Fascinating stuff, thank you for the article, I also just watched it on TV. Must find out a bit more about it.
Frozen baby mammoth discovery
by Lady Lee 20 Replies latest jw friends
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chappy
Funky - here's part of a very long article about one of the first discoveries in the early 1900's. I'll put a link to the entire article at the end.
chappy
Quick-Frozen Mammoth
The body of the Berezovka mammoth was well preserved. Its flesh looked just like fresh frozen beef and horsemeat, as long as it was frozen. – Why? Why has the body of this elephant not rotted away? Why has it not fallen into dust within a few months or years? Also in the Far North, the bodies of very few animals are now preserved.
The American zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson wrote in his article "Riddle of the frozen giants" (1960:82) about the Berezovka mammoth: "Freezing meat is not quite so simple a process as one might think. It will jell once you drop the temperature below freezing, and it will then theoretically remain forever, provided its contained moisture does not melt. So also will a whole corpse. However, the frozen-food technicians have discovered two vital facts. The first is that simply freezing meat is not sufficient, because it loses its flavor and finally becomes unfit for human consumption after a time if only just frozen.
"To preserve it properly, temperatures of minus-twenty degrees Fahrenheit (-28.9°C) or lower are needed. The second and most important is that to preserve it at all it must be frozen very rapidly, and the faster the better. The slower the job is done, the larger are the crystals that form in the water and other liquids contained in its cells; the faster the process, the smaller they are. Above a certain size, these crystals burst the cells. The meat then becomes dehydrated on being unfrozen, and loses all its flavor.
"The flesh of many of the animals found in the muck must have been very rapidly and deeply frozen, for the cells were not burst and, although one mammoth has been found by a radiocarbon dating method to be just over 10,000 years old, the flesh of these animals was remarkably fresh and some was devoured by the explorer’s sledge dogs.
"At minus-forty degrees Fahrenheit (-40°C), it takes twenty minutes to quick-freeze a dead turkey and only thirty to preserve a whole side of beef. But these are mere bits of meat, not live animals clothed in fur and containing blood, internal organs and food, at a living temperature of about ninety-eight degrees (36.7°C).
"The problem is to extract all the heat from the whole beast, but this can only be done from the outside and by working inward. Unless we have tremendous cold outside, the center of the animal – and notably its stomach – will remain comparatively warm for some time, probably long enough for decomposition to start in its contents, while the actual chilling of the flesh will be slow enough for large crystals to form within its cells. Neither event occurred with the mammoths.
"It now transpires, from several studies, that mammoths, though covered in a thick underwool and a long overcoat – and in some cases having quite a layer of fat – were not specially designed for arctic conditions; a little further consideration will make it plain that they did not live in such conditions. That they did not live perpetually or even all year round on the arctic tundra is really very obvious. First, the average Indian elephant, which is a close relative of the mammoth and just about the same size, has to have several hundred pounds of food daily just to survive. For more than six months of the year, there is nothing for any such creature to eat on the tundra, and yet there were tens of thousands of mammoths.
"Further, not one trace of pine needles or of the leaves of any other trees were in the stomach of the Berezovka mammoth; little flowering buttercups, tender sedges and grasses were found exclusively. Buttercups will not even grow at forty degrees (4.4°C), and they cannot flower in the absence of sunlight. A detailed analysis of the contents of the Berezovka mammoth’s stomach brought to light a long list of plants, some of which still grow in the arctic, but are actually much more typical of Southern Siberia today. Therefore, the mammoths either made annual migrations north for the short summer, or the part of the earth where their corpses are found today was somewhere else in warmer latitudes at the time of their death, or both." - Sanderson, I. T. 1960: 82, 83).
"Here is a really shocking – to our previous way of thinking – picture. Vast herds of enormous, well-fed beasts not especially designed for extreme cold, placidly feeding in sunny pastures, delicately plucking flowering buttercups at a temperature in which we would probably not even have needed a coat. Suddenly they were all killed without any visible sign of violence and before they could so much as swallow a last mouthful of food, and then were quick-frozen so rapidly that every cell of their bodies is perfectly preserved, despite their great bulk and their high temperature. What, we may well ask, could possibly do this?
"Now, volcanoes, when in eruption, not only spew out lava and hurl out rocks but also eject masses of dust particles, steam and other gases. Some of the dust may be shot into the upper atmosphere and then drift all around the earth. ... A sudden mass of extrusion of dust and gases would cause the formation of monstrous amounts of rain and snow, and it might even be so heavy as to cut out sunlight altogether for days, weeks, months, or even years if the crustal movements continued. Wind beyond anything known today would be whipped up, and cold fronts of vast lengths would build up with violent extremes of temperature on either side. Here would be forty days and nights of snow in one place, continent-wide floods in another, and roaring hurricanes, seaquakes and earthquakes bringing landslides and tidal waves in others, and many other disturbances. But perhaps more important may have been the gases which would probably have been shot up highest of all. What would have happened to them?
"And there is where we get back to quick-freezing mammoths, for the frozen-food experts have pointed out that to do this, starting with a healthy live specimen, you would have to drop the temperature of the air surrounding it down to a point of well below minus-150 degrees Fahrenheit (-101.1°C). There are two ways of freezing rapidly – one is by the blast method, the other by the mist process; these terms explain themselves. Moreover, the colder air or any gases become, the heavier it gets. If the volcanic gases went up far enough they would be violently chilled by the ‘cold of space,’ as it is called, and then as they spiraled toward the poles, as all the atmosphere in time does, they would begin to descend.
"When they came upon a warm layer of air, they would weigh heavily upon it and pull all the heat out of it and then would eventually fall through it, probably with increasing momentum and perhaps in great blobs, pouring down through the weakest spots. And if they did this, the blob would displace the air already there, outward in all directions and with the utmost violence. Such descending gases might well be cold enough to kill and then instantly freeze a mammoth." - Sanderson, I. T. (1960:83).
"Consider now our poor mammoth placidly munching away in his meadow, perhaps even under a warm sun. The sky need not been clouded over, and here need not even be a dust of haze where he is living, which would appear to have been then about where Central Asia is today. All of a sudden, in a matter of minutes, the air begins to move in that peculiar way one may experience today at the end of the arctic summer when the first cold front descends and the temperature may drop sixty degrees (15.5°C) in an hour.
"All the mammoths feels is a sudden violent tingling all over his skin and a searing pain in his lungs; the air seems suddenly to have turned to fire. He takes a few breaths and expires, his lungs, throat, eyeballs, ears and outer skin already crystallized. If he is near the center of the blob, the terrible mist envelops him, and in a few hours he is a standing monument of what is virtually rock. Nor need there be any violence until the snow comes softly to pile up on him and bury him. And here we leave him for a moment and turn to his distant cousin chewing away in Alaska, just outside the area where the blob descends. What happens to him?
"The sky here probably does cloud over, and it may even start to snow, something he has not before encountered in September, when he is in the north on his summer migration. He starts to pad off for cover. But then comes a wind that rapidly grows and grows in fury and explodes into something unimaginable. He is lifted off his feet and, along with bison, lion, beaver from ponds, and fish from rivers, is hurled against trees and rocks, torn literally to bits and then bowled along to be finally flung into a seething caldron of water, mud, shattered trees, boulders, mangled grass and shrubbery and bits of his fellows and of other animals. Then comes the cold that freezes the whole lot, and finally, when the holocaust is over, the snow covers it all.
"This is exactly the state of affairs that we find in Alaska, where the mammoths and other animals, with one or two significant exceptions, were all literally torn to pieces while still fresh. Young and old alike were cast about, mangled and then frozen. There are also, however, other areas where the animals are mangled, but had time to decompose before they froze; and still others where they decomposed down to the bones and were then either frozen or not. Beyond these again, there are similar vast masses of animals, including whole families or herds, all piled together into gullies and riverbeds and other holes, but where only bones remain." - Sanderson, I. T. (1960:83).
"Here may be the answer to our riddle of why we find mammoths with buttercups in their teeth in one place, shredded but still-edible mammoths in another, rotting mammoths in a third, and mammoth boneyards somewhere else. The animals were frozen whole where the blobs of cold air descended before the wind began, shredded and frozen where the winds came before the cold had spread out, and reduced to bones where the animals had time to decompose before the cold reached them or the moving crust (of the earth) carried them north.
"The remains, if still sticking out of the ground where the middle of the blob occurred, would have been safely sealed in when the snow came, as the Berezovka mammoth probably was. This would seem to be additional proof, for a true ice-cap never formed in Siberia, because the crust was still shifting. There is evidence that one once started to grow there, but that it soon died away, and as it did so, vast floods of melt water brought great quantities of silt down from the south – which is the direction the rivers flow in Siberia – and deposited it upon the compacted snow. This froze in the fall, but melted in the spring, and since a dark material absorbs more heat, it gradually, year by year, dissolved the snow below and descended upon and eventually enveloped the quick-frozen mammoth by the slow substitution of chilled silt for compacted snow." - Sanderson, I. T. (1960:83).
How trustworthy?
How trustworthy is the deep temperature, needed to quick-freeze the Berezovka mammoth? – Dr. J. Dillow comments on this: "The Birds Eye Corporation seems to have been asked by Reader’s Digest, to investigate the trustworthiness of an article, which this journal wanted to publish in the year 1960 about the catastrophic freezing of the mammoths. The refrigeration experts of Birds Eye, who had studied the mammoth tissue, were convinced, that the animals had suddenly ‘been thrown into a refrigerator’, whose temperature must have been below –150°F (-101°C). The Birds Eye engineer Ivor Morgan has done in February 1960 these calculations about the mammoth. He found out, how fast the cold will go into an 8 feet (2.43 m) long cylinder, having a diameter of five feet (1.52 m), corresponding to the size of the mammoth’s body.
"The computer calculation of the Birds Eye experts was: ‘Temperatures of far below –150°F (-101°C) were needed, in order to lower the temperature of the stomach contents within 10 hours, which botanists and physiologists do presuppose for digestion, to 40°F (4.4°C).’ ... this temperature of –150°F (-101°C) also Ivan Sanderson has published. Sanderson had claimed in his report, the refrigeration experts had concluded that the investigated (Berezovka)-mammoth had been frozen at a temperature of under –150°F (-101°C)."
Dr. J. Dillow concludes from this: "The animal has grazed in summer, near the end of July, butter-cups, and only half an hour, after it had eaten this food, it was overwhelmed by a temperature, which lay under –150°F (-101°C). Very soon after that, it has died and was frozen in the middle of summer." (1977:9-12).
-101C: How possible?
Someone may object now and say: A low temperature of –101°C does not even exist now: neither in northeastern Siberia nor in Antarctica. So, how can there have been such a deep cold in the Far North?
The answer: Through the wind. Through the wind-chill effect. This means: the faster the wind is blowing, and the lower the temperature of the air, the more heat it will take out of the body. If above calculation is correct, no air temperature of –101°C was needed, to quick-freeze the Berezovka mammoth. One only needed then a wind-chill effect of –101°C.
According to the wind-chill chart, published by the Arctic Aero-medical Laboratory in Fort Wainright, Alaska, a cooling effect of –150°F (-101°C) will arise, when at –70°F (-43.7°C) the wind is blowing at 40 miles (64.3 km) per hour. In other words: The wind, blowing at –43.7°C at a speed of 64 km per hour, will remove then just as much heat from the body, as an air temperature of –101°C will, when there is no wind. Exposed flesh may freeze already within 30 seconds at –8.3°C, when the wind is blowing at 64.3 km/h.
To achieve a wind-chill effect of –115°C, one needs an air temperature of 65°C and a wind, blowing at 64 km/h. The deepest temperature, measured near Verkhoyansk, in NE Siberia, was –67.7°C. And at the research station Vostock, on Antarctica, -87.5°C.
The mammoth transport arrives in Kolymsk. They have tied the re-frozen parts of the Berezovka mammoth onto the sleighs. Yakutian horses are pulling here now the sleighs. From: E. W. Pfizenmayer, Mammutleichen und Urwaldmenschen (1926)
Stomach Contents
What has the Berezovka mammoth bull eaten, shortly before he died? Which kinds of plants were found in his mouth and stomach? Where are these plants growing now? What kind of a climate do they indicate?
Professor B. A. Tikhomirov, Botanical Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, in St. Petersburg writes about the stomach contents of the Berezovka mammoth: "V. N. Sukachev ... positively identified the following species of vascular plants, met with in the contents of the stomach: Alopecurus alpinus Sm., Agropyrum cristatum (L.) Bess., Beckmannia eruciformis (L.) Host., Hordeum violaceum Boiss et Heut. And Carex lagopina Wahlb. The following species were also noted by him in small quantities: Ranunculus acris L., Oxitropis sordida (Wahlb.) Trautv., together with the remains of some other plants, which he was unable to place exactly according to species or even genus owing to poor preservation...
"‘We must suppose’ writes V. N. Sukachev, ‘that the mammoth pastured in a meadow, where there were low places with Beckmannia eruciformis (L.), Host, Hypnum fluitans (Dill.) L. and higher places, sufficiently dry, where Agropyrum acris would be found among thickets of Alopecurus alpinus Sm., Hordeum violaceum Boiss. Et Heut. and Carex lagopina Wahlenb. in places of average moisture.’ (1914:16).
"If we take into account the finding of parts of arboreous species in the strata where the mammoth was found (Larix sp., Betula albas.l., Alnus sp.), then there can be little doubt that at the time of his death, the Berezovka mammoth dwelt in a wooded zone." (1958:170-174).
"Many of the species whose pollen or macroscopic remains were discovered in the food of the mammoth (Pinus sibirica, Caragana jubata, Hordeum brevisubulatum, species of the genera Atriplex, Agropyrum cristatum, Gnaphalium uliginosum, Alnus hirsuta s.l., Phragmites communis, Plantago media, Artemisia dracunculus s.l., Angelica archangelica, Beckmannia syzigachne etc.), at the present time have a more southern and western range than at the place where the mammoth was discovered. This is indicative of the basic changes in the climate towards lower temperatures since the time of the mammoth’s death. ...
"The considerable number of immature pollen grains of grasses attracts attention. Of the total number of 7,966 grains about 3,000 (38.8%) were immature. In addition, a very large number of pollen masses that have not separated were noted, consisting of immature grass pollen suggests that the mammoth had died at the beginning of summer. However, V. N. Sukachev (1914), basing his conclusions on the presence in the vegetable remains of the fruits of grasses and carices as well as representatives of other families, thought that the mammoth had died during the second half of summer. ...
"Sukachev (1914) stated that the Berezovka mammoth perished in late July-early August when heads of sedges had ripened but had not shed their grains yet, and ripened fruits of Beckmannia eruciformis and Hordeum violaceum had not fallen, but many plants were still in blossom (Kupriyanova, 1957)." - Tikhomirov, B. A. (1958:151, 174).
Where now growing?
When the mammoth was grazing in northeastern Siberia, animals adapted to zonal steppe and forest-steppe, like the steppe-bison and the steppe-horse (of the Mongolian type), were also living on zonal steppe and forest-steppe at the shores of the Arctic Sea. And animals, living now only in the Far North, were flourishing then also in southern Siberia and southern Europe. Eurasia’s and North America’s climate and plant-cover were then entirely different from that of today. The arctic tundra, forest-tundra, and taiga are new. They have not been there yet, when the woolly mammoth was grazing up there. The arctic tundra, forest-tundra, and taiga have arisen in the Holocene. – Let’s look briefly at three species of plants, identified in the stomach contents of the Berezovka mammoth:
Agropyrum cristatum. This sweet grass is not growing now at the Berezovka River. According to Prof. B. A. Tikhomirov (1958:174) it is growing now further south and west of the place, where the mammoth was found. Today, one finds this grass about 600 km southwest from the place, where the Berezovka mammoth was discovered (in a small extrazonal range). The nearest continuous, zonal range, where Agropyrum cristatum is growing now, lies at the Lena River, some 1,300 km southwest of the Berezovka.
This sweet grass is growing now in the coniferous forest of the cold Temperate Zone, in the forest-steppe, and in the half-deserts, down to northern Kazakhstan, and in the feather-grass steppe of southern Siberia, and in Mongolia’s steppe. Walter, H. (1974).
According to A. A. Case, a botanist of the University for animal medicine at the University of Missouri, Columbia, Miss., this plant is similar to the wheat-grass on the Great Plains of North America. Quoted by J. Dillow (1977:7).
Hordeum violaceum. Scientists at the Komarov Botanical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg told me, that Hordeum violaceum is not growing now in the Arctic. This barley plant one finds now between the Caucasus and the Black Sea, about 6,300 km southwest from the Berezovka. That is about as far away, as London (in England) is away from Baltimore (in the USA). Hordeum violaceum is growing now mainly in Iran and Armenia-Kurdistan. Meusel, H. (1965:43).
Hordeum brevisubulatum , a related barley plant, is growing now about 890 km southwest of the Berezovka. In China, this barley plant is spreading into the Subtropics. Meusel, H. (1965:43).
Dr. E. Götz, at the Botanical Institute of the University of Stuttgart-Hohenheim, wrote to me on July 29th, 1976: Hordeum brevisubulatum is synonym with Hordeum secalinum Schreb. This species is common in the coastal areas, otherwise it is rare. It is growing on meadows, likes salt, and goes up to about 1,000 m. It is found on the Iberian Peninsula, Corsica, Sicily, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thrakia, Crimea, S. Russia till Saratov and Ufa. SW-Asia till Kashmir; N. Africa, temperate N- and S-America.
Prof. B. A. Tikhomirov (1958) is right, when he says: "This is indicative of the basic changes in the climate towards lower temperatures since the time of the mammoth’s death." In other words: The plant-remains, found in the mouth and stomach of the Berezovka mammoth bull, do show us this: When the mammoth was grazing in northeastern Siberia, it was living up there in a milder, warmer climate. Since then, it has become there colder.
Link to entire article
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funkyderek
jaguarbass:
Thanks for the laugh. There's no shortage of crazy people out there, huh? Of course, even if the "facts" on that site weren't just made up by creationists, a water canopy around the earth would still be impossible.
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funkyderek
chappy:
Interesting stuff. It's certainly a way of explaining those findings without resorting to the absurdity of a worldwide flood. But the catastrophist explanation seems unnecessary.
See http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mammoths.html for details.
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sir82
It's certainly a way of explaining those findings without resorting to the absurdity of a worldwide flood.
Heh, I used to give the "Noah's flood" public talk until I realized how absurd it all was.
This quote:
"Here is a really shocking – to our previous way of thinking – picture. Vast herds of enormous, well-fed beasts not especially designed for extreme cold, placidly feeding in sunny pastures, delicately plucking flowering buttercups at a temperature in which we would probably not even have needed a coat. Suddenly they were all killed without any visible sign of violence and before they could so much as swallow a last mouthful of food, and then were quick-frozen so rapidly that every cell of their bodies is perfectly preserved,
...appears directly in the outline of the talk, which has about 15 minutes or so devoted to how plausible a worldwide flood was. It is quite illuminating to see the whole article. As usual for the Society, the quote, while technically accurate, is taken far out of context.
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willyloman
A baby mammoth unearthed in the permafrost of north-west Siberia
Fascinating. And boy does that word "permafrost" bring back dub memories!
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AlanF
chappy wrote:
: Scientists say that many of these animals were found with buttercups and other warm weather plants still in their mouths - meaning that they were frozen almost immediately. JW's and other fundamentalists claim that this is due to the sudden collapse of the "water canopy" at the flood. I don't buy their flood-canopy explination so can you think of other reason(s) for these animals to be "quick frozen" along with warm weather plants still in their mouths? Remember, these animals are found in arctic regions where these plants don't and cannot grow.
Unfortunately, you're repeating a couple of myths foisted on the public by a number of crackpot writers over the years, which have been compounded by crackpot religions like the JWs and various other Fundamentalists. Let's go over the myths.
"Buttercups are warm-weather plants . . ."
Some are and some are not. The article you quoted from below quoted from one Ivan Sanderson (who published a number of other crackpot claims in the 1950s and 1960s) who stated: " . . . little flowering buttercups, tender sedges and grasses were found exclusively. Buttercups will not even grow at forty degrees (4.4°C), and they cannot flower in the absence of sunlight." I suppose someone ought to let the buttercups growing in Iceland in on the secret. The article you quoted later quoted one "Professor B. A. Tikhomirov" who stated that the Berezovka mammoth's stomach contained Ranunculus acris, which is a variety of buttercup. Now, there are some 2,000 species of buttercups, and many subvarieties. A quick Google search turned up a couple of interesting links that show that a couple of varieties are native to extreme northern regions. The variety Ranunculus acris figidus is native to Alaska ( http://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRpt/SingleRpt?search_topic=TSN&search_value=194928 ) while the variety Ranunculus acris granatensis (Meadow Buttercup, Tall Buttercup) is found in Alaska, northern Canada, Iceland, Finland, Sweden and Norway ( http://zipcodezoo.com/Plants/R/Ranunculus_acris_granatensis.asp ). Furthermore, sedges and grasses are found all over in extreme northern climates. For example, Kodiak bears in Alaska eat massive quantities of both.
"Many animals have been found quick-frozen in Siberia"
While frozen animals have certainly been found, none of them can be claimed to have been quick-frozen. The material you quoted below contains its own refutation of this, and so does the link you gave to the full article (this was written by a JW, by the way, and the argumentation is simply atrocious), which can be seen by carefully reading about exactly what state various body parts were found in. For example, the Berezovka mammoth was badly rotted almost clear through, and even the parts that initially looked to be well preserved actually gave off a smell of ammonia when thawed. I covered this claim in my essay on The Flood ( http://corior.blogspot.com/2006/02/part-2-polar-regions.html ) by quoting from the original source for the report by the Russian scientists who dug the thing up (O. F. Herz, "Frozen Mammoth in Siberia," Smithsonian Institution Annual Report for 1903, p. 614, 1903. Extracts translated from the Russian), which you should read. I don't know if Ivan Sanderson was the original source for the claim of "quick-frozen" mammoths, but he certainly popularized it in a 1960 Saturday Evening Post article ("Riddle of the Frozen Giants," The Saturday Evening Post, January 16, 1960). My essay quotes from a number of competent scientists who show that such claims are nonsense. One baby mammoth found in 1977 in Russia, for example, clearly died after a long struggle after falling into a big, watery hole in mostly frozen ground. A frozen pony from Siberia had its head carried off by predators before it froze solid. A frozen bison from Alaska had been largely eaten by lions before being frozen and gradually buried in a creeping mud flow.
It was about 1980, when I tried to write a college paper defending the JW notion of "quick-frozen mammoths", that I first found out that many of the Watchtower Society's claims were false. All I had to do was read the Smithsonian Report article, which completely contradicted almost everything the WTS had ever written about the Berezovka mammoth. In 1991 I researched the topic thoroughly, and found that almost everything the WTS had ever written about Noah's Flood and the Arctic was false. It pays to be skeptical about Fundamentalist claims with regard to scientific verification of their religious beliefs.
AlanF
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chappy
Allan, how do you think these animals survived during the winter months so close to the arctic circle? I realize that there is a large amount of vegetation alive and well during the arctic summer, but what are the winter conditions like? It's easy to see how large mammals like polar bears and walrus had access to a large food supply in the winter, however the mamouth was a plant eater with a huge appetite. Living in large heards also increased the need for a very large food supply. I've done a fair amount of searching but have yet to find anything addressing this. One thought that I did have was migration but I've found nothing on this either. An explination that would work is another one of those "crackpot theories" that you love so much - pole shift. A pole shift would mean that the present day arctic areas were in a more temperate zone at one time, providing year-round vegetation. A sudden pole shift would then have caught the animals grazing and hit them with a fast temperature drop as the then warm arctic suddenly shifted into its present location. There are catastrophic natural events that could cause an episode like this... (a large meteor or comet strike or one passing in very close proximity to the planet, massive volcanic/earthquake activity etc). An event like this is not far fetched. They are known to have happened farther back in the past.
chappy
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funkyderek
chappy:
A sudden pole shift would then have caught the animals grazing and hit them with a fast temperature drop as the then warm arctic suddenly shifted into its present location. There are catastrophic natural events that could cause an episode like this... (a large meteor or comet strike or one passing in very close proximity to the planet, massive volcanic/earthquake activity etc). An event like this is not far fetched. They are known to have happened farther back in the past.
But there's no need to hypothesise a sudden catastrophe at all. There's nothing about the fossils that can't be explained by more mundane means; large animals sometimes fall into lakes, mud or snowdrifts and have difficulty getting out. Mud and ice preserve bodies pretty well for thousands of years. The attempts to make it seem that there was a worldwide catastrophe that suddenly fast-froze all mammoths are mere wishful thinking by creationists.
