Spirituality Guide

by Seeker

Some of the new knowledge we have come to from science tells us that the Earth is in flux. The surface of the planet is still recovering from the Ice Age, both in climate and in physical effects. The mass of ice, particularly in the Northern hemisphere, was enormous; when that much water is concentrated in one area, the excess weight can change landscapes, alter the albedo of the planet so that more sunlight is reflected away from the surface, and even press the continental plates down into the magma underneath.

The Antarctic is made up of two islands, something not many people realize, with a channel between them. One island is pressed down below what would be sea level by the ice on it. Were the ice on that island to slip and slide into the ocean, not only would the mass of water alter the sea level rather rapidly, there would be a surge back from the island as the magma below ‘popped’ the dimple back out to the normal surface.

As well as the weight stress on the continental plates, there is the effect of huge masses of ice entering the sea in a very short space of time. For example, recent findings show an increase in liquid water under the ice on the Antarctic islands – it isn’t hard to see this water as a lubricant, allowing the sudden slip of a large mass into the ocean.

Not only would this raise the sea level, a sudden mass slippage would cause a tsunami, the size of which would depend on how much ice moved. There would also be climate change as the fresh water altered currents in the ocean and even changed precipitation rates and distribution.

There’s another effect as well; huge amounts of water can be trapped behind ice masses and when the ice lets go, the water releases all at once. Canada was once almost covered by a large lake held back by an ice dam. When it released, possibly due to an atmospheric air burst of a comet, (of which they are finding traces in excavations across North America) it scoured across the US, entering the Gulf of Mexico in such an amount it altered the salinity enough that the life forms changed from marine to freshwater for a time.

Ice dames are dangerous even today – in India there are often unexpected floods as valleys in the Himalayas, flooded for centuries, suddenly empty as the ice holding them back is swept away.

So, it is certainly feasible that the end of the Ice Age brought about massive cataclysms that altered the world. Even today, most of our civilization lives in the lowlands, close to the sea. Were the sea to rise within a day or so, by (say) twenty metres, how much of our world would change forever?