Evidence of age - 1. Ice Cores

[philadiddle]

Saucy was saying in another thread that he had not seen actual evidence for an old earth so this is the first part in a small series on the age of the earth. For many of you on this forum, this will be information you've heard many times before, but for the newcomers this may be fresh information.

First, here is a link to the Nasa website explaining how ice core sampling works: Paleoclimatology: The Ice Core Record : Feature Articles

Also, if you are interested in a longer more detailed explanation, I would refer you to this post from the Christianforums archive. It has references to the scientific studies and it addresses many counterclaims (such as the lost squadron). (It's in 2 parts)

Christian Forums - View Single Post - The Quiet Thread
Christian Forums - View Single Post - The Quiet Thread

The following is my quickie explanation.

The isotopes in the air and the snow itself is different from summer to winter in the arctic. This is not an assumption, it is an observed fact.

Each year we can see different bands of trapped isotopes in the snowfall that record the change from summer to winter and back again. This is not looking at each layer of snow, since it snows multiple times in a year, we are looking at the change in isotopes which we know for a fact alter from summer to winter. We see that the snow accumulates and records this each year and each decade that we observe it happen. Again, there are no assumptions here, this is observed fact.

We can dig deeper into the ice and observe the same pattern of alternating isotopes in the ice that go back 100 years. Is it unreasonable to conclude that this has been happening for 100 years?

We can also dig deeper into the ice and observe the same pattern of alternating isotopes in the ice that go back 2,000 years. Is it unreasonable to conclude that this has been happening for 2,000 years?

Finally, we can dig deeper into the ice and observe the same pattern of alternating isotopes in the ice that go back 100,000 years. Is it unreasonable to conclude that this has been happening for 100,000 years?

There is no way that a flood can explain how ice froze with alternating seasonal bands. The record of ice in the arctic shows an age of 100,000+ years in the arctic. This is not some atheist conspiracy, it is an objective conclusion based on observed facts.

A young earth model cannot explain how the ice formed this way. However, what we observe in the ice fits nicely into an old earth model.

 

[Papias]

Philaddidle, tell me to go away if I'm getting ahead of the conversation here, but it might be worth pointing out that any young-earth explanation of the ice core data also has to provide a response to this:

"why do the dozens of various dating methods (including C14, K-Ar, varves, dendrochronology, ice cores, obsidian, protein racecimization, speleotherms, superposition, geologic event dating, geomagnetic polarity, Pb/U, association, Rb/St, and others), agree with each other when more than one can be used on the same sample, again and again, over thousands of tests on hundreds of samples?"

Papias

 

[philadiddle]

Philaddidle, tell me to go away if I'm getting ahead of the conversation here, but it might be worth pointing out that any young-earth explanation of the ice core data also has to provide a response to this:

"why do the dozens of various dating methods (including C14, K-Ar, varves, dendrochronology, ice cores, obsidian, protein racecimization, speleotherms, superposition, geologic event dating, geomagnetic polarity, Pb/U, association, Rb/St, and others), agree with each other when more than one can be used on the same sample, again and again, over thousands of tests on hundreds of samples?"

Papias

This is part 1, so yes, you are getting ahead of things

You don't have to go away though, your input is appreciated.

 

[juvenissun]

Ice core is a bad example to argue against YEC. At the best, it dates back to Pleistocene age. Even the earth is as old as any age in the Cenozoic, it is still a young earth.

 

[philadiddle]

Ice core is a bad example to argue against YEC. At the best, it dates back to Pleistocene age. Even the earth is as old as any age in the Cenozoic, it is still a young earth.

All I'm doing is showing that the ice took at least 100,000 years to form. Do you agree with that?

 

[juvenissun]

All I'm doing is showing that the ice took at least 100,000 years to form. Do you agree with that?

According to all the data, I have no problem to take it as a model.

 

[shernren]

I would just point out that we've recently discussed the issues with a "presuppositional defense" ("you have your evolutionist presuppositions and I have my creationist ones") at length in this thread: http://www.christianforums.com/t7562718-7/#post58242488 with a fairly similar physical example, namely the Lake Suigetsu varves.

 

[Saucy]

I'm going to post some creationist answers from AIG, so please don't roll your eyes or say PRATT. If AIG is wrong, then I'm looking for actual evidence against what is posted and not "Oh that source isn't reliable" etc...

Seely states that surface hoar frost forms only during the summer due to sunshine and fog. However, surface hoar frost is only a minor player in the annual layer method; depth hoar is the main marker.17 Depth hoar develops when a large, vertical temperature gradient causes vapour to sublime, diffuse and crystallize in a layer.18 This occurs just below the surface, mainly during the summer. However, it has been observed from snow pits that many depth-hoar/wind slab couplets can form each summer.19,20,21,22 Alley and colleagues measured about 15 alternating depth-hoar/finer-grained wind crusts per year in snow pits at the top of the Greenland Ice Sheet.23,24 These layers were observed to have formed by individual storms.24 Although considered rare today, winter depth hoar can also form, but it is normally thin and discontinuous.23,25,26 Storms can cause depth hoar layers if the temperature gradient is sufficient during the changes between warm and cold sectors of storms. These depth hoar complexes, as they are called, can usually be counted as annual layers in the top portion of the GISP2 core. It is more likely that a subannual depth hoar layer formed by a storm would be counted as an annual signal, if the snowfall were significantly higher in the past, as in the Creation/Flood model for the middle and lower portions of the ice core.4,16

Seely claims that dust variations are primarily seasonal, so that every dust band, whether counted visually or by LLS, are evidence for annual layers. Such dust bands are mainly responsible for the counting of annual layers from around 12,000 years to 110,000 years and even older in the uniformitarian timescale of the GISP2 ice core. Although dust bands are generally annual today, this does not mean they were annual in the past. The period between 12,000 and 110,000 years would correspond to the Ice Agega very dusty period with a unique climate. In the compressed Creation/Flood model with much thicker annual layers during the Ice Age, the dust represents an extremely dusty atmosphere, especially near glacial maximum and during deglaciation. Storms would be very dirty and multiple bands of dust could be deposited on the ice sheet by several mechanisms, such as by dry deposition between storms or during showery periods in one storm. In a high snowfall model, such as the Creation/Flood model, one can find oscillations in dust at almost any frequency, which is demonstrated when Meese and colleagues found 25,000 more annual dust layers using a finer analysis!
Alley admits that subannual events can be produced during one year in all the annual layer methods, storms being one of the mechanisms:

‘Fundamentally, in counting any annual marker, we must ask whether it is absolutely unequivocal, or whether non-annual events could mimic or obscure a year. For the visible strata (and, we believe, for any other annual indicator at accumulation rates representative of central Greenland), it is almost certain that variability exists at the sub-seasonal or storm level, at the annual level and for various longer periodicities (2-year, sunspot, etc). We certainly must entertain the possibility of misidentifying the deposit of a large storm or a snow dune as an entire year or missing a weak indication of a summer and thus picking a 2-year interval as 1 year.’ 27
​

If one starts with the uniformitarian paradigm, it is easy to see how the various methods appear to be corroborating. However, when one steps back and questions the unspoken starting assumptions and allows the parameters to vary by the full range available, completely different consistent results can be obtained. This shows the importance of where we start.

Ice Cores vs the Flood - Answers in Genesis

I think that's a good article that answers some questions. How can you be completely sure that every layer represents one year? You couldn't have variable circumstances that up to three or four different layers could have happened within one year?

The flood certainly would've changed the world's weather in a major fashion. You have water bursting out of the ground (carrying dust and dirt with it) and water falling out of the sky, the shifting and moving of layers of dirt which may have cause volcanic eruptions all over the world on a scale never seen before.

If you were to look at the flood as a real event and the consequences it would have brought and the power it would've had to change the world's climate, you probably might conclude that every layer might not be equal to one year. That's supposing that the environment over the past 100,000 years had never changed and was always the same. But I could see how the flood could lay several layers of ice, both from the ground and from the sky and make one layer look like it was from one year's time.

If you looked at it from a scientific viewpoint, not taking a major event like a flood into account, you would get the conclusion that you have.

 

[philadiddle]

How does this explain the alternating ratios of Oxygen 16 and Oxygen 18? Why would a flood make separate layers of dust, would it all be mixed together? How could snow fall between the layers of dust if the layers of dust were put down by the flood?

The article also says "in a high snowfall model, such as the Creation/Flood model." What model is he talking about? How does the creation model imply more snow?

I'm just looking for a clear picture of how this can form in 6,000 years. The article doesn't explain how. If the flood laid things down differently, or if the pre-flood world caused things to be laid down differently, why does the pattern seem to continue on back in time unchanged? Wouldn't there be a point where it would start to look different?

 

[Saucy]

If we supposed that the pre-flood world was mostly tropical. The green house effect caused by the firmament in the atmosphere. It doesn't have to be very thick to cause greenhouse as only a hundred years worth of car exhaust is enough to cause global warming to this degree in our present day.

There is evidence of tropical plants in Alaska and Antarctica. A scientist would probably say that it's evidence of shifting continents. Maybe. I'm not opposed to the idea that continents shifted after the earth burst forth water from the middle of what is now the Atlantic Ocean. But when you have that much water suddenly falling from the sky, the global temperatures dropping very, very rapidly as the heat trapped inside escapes, you suddenly have a mega-blizzard...water falling now as ice and snow. You're going to have the summer isotope particles (remnants of the warmer climate?) and the new winter, colder weather particles mixing as the tremendous amount of snow falls.

As the water comes out of the ground, I would also imagine that it brought with it layers of dirt and dust and those summer isotopes.

I know it probably sounds like fantastical imagination, but if you add the flood into the mix, you can see how it may be possible to have a ton of ice dropped into place at once. You even have other evidence, such as immediately frozen wholly mammoths with green food still on their teeth and digesting in their stomachs. How does a lumbering Mammoth suddenly get encased in ice and snow to the point that he's perfectly preserved unless he was flash frozen and covered immediately.

 

[Saucy]

And I'm not saying that my answers are the right answers, but rather there are other explanations for how things are the way they are. If you put supernatural acts of God into the equation, if God does exist and does the things that He does, you get very different answers than science can come up with, doing scientific work without adding God into the equation.

If God exists (and I believe wholeheartedly that He does), then we need to take a step back and think of the ways that God could have change the naturalistic views of the world. Either He was involved or He wasn't. If He was, then you can't use science as a reliable way to measure anything and get credible results. There has be a point in time in your life where you accept something by faith and not hard facts. That doesn't make you ignorant either.

I may not know how old the earth is. When Genesis said, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," there is no timeline that states how long ago that was. But I do believe in Noah's Flood and think there is ample evidence of it all around the globe and if this supernatural even did indeed happen, then it would change a lot of scientific theories. In fact, doesn't science believe if all the glaciers and ice caps melted, that all the land would be covered by water? Like that Kevin Costner movie.

So it is plausible the world was covered with water and a lot of it retreated and built up as ice and as the continents shifted, creating deep ocean trenches, the water was able to recede from the land.

 

[juvenissun]

How does this explain the alternating ratios of Carbon 16 and Carbon 18? Why would a flood make separate layers of dust, would it all be mixed together? How could snow fall between the layers of dust if the layers of dust were put down by the flood?

The article also says "in a high snowfall model, such as the Creation/Flood model." What model is he talking about? How does the creation model imply more snow?

I'm just looking for a clear picture of how this can form in 6,000 years. The article doesn't explain how. If the flood laid things down differently, or if the pre-flood world caused things to be laid down differently, why does the pattern seem to continue on back in time unchanged? Wouldn't there be a point where it would start to look different?

You should change that. Oxygen, not carbon.

A global flood can certainly make layered deposits locally, or regionally. Even a local flood can do that.

 

[philadiddle]

If we supposed that the pre-flood world was mostly tropical. The green house effect caused by the firmament in the atmosphere. It doesn't have to be very thick to cause greenhouse as only a hundred years worth of car exhaust is enough to cause global warming to this degree in our present day.

So far you have reduced the timeline that the ice could form to 4,400 year which is the time since the flood.

But when you have that much water suddenly falling from the sky, the global temperatures dropping very, very rapidly as the heat trapped inside escapes, you suddenly have a mega-blizzard...water falling now as ice and snow.

I'm not sure if there is a model that could produce those effects, but I'll let you have it and we can assume that the flood made a mega-blizzard.

You're going to have the summer isotope particles (remnants of the warmer climate?) and the new winter, colder weather particles mixing as the tremendous amount of snow falls.

Here's where things fall apart for you. We have 120,000 annual layers, which is actually alternating bands so it is 240,000 bands of alternating isotopes/dust/etc.

The last 4,400 years had no major known events that would have caused extra layers to be formed so out of our 240,000 layers we are left with 231,200 (240,000 - 8,800). If we allow the flood 1 year to lay these down it means that during that year it laid down 26.4 layers per hour!!! (231,200/ 365 / 24)

How could alternating dust and ratios of isotopes form that fast? Not only that, but there are several different snowfalls that make up each layer. It's simply impossible.

And as mentioned earlier, why don't we see a change in the ice cores when we reach the flood? It seems to have the same features as we observe today that continue on uninterupted for 120,000 years.

As the water comes out of the ground, I would also imagine that it brought with it layers of dirt and dust and those summer isotopes.

How does the ground maintain the appropriate ratio of oxygen-16 and oxygen-18? And then how does that mix with the winter ratio in the air to lay one on top of the other in thin layers at a rapid pace?

I know it probably sounds like fantastical imagination, but if you add the flood into the mix, you can see how it may be possible to have a ton of ice dropped into place at once.

If you search back far enough in my posts you will see that I started out on this board as a creationist, so your attempt at explaining this and your criticisms are understood. However, I hope that you can look at this objectively and see the obvious explanation, which is that the ice took 120,000 years to form. There seems to be a great worry that creationists have that data is assumed to support an old earth and is thus interpretted that way. In reality, the ice could be 6,000 years old and it wouldn't matter as far as the age of the earth goes, we are just forced to conclude it is older than that based on our objective observations.

 

[philadiddle]

You should change that. Oxygen, not carbon.

You are right, I caught that in my last reply I was typing while you posted that. Thanks!

 

[Saucy]

Well I'm not supposing that one flood created the entire ice sheet either. That plus 4,400 years of alternating winters and summers. If you go back, you're going to find that there are numerous variations. Some summers it may not have gotten above freezing in certain locals. There may have been certain locations where their has always been ice on the earth from creation when the earth was without form and void. There may have been places with extended summers and warmer than usual seasons where very little to no snow/ice fell.

So to say that the ice core shows very uniform layers of alternating seasons as if there have been no change in the climate for 100,000 years doesn't make any sense to me.

I know that along warm and cold fronts, moisture can travel all the way from the Gulf of Mexico and affect weather in Canada and a front from Canada can affect weather in Mexico. The existence of jet streams carrying along different particles, even from volcanic eruptions thousands of miles away can affect what appears to be a single year in a core sample.

Just like with tree rings. You don't automatically get a tree ring every year without the right conditions. A drought could stunt a tree's growth, not allowing a new ring to grow. There you have it, a tree that is older than it appears to be because of a few years worth of drought. Or maybe it's even possible that a tree is younger than it appears to be because weather conditions allowed for extra growth and the appearance of two rings.

Tree rings and core samples and even carbon dating is all based upon supposed theories that everything has remained the same. Oxygen levels, carbon levels, growth rates, weather etc...If even one level was off, like let's say there was extra carbon in the atmosphere as is what a lot of creationists believe, it would go to show that trees have grown at extra high rates. We're seeing right now an explosion in the growth of trees and foliage because of the extra carbon in the atmosphere. Trees use carbon.

Unless you know the exact level of gasses and weather conditions, etc, you can't accurately predict anything.

 

[philadiddle]

Well I'm not supposing that one flood created the entire ice sheet either. That plus 4,400 years of alternating winters and summers. If you go back, you're going to find that there are numerous variations. Some summers it may not have gotten above freezing in certain locals. There may have been certain locations where their has always been ice on the earth from creation when the earth was without form and void. There may have been places with extended summers and warmer than usual seasons where very little to no snow/ice fell.

This is wild speculation. You are using much more bias and speculation than you are accusing your counterparts of. There is no evidence that would lead us to think this other than trying to fit the data with the conclusion that you want to be true.

So to say that the ice core shows very uniform layers of alternating seasons as if there have been no change in the climate for 100,000 years doesn't make any sense to me.

Of course not every year is exactly the same. Some have more/less snowfall in some years than other years, some oxygen levels are generally higher some years than others etc. But what we don't see is 4,400 years of ice, then ice that was laid down differently as if it was put there by a flood. Try to work out the math, if there is data for 120,000 years of ice, how many is that per year in the last 4,400 years? Why do we only observe 1 alternating layer of isotopes per year? What conditions allowed it to alternate bands faster? The objective conclusion of a long period of time makes sense and fits the data with no fanciful explanations needed.

I know that along warm and cold fronts, moisture can travel all the way from the Gulf of Mexico and affect weather in Canada and a front from Canada can affect weather in Mexico. The existence of jet streams carrying along different particles, even from volcanic eruptions thousands of miles away can affect what appears to be a single year in a core sample.

We don't observe that affecting the annual layers in the ice. Again, no assumptions needed here on my part, I'm basing this on observed fact.

(I'm saving tree rings for another thread so I cut that part out.)

Unless you know the exact level of gasses and weather conditions, etc, you can't accurately predict anything.

This is completely untrue. We know that the ratio of oxygen-16 and oxygen-18 changes from the winter to the summer. Do I know EXACTLY what the levels were ten years ago? No I don't, but we still know that it alternates between the 2 seasons.

 

[shernren]

Wow. Where do I start?

1. Note that the AiG article starts by listing Paul Seely's various articles on the raqiya, a word translated as "firmament" in Genesis 1. Now regardless of Seely's actual views on that word (and I happen to disagree with him over that), don't you think that Seely's Hebrew translation philosophy is irrelevant at best and a subtle character attack at worst?

To put things in perspective, remember that long article I wrote about Grady McMurtry's genetics gaffes? Imagine if I had started the article, not by talking about genetics, but by pointing out that he denies that global warming is caused by humans, and going on to mock how scientifically backward he is. Now wouldn't that have decreased my credibility in your eyes?

Just the same, you should be wary of any source that starts a reply with a personal attack.

2. Michael Oard quotes Seely as saying that "surface hoar frost forms only during the summer due to sunshine and fog ... [but] depth hoar is the main marker." (italics in original)

Now, let's work through some of the technicalities. Surface hoar is when fine, dense crystals of ice form on a cold surface due to condensation followed by freezing. (The frost you see on a winter morning is normally surface hoar.) If you have a nice thick layer of surface hoar, then water from the crystals of the top 5cm of it can sublime (go from solid directly to gas), with the vapor passing through the hoar to reach the surface.

Now, the smaller a crystal is, the more surface area it has relative to its mass, and so the more water it will tend to lose to sublimation. This creates a feedback effect: some crystals happen to be smaller than others as they start subliming, so they quickly dwindle away to nothing; other crystals happen to be larger than others as they start subliming, so they happen to be able to catch the water vapor coming from the shrinking crystals and grow. (The bigger they grow, the more protected they are from subliming away into nothing, while still being able to catch a little bit more vapor to keep growing.)

This has two effects: the snow underneath forms large, loosely packed crystals called depth hoar, while whatever vapor survives to reach the top can recondense as even finer and denser crystals (since the water vapor is more concentrated) which eventually consolidate to form a wind slab.

Now, what did Paul Seely originally say?

But, the annual summer sun regularly heats the first inch of snow during the day with the result that much of it evaporates, leaving it light and airy. Then during the summer nights the snow surface and the air just above it cool and form fog. The fog in turn condenses as frost on the surface of the snow. The result of this daily warming, cooling, and frost-forming is that an inch of fine-grained high density snow becomes two inches of coarse-grained low density snow called hoar.
​

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2003/PSCF12-03Seely.pdf (warning: PDF file)

Based on what I described above, it's clear that Seely is describing the simultaneous formation of depth hoar ("two inches of coarse-grained low density snow") and a wind slab ("frost on the surface of the snow").

How could Michael Oard have read a paragraph that ends with coarse-grained low density snow and concluded that it was about the formation of surface hoar, not depth hoar - and made that out to be such a great talking point? I leave that to your imagination.

3. Michael Oard makes a big deal of the fact that 25,000 extra annual layers were found from 2300 to 2800 m in the ice core based on dust storms. This is a silly point for several reasons:

i) It does nothing to discredit the top 2300 m of ice, which has nearly 50,000 annual ice layers - already at least five times larger than a creationist can explain.

ii) Remember, in the ideal creationist world, the GISP2 ice core would only have a few thousand layers. Every additional layer is a layer the creationist has to explain away, and the finding of 25,000 additional layers really should only mean 25,000 extra headaches!

iii) But here's the real beef. How did the scientists know that they were supposed to find 25,000 additional layers? The reason is that the oxygen isotope ratio records in the GISP2 ice core from 2300 m to 2800 m matched up with the isotope ratios in the Vostok ice core, which had been independently dated to about 110,000 years old; but their visual counting up to then had only found about 85,000 layers in the GISP2 core up to then. A finer resolution allowed them to find the remaining 25,000 layers and tie the two numbers together.

(It's amazing that the creationists will even admit that the layers could be found. Wouldn't it have been more sensational if the GISP2 ice core had been dated to 85,000 years using one method and 110,000 years using another, and the dratted scientists just couldn't find the difference, showing how useless old-earth age measurements are?)

Now the oxygen isotope ratios show the average temperature around the area at the time the snow was laid. So two ice cores have the same temperature records going back 110,000 annual layers: surely that's a snap for creationists to explain, right? Except that the GISP2 ice core was dug up in Greenland, and the Vostok ice core was dug up in Antarctica.

So in order for the creationists to explain the fact that dust layers in GISP2 match up with oxygen isotope ratios in both GISP2 and Vostok, they should have to posit that for several years, not only were dust storms frequent enough in Greenland that "annual" dust and snow layers could be continuously deposited every day, but that every time an "annual" layer was being deposited in Greenland, a layer of snow was being laid down in Vostok on the other side of the Earth at exactly the right temperature so as to convince us that they were laid down simultaneously and annually. Every day. For hundreds of years.

That isn't an alternative explanation, that's a cruel joke.

 

[Saucy]

Okay so how do you explain the same ice cores on opposite sides of the globe?

And can someone explain for me in layman's terms winter and summer isotopes and how they differ?

 

[philadiddle]

Okay so how do you explain the same ice cores on opposite sides of the globe?

You'll have to give me specific examples and explain what you mean by "the same".

And can someone explain for me in layman's terms winter and summer isotopes and how they differ?

Simply put, oxygen-16 is the common form of oxygen in the atmosphere. When the temperature goes up or down, the level of oxygen-18 also goes up or down. When we take a sample from the winter and a sample from the summer of the ratio between these we find a change. This alternates from summer to winter, it does not alternate everytime there is a snowfall.

It doesn't have to be perfect either. If one summer is not as hot as the previous summer the ratio will simply not have gone up as much, however there will still be a noticeable change from winter. We don't have to know exactly what the temperature was or make any assumptions about what the ratio should have been. We observe ice capturing this, we don't assume that the ice captures it. We observe this alternating pattern continue many tens of thousands of times, we don't assume that it alternates tens of thousands of times. There is no way for a flood to lay down a pattern of alternating ratios of isotopes that mimick how annual snowfall captures them.

I hope that makes sense to you.

And BTW, I'm enjoying our respectful back and forth on this topic.

 

[Saucy]

Okay. So how do you get varying summer and winter varying isotope layers in a place like Antarctica where it's always cold? The highest temperature ever recorded there is just below 60 degrees Fahrenheit. There are no places in Antarctica that have an average monthly temperature above freezing!

During a recent decade, East Antarctica thickened at an average rate of about 1.8 centimetres per year while West Antarctica showed an overall thinning of 0.9 centimetres per year (Davis et al., Science 2005) doi:10.1126/science.1110662. For the contribution of Antarctica to present and future sea level change, see sea level rise. Because ice flows, albeit slowly, the ice within the ice sheet is younger than the age of the sheet itself.

With ice constantly shifting, moving, thawing, adding I still don't see how you can get accurate readings. But with the temperatures always cold, how can you measure differences? You would think, from two different climates and the rarity of a 'warm' summer in Antarctica, you wouldn't be able to get any measurable layers.