Page 28 - Insights Into The Scriptures - The Jaredites

If they traveled across the great steppes of Asia, it would match
what the scriptures say about going into the wilderness, into a quarter
where men had not been. But I could also see the concern some scholars
had about them being able to survive. Then one day, as I pondered this, I
had an interesting experience.
I was at a math conference and was attending a session on the math
of global warming, which was becoming a hot topic at that time in the
1980s. (No pun intended. Well, maybe a little.) I had been thinking about
the idea of the Jaredites traveling across Asia and was not paying much
attention to the speaker. Suddenly, I felt a strong prompting from the spirit
telling me I should listen to what the speaker was saying.
The speaker had a slide of Asia on the overhead projector. He said
that one of the greatest signs of global warming was the gradual
disappearance of what he called The Great Siberian Sea. He said that the
sea had reached its peak at about 3,500 to 2,000 B.C., but now (being the
1980s), the last remnants of it were fading away.
I looked at that slide and realized pieces of the puzzled I had not
understood. The land the Jaredites knew was not the same as the one we
know. In fact, being only a hundred years or so after the flood, it would
have been far different. Many lands would likely have had water still
receding from them. And though the scholar giving the talk did not
mention the flood at the time of Noah, which many scholars would have
laughed at, the thought was clear to me.

The flood of Noah was estimated in the time period he said, of
3,500 to 2,000 B.C. That would make sense why The Great Siberian Sea
was at its highest point then. Chances are that if it was just fading away in
the 1980s, Siberia in the time of the Jaredites could still have a lot of water
covering it.

As I put this book together, I tried to find any image that matched
the one in the slides the scholar showed that day. But information on The
Great Siberian Sea, as he described it, is minimal, and I have yet to find a
map. So, I devised a plan to replicate his slide the best I could. I took an
elevation map of central Asia and replaced the lowest elevations within the
mountain ranges with blue. The original map can be seen in Figure 11, and
the revised map is in Figure 12.
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