"Ice cores prove the earth is older than 6,000 years 1" (Claim #E873)
Response
- Contrary to popular belief, ice cores are not dated by simply counting layers. In many places, the ice is too mangled, and so evolutionists calculate the age by how deep the ice is, and how much ice they think accumulated each year. 2 But even evolutionists believe that the climate fluctuated in the past, 3 making these dates based on ice depth invalid.
- Ice can accumulate quickly even today. For instance, 250 feet of ice covered over a lost squadron of P-38s in just 50 years. 4 After the Flood, we would expect the climate to be unstable, laying down ice and layers much more quickly than today’s 5 average. 6
- Even visible layers do not necessarily represent one year each—they just represent one layer of ice. Multiple layers can form in a single year, similar to tree rings. A layer could represent a large snowstorm rather than an entire year.
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Sources
Rafferty, J. P. (2010). Glaciers, Sea Ice, and Ice Formation. New York, NY: Britannica Educational Pub. in association with Rosen Educational Services.
Notes
- http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131105081228.htm ↩
- Rafferty, 2010, p. 111: “Near the surface [of ice cores] it is possible to pick out annual layers by visual inspection. In some locations, such as the Greenland Ice-core Project/Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GRIP/GISP2) sites at the summit of Greenland, these annual layers can be traced back more than 40,000 years, much like counting tree rings. The result is a remarkably high-resolution record of climatic change. When individual layers are not readily visible, seasonal changes in dust, marine salts, and isotopes can be used to infer annual chronologies. Precise dating of recent layers can be accomplished by locating radioactive fallout from known nuclear detonations or traces of volcanic eruptions of known date. Other techniques must be used to reconstruct a chronology from some very deep cores. One method involves a theoretical analysis of the flow. If the vertical profile of ice flow is known, and if it can be assumed that the rate of accumulation has been approximately constant through time, then an expression for the age of the ice as a function of depth can be developed.” ↩
- Rafferty, 2010, p. 112: “Perhaps most exciting are recent ice core results that show surprisingly rapid fluctuations in climate, especially during the last glacial period (160,000 to 10,000 years ago) and probably in the interglacial period that preceded it. Detectable variations in the dustiness of the atmosphere (a function of wind and atmospheric circulation), temperature, precipitation amounts, and other variables show that, during this time period, the climate frequently alternated between full-glacial and nonglacial conditions in less than a decade. Some of these changes seem to have occurred as sudden climate fluctuations, called Dansgaard-Oeschger events, in which the temperature jumped 5 to 7°C (9 to 13°F), remained in that state for a few years to centuries, jumped back, and repeated the process several times before settling into the new state for a long time — perhaps 1,000 years. These findings have profound and unsettling implications for the understanding of the coupled ocean-atmosphere climate system.” ↩
- http://www.icr.org/article/355/ ↩
- Rafferty, 2010, p. 102: “The rate of precipitation on the Antarctic Ice Sheet is so low that it may be called a cold desert. Snow accumulates over much of the vast polar plateau is less than five cm (two inches) water equivalent per year. Only around the margin of the continent, where cyclonic storms penetrate frequently, does the accumulation rise to values of more than 30 cm (12 inches).” ↩
- http://creation.com/do-greenland-ice-cores-show-over-one-hundred-thousand-years-of-annual-layers ↩