An Out-of-Date Discovery

The question came years ago from an elderly gentleman seated in the window seat left of me, directed toward my wife on my right. Used to flying in Canada (for the most part involving traveling in a direct flight to your destination), my better half was obviously struggling to stay calm with the turbulence and more aggressive maneuvers being performed by the commuter jet we were on headed to Portland.

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With her white-knuckling the armrests and praying with her eyes snapped shut, I decided chatting with her was likely a lost cause until we landed. So I put my hand on hers, turned my attention to the fellow beside me to make small talk, and asked if he was traveling home.

Much to my surprise he said he was on his way to a bombardier’s convention, something I had never heard of before.

A Unique Encounter

He explained he was a WW2 veteran whose job in combat was to drop the payload from B-17 bombers, and he was on his way to a gathering of similar men who’d served in the same capacity on the wide variety of flying fortresses such as the B-24, B-26, and B-29 super fortresses during the war.

“We’re kind of like the dinosaurs,” he drawled. “There’s less and less of us each year.” Much to my delight, he was willing to dialogue about his experiences, such as the various enemy aircraft they’d encountered and how they were forced to wear electrical suits to keep them warm from the freezing cold when they had to fly higher away from the reach of enemy flack.

Unfortunately, he also related that the suit’s clumsy, multilayered nature often made it impossible to manipulate the release handle for the bomb drop, forcing him to remove the gloves and put grease on his hands so they wouldn’t stick to the metal as he gripped it and unleashed the munitions.

Interestingly, the only time I ever saw a glimmer of unease pass over his face was when I asked him if he’d ever come up against an ME 262. With a quick ripple of concern, he simply said, “Only one time,” turned away, and seemed resistant toward any further comment on it.

So I decided to change the subject and went back to less serious topics such as the expected weather forecast in Portland for the week etc. and thanked him for his past service as we exited the plane.

I could only imagine why he’d reacted the way he had when I mentioned the ME 262, as that German aircraft was the world’s first operational jet-powered fighter to see air-to-air combat in WW2. With its incredible speed and firepower, in comparison to most of the propeller-driven aircraft it was up against, it must have made a plodding bomber crew feel like sitting ducks.

I’d imagine coming up against something like that would have felt like battling alien technology—it would have been unnerving, like discovering an aircraft from a later era “out of time.”

A Plane Out of Time

Enter Glacier Girl, another WW2 wonder of design that was found very much out of place from where her discoverers imagined they would. The plane was buried a full 82 meters deep (269 ft.) inside the glacier it landed on in 1942.

Much has been made of the discovery of the legendary “Lost Squadron.” Insightful books, abundant articles, and dramatic documentaries have been devoted to the tale of the squad of six P-38 Lightnings and two B-17 bombers that were discovered trapped in ice less than 50 years after they had been ditched because of running out of fuel on the mission.

Enter Glacier Girl, another WW2 wonder of design that was found very much out of place from where her discoverers imagined they would. The plane was buried a full 82 meters deep (269 ft.) inside the glacier it landed on in 1942.

Even outside of the paradigm-breaking scientific discoveries we’ll explore later, the entire saga of the Lost Squadron is pretty captivating.

Indeed, just researching the courage of the WW2 airmen involved, studying the dynamic aircraft they served in back in the day, and then learning about the incredible rescue efforts and quirky technology the modern expeditions had to design and utilize in order to eventually retrieve the P-38 Lightning is truly mind-blowing!

The Real Key to the Story

The real key to our story here, which has much more impact on our big-picture understanding of reality, is that this whole story has occurred within the lifetime of many still alive today. It has eyewitness accounts from numerous people throughout history and the physical evidence found corroborates those accounts at virtually every turn.

This record of real history provides evidence that can be fact-checked and helps demonstrate that often what the average person (and many experts in their respective fields) has come to accept as “settled science,” definitive proof, and absolute truth can be turned on its head in a moment, often by the strangest of events.

This entire dramatic story should also cause us to reconsider one of the “greatest proofs” that Bible skeptics bring against the plain reading of the biblical record outlined in Genesis—the supposed rock-solid evidence of “millions of years” of earth history. Why?

Long Ages Undermining Biblical Authority

The “fact” of deep time has been used as a cudgel against biblical authority for well over a century now, paving the way for what many consider to be a scientific argument for an atheistic worldview, the story of evolution. The tie-in to our story here is that many people believe that ice core dating methods are additional, definitive proof of long ages having occurred on earth, contradicting the biblical timeline.

These types of scientific dating methods have influenced many people’s lack of belief in God. In many people’s minds, they think if the Bible can’t be trusted in one area as plainly written, then why trust it anywhere else?

If there were a way to explain all the incredible design we see in our world by natural processes over millions of years, why should we believe in a Creator God? Atheist Ernst Mayr (one of the twentieth century’s leading evolutionary biologists who admitted to rejecting God because of his evolutionary beliefs) once said, “The revolution began when it became obvious that the earth was very ancient rather than having been created only 6000 years ago. This finding was the snowball that started the whole avalanche.”1

The “avalanche” he’s referring to, of course, is the Darwinian Revolution. The Darwinian Revolution is the full-scale rejection of the belief in the Genesis creation account by most in Western culture because of the promotion of the story of evolution in its place.

Reliving the Story of the Lost Squadron

Before we get further into that, let’s look at a recap of the story of the Lost Squadron so you can better understand the significance of what I’ll be demonstrating later. To begin, let’s read the description of the book of the same name from an online bookstore which tees up the account nicely.

During World War II in 1942, a fleet of warplanes consisting of two B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers and six P-38 Lightning fighters were flying on a transfer run from North America to Scotland. During the leg of the flight from Greenland to Iceland, they ran into severe weather over the Denmark Strait and were forced to turn back. Unfortunately, all the landing fields within their fuel range were socked in under the same weather conditions. Running low on fuel, the two bombers and four of the Lightning fighters were forced to crash-land on the coast of Greenland. All personnel survived the landings and were eventually rescued, however the aircraft were abandoned to the elements.2

The book is laid out in three parts “The Legend,” “The Search,” and “The Recovery,” presented in five chapters, and includes a prologue, epilogue, and a detailed appendix. All these parts make for very interesting reading, even if you’re not a WW2 buff like me.

Not to spoil the story (for those of you who may wish to get yourself a copy), but Hayes’ book largely details how two friends, architect Richard Taylor and airplane dealer Patrick Epps, heard about the eight aircraft that had been abandoned on Greenland’s frozen landscape and how they later spearheaded several expeditions to find and recover them.

The first part, “The Legend,” provides the detailed background of the original WW2 mission, its crew members, and information on the individual aircraft. Parts 2 and 3, “The Search” and “The Recovery,” are truly fascinating because they get into the nitty-gritty of the attempts to find the planes by various different teams.

The most remarkable discovery of all was that the planes were found buried over 80 meters deep in solid ice!

These expeditions began in 1981, continued till the planes were initially detected via radar seven years later, then lasted up to 1992 when the P-38 that would be renamed Glacier Girl was brought to the surface. After returning to the surface, she was restored and made able to fly once again. The most remarkable discovery of all was that the planes were found buried over 80 meters deep in solid ice!

What No One Ever Imagined

Throughout this time, several recorded comments, based on the assumptions of the rescuers of the Lost Squadron, began to unravel many of the scientific presuppositions that Bible skeptics have used to undermine biblical authority. This quotation from Richard Taylor demonstrates the assumptions I’m referring to very clearly: “We thought that all we’d have to do is shovel the snow off the wings, fill ’em with gas, crank ’em up and fly ’em off into the sunset. Guess we couldn’t have been much more wrong.”3

Basically, no one dreamed the planes would be buried in over 80 meters of ice in only 40 years or so. Why? Up to this point, scientists had been making claims that ice core studies showed deposition rates far slower than this, with some deeper depths having occurred over hundreds of thousands of years.

Geologists would commonly cite fine layers in sedimentary rock deposits as evidence of annual layers having accrued slowly over thousands of years. Similarly, geoscientists assume that ice cores can be dated by counting what are assumed to be annual layers, particularly in their uppermost parts.

For example, as late as 1997 (five years after the retrieval of Glacier Girl), the Journal of Geophysical Research dated the ice on Greenland using ice core measurements this way.

The ice at 2800 m is dated at 110,000 years B.P. with an estimated error ranging from 1 to 10% in the top 2500 m of the core and averaging 20% between 2500 and 2800 m.4

Now, 110,000 theoretical years divided by 2,800 real meters would equal an average of 39.2 years per meter of accumulation. Assuming a similar rate of accumulation, when compared to the 80-plus meter depth the Lost Squadron was, the planes should have been there for over 3,000 years to be at the depth they were found (80 m x 39.2 years/m = 3,136 years), according to these published calculations.

With the planes being found at a depth of over 80 meters in just 40 years or so, that should have been at least an average of 2 meters per year instead of 1 meter about every 40 years, and even with their margin of error, that’s not even close.

The following quotation from The Lost Squadron book emphasizes how none of the expeditions expected anything close to the amount of accumulation that had occurred: “A B-17 tail-fin was twenty feet high, so there was every reason to believe the tip might be visible poking through a mound of snow.”5

Prior to the discovery of the Lost Squadron, apparently, no one had imagined ice accumulating at this rate. Here is another example of a 1993 New Scientist article referencing previous ice core dating, this time from Siberia rather than Greenland: “Frozen salamanders have been found in layers of ice 14 meters down, which were deposited in the Pleistocene age more than 12,000 years ago.”6

In this example, the math would indicate they believe the ice accumulated at an approximate rate of about 857 years per meter, a rate almost 22 times slower than in the Greenland study.

Now understand, although the two main players in the Lost Squadron saga were not professional scientists, Taylor and Epps were obviously quite intelligent and certainly understood the concepts behind these dating methods as demonstrated in this next quotation from the book.

Finally, they gave up on the magnetometer and dug an eight-foot hole to examine the characteristics of the densely packed ice. Ice lenses- layers in the ice that looked like the rings in a tree- were plainly visible. “Each one must represent a summer thaw”, Taylor deduced, drawing on his boy scout forest lore. He measured them and found they were about 18 inches apart. If, like tree rings, each lens represented a year, he concluded, the planes were about 40 feet deep. Everyone was stunned by the idea.7

At this point, everyone was shocked to think that the planes might have been buried to a depth of 40 feet in 40 years or so, let alone the true depth they later found them at, which was six times that amount!

Against the Common Wisdom

Now, scientists who believe in long ages will often admit that these types of dating methods aren’t an exact science, so they often include some possible fluidity (or fudge factors) to the ages they cite.

However, the overarching impression one takes away from reading these studies is that dates indicating the supposed slow and steady annual accumulation of ice over hundreds of thousands of years are commonplace.

The introduction to the British Antarctic Survey’s article on “Ice Cores and Climate Change” says, “Most ice core records come from Antarctica and Greenland, and the longest ice cores extend to 3km in depth. The oldest continuous ice core records to date extend 123,000 years in Greenland and 800,000 years in Antarctica.”8

The title of a 2019 article from Princeton University boldly claims, “Two Million-Year-Old Ice Cores Provide First Direct Observations of an Ancient Climate.”9

So it’s really no wonder that as you read through the account of the various expeditions over several years, all of those who participated (including several different scientific experts who joined the diverse missions) were absolutely blown away at the idea that the planes could possibly have been buried as deep as they had been in such a short time.

The common wisdom of the day was that science had shown the accumulation of these layers happening at a much slower rate than what it did. The scientists even disregarded the 1983 Icelandic expedition that used radar to indicate the planes were indeed that deep, as this quotation from The Lost Squadron book demonstrates:

The question was, how deep were the planes? The Icelanders had suggested they were 180–240 feet below the surface, but no one really believed that was possible. Most estimates of the aircraft’s depth ranged from an optimistic forty feet . . . to sixty or 80 feet.10

However, to make things even more mind-blowingly contrary to what the experts had predicted, it is plausible that the planes’ burial took place at an even more rapid rate.

So join us for Part 2 where we will explore even more evidence involved that dismantles old-earth dating methods and exposes the presuppositions behind them even further.