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Ice Cores and the Age of the Earth
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GOD SAID, Exodus 20:11:

For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

I contacted you about a month ago, but received no reply. I thought I would give it one more try: I understand that you subscribe to a young Earth belief. This may, in fact, be true, but I have a question. I have viewed ice cores with rings that can be visually counted going back more than 250,000 years. How can these ice cores exist if the earth is only six thousand years old? Respectfully submitted, H. K.

GodSaidManSaid apologizes to H. K. for not getting to him sooner. We receive many, many electronic communiques and, unfortunately, cannot respond to them all. We attempt to answer the most frequently-asked questions on the web in the form of a Weekly Webcast.

H. K. should note that scientific creationism has no problem defending against this theoretical challenge, and be aware that anti-creationism, anti-young Earth proponents are certainly not unified in many of their discipline’s assumptions.

Much of the evolutionary paradigm is built on philosophy and not science, and all of it is based on false assumptions. Concerning its philosophy, 1967 Nobel Peace Prize in Science winner Dr. George Wald said the following:

When it comes to the origin of life on this earth, there are only two possibilities: creation or spontaneous generation (evolution). There is no third way. Spontaneous generation was disproved 100 years ago, but that leads us only to one other conclusion: that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds (personal reasons); therefore, we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance.

A fundamental false assumption made by evolutionists is that of uniformitarianism, which is the notion that all geological processes happen at a constant rate over the vast stretches of time. This, they claim, makes it possible to extrapolate the age of the earth and the universe by incorporating dating techniques built on the uniformitarian assumption. The simple facts supporting the Noahidic flood are testimonies that destroy the uniformitarian notion. A global water catastrophe is certified by flood strata encompassing the earth with fish fossils on nearly every mountain peak in the world, including clam fossils at the top of Mt. Everest, fossil graveyards created by water action, and much more. Does the above sound like all geological processes happened at a uniform rate?

H. K. speaks of counting snow and ice layers, which are supposed to have been laid down one layer per year and thus dating the age of the ice measured. This is said to work in the same way as counting growth rings to establish the age of a tree. The reader should note that cyclical geological chronology is coming up short. The following excerpt is from Weather Cycles: Real Or Imaginary by W.J. Burroughs:

There is one further example of cyclical behavior in geological records which needs to be taken on its own. This is what appeared to be the most stunning evidence of solar influence on the weather. It came from the work of George Williams in South Australia. He became intrigued in 1979 by the laminated sandstones and siltstones in the Elatina formation in South Australia which appeared to reveal the Sun’s influence on the climate in the Precambrian era.The geological explanation of the Elatina formation was that the layers were standard varves which were produced from the sediment when turbid glacial meltwater filled a lake each summer.The laminations studied occupied a 10-meter thick unit in the 60-m thick formation. This contained roughly 19,000 laminations which contained 1580 cycles.All of this bore an uncanny resemblance to the observed variations in sunspot number which have occurred since 1700. This led to two fascinating hypotheses. First, that the behavior of the Sun had remained relatively unchanged for 700 million years. Second, that for all this time, solar activity had been modulating the weather. But subsequent analysis of this record and others from Australia suggests that the explanation may be lunar rather than solar. The new explanation is that the laminations record the variations in sediment laid down by daily tides. So the 19,000 laminations studied would have been deposited in just 56 years rather than the 19,000 “years” originally assumed.

The word “varve,” used in the following paragraph that was taken from the American Journal of Science, is defined as follows: “varve: annually deposited layers of clay or silt in a lake used to determine the chronology of glacial sediments.” The paragraph in question reads:

The Arkport Flood Control Reservoir near Hornell, N.Y., held water for the first time during the spring of 1940. This flood had 3 peaks over a period of 2 weeks. The sediments deposited during this period form what appear to be three typical varves. . . . A series of varvelike bands, not readily distinguishable from varves, may be deposited in a very short time and may by no means indicate the number of years required for the formation of a given deposit. [End of quote]

Glaciologists have drilled deep down into the ice of Greenland and the Antarctic. One particular core drilling is the Vostok core, where counting the layers of ice and snow has delivered a supposed age of 420,000 years. Could these layers be telling a different story?

Keep in mind that the uniformitarian hypothesis is built on a premise void of the worldwide catastrophe that happened about 4,500 years ago — the Noah flood. Atmospheric scientist Michael J. Oard was published in the July 2003 issue of Impact, which is published by ICR—the Institute for Creation Research. The following excerpts are from his article titled “Are Polar Ice Sheets Only 4,500 Years Old?”

There certainly is an alternative explanation for the origin of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets within the creationist time frame. To start with, the volume of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is 26.4 million cubic kilometers with an average depth of 1900 meters. The corresponding figures for the Greenland Ice Sheet are a volume of 2.9 million cubic kilometers and an average depth of 1600 meters. All this ice represents an average depth of 3.1 kilometers if spread over the entire United States. But, this amount of ice does not demand an inordinate amount of time to accumulate. At the present average precipitation rate, assuming no melting, the Antarctic Ice Sheet would build up to its present height in only 10,000 years while the Greenland Ice Sheet would build in only 5,000 years. In the creationist model, the bulk of the ice sheets built up during a 700-year post-Flood Ice Age with much higher precipitation, represented by the lower half of the GRIP and GRIP2 cores. Further accumulation of snow and ice after the Ice Age would have increased the volume upwards to the present day.

Again, Oard weighs in concerning sub-annual layers:

In the creationist model, the well-defined annual layers would be obvious near the surface, but they would be sub-annual deeper down, the number of sub-annual layers per year increasing with depth. It is known that sub-annual events show up within the top annual layers. These sub-annual signatures may be the result of individual storms, or they could be cycles of sunny, mild weather alternating with cool, stormy weather. These sub-annual layers can mimic annual layers in the measured variables. For instance, enough variability exists in the precipitation from some mid-latitude storms to account for the annual amplitude of the oxygen isotope ratio. In the uniformitarian model, it is assumed that storms and short weather cycles would be smoothed and obliterated deeper in the ice by compression and diffusion. However, in the creationist model, these sub-annual fluctuations would be expected to remain and be counted as “annual” by the uniformitarian scientists.

Dust bands are assumed by the uniformitarians to be annual, but just like the varve, things aren’t always what they are assumed to be. Oard continues:

Creationists, on the other hand, point out that much dust is known to have occurred in the Ice Age part of the Greenland Ice Sheet. When the atmosphere is loaded with dust, a storm can lay down multiple dust bands separated by less dusty ice. Showers in the precipitation sector would lay down variable amounts of dust in the snow. The finer the scale of measurement for this dust, the more oscillations in the dust will be detected. It is possible to pick up hundreds and perhaps thousands of dust wiggles in one year when measuring at a very fine scale.

Finally, Oard writes:

The bottom line in dating ice cores is really the assumed age of the ice sheets which is based on the time scale from deep-sea cores. The deep-sea time scale is built into the dating of the ice sheets by the use of flow models and time markers, which act as a first guess to the annual layer thickness. The flow model assumes the ice sheets have been more or less in equilibrium for millions of years. This first guess is used to determine the resolution of the measurements down the core, insuring that multiple measurements per annual layer are “counted.” No matter what resolution is used, the glaciologist is able to pick up oscillations in the data record that he assumes are annual but which might actually be sub-annual.The deep-sea core time scale is likewise built upon the assumption of the astronomical or Milankovitch theory of the Ice Age or ages that is far from proved. Antarctic ice cores are dated by this method, since the accumulation on this ice sheet is so low that annual layer dating cannot be applied, except in shallow coastal cores with higher snowfall. So, the 420,000 years obtained near the bottom of the Vostok ice core is based on preconceived ideas on the ages of ocean sediment, which is based on the astronomical theory of the Ice Age. In other words, the uniformitarian scientists date the ice sheets to hundreds of thousands of years because they believe the ice sheets are old to begin with. They have “proved” only what they have assumed!

On this website, the incontrovertible truth of God’s Word is declared. Let there be no doubt about it in your mind: In six days, God created you and me from the dust of the earth, and created the earth from that which is invisible, a little over 6,000 years ago.

GOD SAID, Exodus 20:11:

For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

The genealogical record in the scriptures concludes that this miraculous creation took place a little over 6,000 years ago.

MAN SAID: What foolishness! Everyone knows there is no God of creation, but only evolution, and the process of evolution took billions of years. Layers in ice cores prove a very old Earth!

Now you have THE RECORD.

References:

King James Bible

Alley, R.B., et al., “Visual-Stratigraphic dating of the GISP2 ice core: basis, reproducibility, and application,” Journal of Geophysical Research 102, C12 (1997), pp 26,367-26,381

Lindsay, D., “The Dinosaur Dilemma,” Christ For The Nations, vol 35, no 8, 11/82

Meese, D.A., Gow, A.J., Alley, R.B., Zielinski, G.A., Grootes, P.M., Ram, M., Taylor, K.C., Mayewski, P.A., and Bolzan, J.F., “The Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 Depth-Age Scale: Methods and Results,” Journal of Geophysical Research 102, C12 (1997), pp 26,411-26,423

Oard, M., “Are Polar Ice Sheets Only 4,500 Years Old?” Impact Publications, July 2003, Institute for Creation Research

Vardiman, L., “Ice Cores and the Age of the Earth,” Institute for Creation Research, El Cajon, CA, 1993

Vardiman, L., Sea-Floor Sediment and the Age of the Earth (Institute for Creation Research, El Cajon, CA, 1996).

Wood, A.E., “Multiple Banding of Sediments Deposited During a Single Season,” American Journal of Science, vol 245 (5/47), pp 304-312