Page 216 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

12,000 years ago, apparently very abruptly, when the mammoths and
other large mammals were frozen in their tracks.
39
Elsewhere the picture was different. Most of Europe was buried under
ice two miles thick. So too was most of North America where the ice-cap
40
had spread from centres near Hudson Bay to enshroud all of eastern
Canada, New England and much of the Midwest down to the 37th
parallel—well to the south of Cincinnati in the Mississippi Valley and
more than halfway to the equator.
41
At its peak 17,000 years ago, it is calculated that the total ice volume
covering the northern hemisphere was in the region of six million cubic
miles, and of course there were extensive glaciations in the southern
hemisphere too as we noted. The surplus water flow from which these
numerous ice-caps were formed had been provided by the world’s seas
and oceans which were then about 400 feet lower than they are today.
42
It was at this moment that the pendulum of climate swung violently in
the opposite direction. The great meltdown began so suddenly and over
such vast areas that it has been described ‘as a sort of miracle’.
43
Geologists refer to it as the Bolling phase of warm climate in Europe and
as the Brady interstadial in North America. In both regions:
An ice-cap that may have taken 40,000 years to develop disappeared for the most
part, in 2000. It must be obvious that this could not have been the result of
gradually acting climatic factors usually called upon to explain ice ages ... The
rapidity of the deglaciation suggests that some extraordinary factor was affecting
the climate. The dates suggest that this factor first made itself felt about 16,500
years ago, that it had destroyed most, perhaps three-quarters of the glaciers by
2000 years later, and that [the vast bulk of these dramatic developments took
place] in a millennium or less.’
44

39 The reader may recall that inexplicably warm conditions prevailed in the New Siberian
Islands until this time, and it is worth noting that many other islands in the Arctic Ocean
were also unaffected for a long while by the widespread glaciations elsewhere (e.g. on
Baffin Island the remains of alder and birch trees preserved in peat indicate a relatively
warm climate extending at least from 30,000 to 17,000 years ago. It is also certain that
large parts of Greenland remained enigmatically ice-free during the Ice Age. Path of the
Pole, p. 93, 96.
40 The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 114; Path of the Pole, pp. 47-8.
41 Ice Ages, p. 11. Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 117; Path of the Pole, p. 47.
42 Ice Ages, p. 11; Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 114.
Path of the Pole, p. 150.
43
44 Path of the Pole, pp. 148-9, 152, 162-3. In North America, where the ice reached its
maximum extent between 17,000 and 16,500 years ago, geologists have made the
following discoveries: ‘Leaves, needles and fruits’ that flourished around 15,300 years
ago in Massachusetts; ‘A bog which developed over glacial material in New Jersey at
least 16,280 years ago, immediately after the interruption of the ice advance.’; ‘In Ohio
we have a postglacial sample dated about 14,000 years ago. And that was spruce wood,
suggesting a forest that must have taken a few thousand years, by conservative
estimate, to get established. What, indeed, does this mean? Does it not clearly suggest
that the ice cap, estimated to have been at its maximum at least a mile thick in Ohio,
disappeared from Delaware County in that state within only a few centuries?’
Likewise, ‘in the Soviet Union, in the Irkutsk area, deglaciation was complete and

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