SUMMARY: Muddy water from the fountains of the great deep jetted above the atmosphere where it froze into extremely cold hail. Within hours, mammoths, which could not have lived in today’s Arctic climates or at Arctic latitudes, were buried alive and quickly frozen as some of this muddy hail fell back to Earth in a gigantic hail storm. (As Endnote 84 on page 154 explains, latitudes changed soon after the flood.) Past attempts to explain the frozen mammoths ignored many established facts.
For centuries, stories have been told of frozen carcasses of huge, elephant-like animals called mammoths,4 buried in the tundra of northeastern Siberia.5 These mammoths, with curved tusks sometimes more than 13 feet long, were so fresh-looking that some believed they were simply large moles living underground. Some called them “ice-rats.” 6 People thought that when mammoths surfaced and saw daylight, they died. Dr. Leopold von Schrenck, Chief of the Imperial Academy of Sciences at Petrograd (today’s St. Petersburg, Russia), published the following account in 1869 : “The mammoth ... is a gigantic beast which lives in the depths of the Earth, where it digs for itself dark pathways, and feeds on earth ... They account for its corpse being found so fresh and well preserved on the ground that the animal is still a living one.” 7 Some even thought that rapid tunneling by mammoths produced earthquakes.8
This was an early explanation for the frozen mammoths. As people learned other strange details, theories multiplied. Unfortunately, theories that explained some details could not explain others. Some explanations, such as the one above, appear ludicrous today.
To learn what froze the mammoths, we must first understand much of what is known about them. This is summarized immediately below. Then, we will distill the key details requiring an explanation. Finally, we will examine ten proposed theories. Initially, many may seem plausible, but their flaws will become apparent when we systematically compare how effectively they explain each detail. We will see that the hydroplate theory, summarized on pages 118– 157, best explains all the details.