earth was created. What it does do is to offer an explanation of WHY the earth was created. And, while doing that, it offers some interesting information that may be of help in explaining some of the scientific details and provide some answers for why my friend and his associates found green palm branches in core samples on the north slope of Alaska. The key may be in an ancient Hebrew word that the Bible translates as firmament (Genesis 1:6 KJV). (The word is translated as ‘expanse in the New International Version - NIV.) The Hebrew word is ‘raqiya . It can mean to compress, pound out as in thin metal sheets. The word is used 8 times in the first chapter of the Bible. The question is, ‘what was being compressed or pounded into thin sheets? The answer is water. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light "day and the darkness he called "night. And there was evening, and there was morning - the first day. And God said, Let there be an expanse (raqyia, firmament) between the waters to separate water from water." So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above It. And It was so.. And there was evening, and there was morning - the second day. (Gen. 1:1-7 NIV) It seems clear, on the surface at least. Water that covered the primal earth was separated creating water above and below. The upper water, called ‘raqiya , is described as a solid, metallic like canopy surrounding the earth. But how could this be? Recently, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore labs in California took water and compressed it under supercold (cryogenic) conditions. They found that the oxygen in water turned blue and the hydrogen became metallic in form. This metallic form of hydrogen, existing under supercold conditions had some other interesting properties. It was crystalline, transparent, fiber optic, superconductive and ferromagnetic. Further, there is a heat sink that exists 11 miles out in space. What this means is that as you get closer to the earth it gets warmer and if you go farther into space it gets warmer. At 11 miles out it is the coldest (-130 to -180 degrees F). A special super cold band surrounds the earth. The interesting question then relates to just what God did with the water on the second day of creation. Was it compressed under these supercold conditions to form a crystalline, fiber optic layer surrounded by ice creating a canopy around the earth - like a greenhouse? Many of the ancient Bible writers seemed to see the creation in just this way. ‘You who swelter in your clothes when the land lies hushed under the south wind, can you join him (God) in spreading out the skies, hard as a mirror of cast bronze?" (NIV) Which is strong, and as a molten looking glass" [KJV] (Job 37:18) "He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a tent to live in." (Isaiah 40:22 NIV) The prophet Ezekiel saw a vision of the glory of God as he looked into the sky. This is part of what he saw. "Spread out above the heads of the living creatures was what looked like an expanse, (firmament) sparkling like ice and awesome." (Ezekiel 1: 22 NIV) These ancient writers related God, in his creative glory, with a firmament or a hard, metallic, crystalline canopy surrounding the earth. Today scientists are studying the effects of such a canopy and we can at least speculate on a number of significant elements in this creation model. |
A few years ago, a neighbor of mine returned from a six month term of employment with an oil company. He was working with a drilling crew on the north slope of Alaska. He had an interesting story to tell. 
