Plane Flies in the Face of Glaciology

“An American fighter plane will be arriving in Britain from the United States next week—65 years after taking off,” reports BBC news on last week’s arrival of a World War II–era P-38 Lightning in Duxford, England.

The P-38’s 1942 flight to the U.K. ended when bad weather forced the pilot to land the plane on one of Greenland’s glaciers. Although the pilot—along with the 24 other airmen from seven other planes forced down—were rescued shortly thereafter, the planes were left and summarily buried under 250 ft (77 m) of ice.

While this story may seem like little more than curious historical trivia, it actually connects directly to the eons old-earthers see in ice cores drilled in such places as Greenland and Antarctica. First, Michael Oard describes how old-earthers use ice cores to argue for a timeline much longer than the bible clearly allows:

Many ice cores have been drilled deep into both the Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets since the 1960s. . . . It is observed today that these ice sheets incorporate dust, acids, pollution, etc. that cycle with the seasons. Near the top of the ice sheets, annual layers can be distinguished by measuring the many variables related to the seasons. . . . [G]laciologists further claim that they can count the annual layers downward . . . they arrive at 110,000 years for the top 90 percent of the ice sheet.

A biblical interpretation of the ice—one that takes into account such factors as the Flood and related events—can account for the current prominence of the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets during a short Ice Age of a few hundred years and the present climate for another 3,700-4,000 years.

Furthermore, Oard includes the story of the eight World War II craft that emergency-landed in Greenland. Oard writes:

[The planes] are at this depth because of the high precipitation that covered them. Such high precipitation is not typical for the remainder of the ice sheet, but gives us a hint of the possibilities when the ice sheet was much lower and the climate much different in the Ice Age.

The planes’ depth of coverage provides clear evidence that the uniformitarian assumptions underlying old-earth ice-core dating methods are shaky at best. Even so, old-earthers continue to tout ice cores as a “direct [measure] of the [old] age of the Earth.”