By James Donahue

Not long ago we offered a review of the Vapor Canopy Theory. While such a theory solves some problems for Bible scholars and geologists, it creates a strange paradox.

There is geological and archaeological evidence found all over the earth proving that (a.) there was once a time when forests, vegetation and a wide variety of animals lived at both the northern frozen tundra and under the ice at Antarctica, (b.) large areas of the planet show fossil evidence of being submerged.

A study of the remains of mastodons and other prehistoric creatures found frozen in the muck of the tundra, some with vegetation still in their mouths, has revealed that they were large creatures with relatively small lungs. This fact, plus a study of trapped air bubbles removed from fossilized tree resin and amber formed during that period reveals that the atmosphere was thicker, with 50 percent more oxygen than it contains today.

Thus there is an understanding why the heavy pterosaur, with its stubby body and 11-meter wing span, could fly. The creature could not exist in today’s atmosphere.

It is obvious that the world went through a radical change between the time of the dinosaurs and now. What was that change? How could it have happened?

The Christian oriented solution suggests that there once existed a thick vapor canopy that hung over the planet acting as a protective barrier. Its existence created a perfect tropical climate that prevented winds and storms. Because of it, the entire world was covered in lush green tropical vegetation.

The story is that something caused the vapor canopy to collapse. This event flooded the Earth. Theorists say the event occurred so quickly that the northern and southern poles went into instant deepfreeze, killing all of the animals in their tracks.

The flaw in this theory, however, is that a canopy of vapor thick enough to flood the entire planet has been calculated to stretch an estimated 43,000 miles high and be at 100 percent saturation to contain that much water. And if such a canopy existed, it would have made a fog layer so dense it would completely block all sunlight. No vegetation could survive in perpetual darkness.

How do we resolve this problem? The study of the looming effects of global warming, and a melt-down of the planet’s ice caps, offers a possible answer.

Without ice caps in the beginning, the original Earth may have been warm enough all over to support vegetation and animal life. If there was enough vegetation (humans weren’t around to cut down trees then) the air was thick with the oxygen it generated.

There could even have been several isolated vapor canopies, each of them covering certain areas of the planet. It was within the thick atmosphere, under the vapor covers, that creatures like the pterosaur evolved and thrived. But they could not have live outside the canopy.

There was a major disastrous event that occurred about 80,000 years ago that caused an extinction of a large number of animals, including the dinosaurs. It also cooled the earth, creating an ice age and the frozen poles remain a remnant of that event even today.

So what was this event?

Large marks on the surface of the planet show that Earth was struck by a number of large asteroids or meteors, probably a cluster of large rocks and ice that strayed through the solar system from out of the Kuiper Belt a string of unexplained space debris located about seven billion kilometers from Earth. The explosive power of these strikes in the Gulf of Mexico, the Indian Ocean and Russia filled the atmosphere with so much debris it blocked the sun, cooled the Earth and collapsed the vapor canopies.  

The freezing of the northern and southern polar areas didn’t happen overnight, but the event happened relatively quickly, probably within a matter of weeks. Thus the animals still were grazing, eating the vegetation that still was standing, when they froze to death.

The entire planet was never completely flooded. The floods were in certain populated areas. Thus the memory of them is related to what happened in individual cultural areas. Also the flooding was not linked to the asteroid collisions.

Why didn’t the ice caps disappear after the dust, smoke and debris settled to the planet? Because as it has been for as long as recorded history, blue ice and snow has been reflecting sunlight, not allowing it to reach the rock and soil below it. Thus it never heated enough to melt the ice and snow.

Global warming, however, is changing this. With the air now filled with pollutants and noxious gas, the ice is melting. As more and more of the tundra soil is exposed to sunlight, the warming is intensifying. Thus the meltdown of the poles is going on at an alarming rate.

The Earth is in another state of radical change. And once again, there is a looming threat of human extinction.