I forgot to include my Red Panda pictures on Friday’s post, so I’ve just replaced the ones on my full post about those cool animals. My husband is quite a photographer, isn’t he?
One of the things that I like best about Binder Park is a walking trail on stilts through one of the swamps that are very common around the northern US Midwest. It gives us a close picture of something that is happening around the northern world (it probably is, or was, in some areas of the southern hemisphere, but I couldn’t find anything on it). This is the rise of the land and shrinking of the glacial lakes since the Ice Age ended.
Although people have had a big hand in the shrinking of the wetlands across the northern US and Canada since we started settling 200 years, we aren’t the only cause. Turns out we’ve just sped up a process that has been going on for thousands of years.
As you will remember, during the Ice Age much of the Northern Hemisphere was covered with glaciers. When things started to settle down to the climate that we now have, the ice melted back leaving scoured valleys and pockets of lowland that filled in with water. Large areas of lowland became lakes, some of which dwarfed the Great Lakes that we still have. Small bits eventually became the wetlands that much of the glacial area is filled with (check out THIS PAGE to see a map of the wetland areas of the world.
The curved lines along the bottom show how much faster we figure the land rose right after the ice mellted. Just stretch the numbers out so you have a 4 on the bottom left.
Another thing that happened as the Ice Age came to an end is that the land underneath began to spring back. I’ve seen this described as something similar to what happens to a mattress when a large person gets up out of bed. We know that northern Canada’s land rose very quickly after the ice melted and is still rising more slowly. Uniformitarians figure the rate of rise was about 33 feet [10m] per hundred years (so they can fit things into their extra long timeline). We do know that the land is still rising near Hudson Bay at a rate of 4.3ft [1.3m] per century right now. This is happening as far south as the upper edge of Lake Michigan.
This isn’t the only place where the land is rising. Hundreds of years ago the Swedes were sure the sea level was falling. They finally realized that it was their land that was rising instead! In northern Sweden, the land is rising today at a rate of 11mm every two years. That works out to 220m [722ft] in 4,000 years!
I found an article by a guy here in Michigan who has seen the results of all this upheaval in his own lifetime. He has seen lakes shrink quite a lot and has heard accounts of these lakes being even larger less than 200 years before. This was the article that showed me the connection between our shrinking swamplands and the land rising. Part of this man’s experience was that places that had been swamp had become forested, and small lakes had become the new swamps.
Some Swamp Flora (plants)
Tamarack, or Larch a very cool tree
We have an important responsibility to be careful with the beautiful world God has made for us. But we aren’t in complete control of everything that happens to our environment. Even if we are very careful with the special places that are still left, things are still getting slowly worse and worse, not better and better as the Evolutionists want us to believe. Let us look to our Creator God and ask Him to help us preserve and protect His workmanship.
And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. Genesis 2:15
For more, check out:
see the pictures of changing coast lines at USGS: Geological Survey: POST-VALDERS LAKE STAGES IN THE LAKE SUPERIOR BASIN
Post-Glacier Rebound Net Helper (like Wikipedia, but nicer layout)
Eastern US Earthquakes related to Post-Glacier Rebound Live Science
As Alaska Glaciers Melt, It’s Land That’s Rising New York Times
