National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Paleo Slide Sets
National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Paleo
Slide Sets
Ice cores are obtained by drilling core samples of ice near the poles. There is a common misconception that the visible rings of light and dark ice are always annual rings.
Actually they are just hot / cold - hot / cold and more than one set of rings can form in a year. Growing up in New England, I've seen several such layers of snow and ice resulting from the storms of one new England winter. This is further demonstrated by the Lost squadron. In 1952, P-38 Lightning fighter planes ran out of gas and landed in Greenland. Then in 1990, a group started looking for the plains. They finally found them in May, 1992, under 250 ft and hundreds of layers of ice. Now it is true that neither of these is representative of the glaciers used for ice core analyses to day, but the could be been representative of those glaciers in the past.
This problem is recognized by those who date ice cores and so they use a number of other methods to find the annual layers. However most articles do not make a distinction between these so called annual layers and the visible layers. While these methods work good for relatively recent ice as one goes back in time they become less certain. One such method is 10Be/9Be isotopic analysis, but over time diffusion renders it useless detecting annual distinctions. Like wise 18O/16O isotopic analysis suffers from diffusion. Ice flow also blurs any indication of years so that ages for deeper ice are derived from models of variations in accumulation rate and ice flow. This makes ice core dating vary dependent on the theoretical models used, as such non of these methods are independent indicators of age and are calibrated to climatic models.
Ice flow
14C is also used to date ice cores but it has been
in part calibrated to ice cores and so it is not an independent
method.
All ice core "dates" are derived by calibrating the
various methods to the uniformitarian theoretical system. When
calibrated to the Creation theoretical system the dates derived
agree with time of the Flood.
Ice Cores and the Age of the Earth
Do Greenland ice cores show over one hundred thousand years of annual layers?