I don’t follow Ken Ham and his collection of Answers in Genesis blogs very much, but I do like to keep an eye on the Creation Ministries International (CMI) website.
Last month, they re-posted an article written by Dr. Carl Wieland, a former managing director of CMI. In the post, he claims an American World War II squadron buried under ice in Greenland disproves deep time/evolution and instead proves Noah’s flood!
Certainly, you would believe that is true, judging from some of the comments that CMI — in a rare break from the typical practice of YEC organizations — allows:
“Now this article contains the sort of depth charges/torpedoes which will sink many an evolutionist’s vessel to the 6,000-year bottom of the sea where it belongs….”
So what is going on, and why are professional glaciologists not racing to re-interpret their ice core dates based on this new revelation? Why has Dr. Wieland not accepted his Nobel Prize for proving evolution wrong and Noah’s flood to be true?
The good doctor starts by telling us that on the 15th of July, 1942, a squadron consisting of six P-38 Lightning fighter planes and two very large B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers set off for a British airfield. They never made it due to very bad weather closing their refueling stop in Iceland. Worse still, their home base closed too!
With fuel running low, the pilots attempted a crash landing on the east coast of Greenland. The pilots were rescued 9 days later but the planes were abandoned. In 1988, an expedition found that in 46 years the planes had been buried under 250 feet of ice and snow. According to Dr. Wieland, this shows that those pesky evolutionist are wrong and is does not take thousands and thousands of years for ice to build up. This case shows that glaciers really only formed in the 4,000 or so years since Noah’s flood!
Not surprisingly, Dr. Wieland has not updated his article to include the case of another aircraft that went missing in Greenland. This aircraft, a Navy P-2V Neptune patrol plane, went down over the Kronborg Glacier in 1962. However, in the summer of 1995, a crew of British geologists flew over the site and documented that human remains were still exposed and clearly visible on the ice. In other words, there had been no accumulation of snow at this location for over 30 years!
On the east coast of Greenland, where the 1942 squadron landed, snowfall is a much heavier, accumulating at an average rate of 7 feet (2 metres) per year. So, 7 ft per year times 46 years = 322 feet. This rate (which is an average, so some years would see less snow and others more), after allowing for some compaction due to the weight, is sufficient to account for the depth of snow the WWII planes were buried in. The interior of Greenland by comparison receives much less snowfall, about (0.3m/1 foot per year).
So while Dr. Wieland has definitely proven the amazing fact that snowfall rates vary in different parts of the world, it remains to be seen how this groundbreaking discovery will deliver the death blow to deep time and evolution.
With a magician’s flourish, Dr. Wieland attempts to equate the thickness of the snow burying the squadron with valid ice core samples retrieved by the joint European Greenland Ice-core Project (GRIP). By doing this he hopes to show that the “evolutionary” dates are wrong and the biblical time frame is correct.
The GRIP project retrieved ice core samples in excess of 3,000 metres. The GISP2 sample was dated using 42 parameters which agreed with each other and indicated ages in excess of 110,000 years!
But wait a minute: Where were the GRIP samples taken? In the interior of Greenland, where snow fall is a lot less. And where were the WWII planes buried? On the east coast of Greenland, where snowfall is a lot more. So Dr. Wieland is attempting to disprove ice core samples dated using 42 scientifically validated parameters (ice thickness is not one of these parameters by the way) from one location with a known rate of snowfall, by comparing it to the burial of some World War II planes in another location with a completely different rate of snowfall!
Oh dear. Maybe his Nobel Prize will have to wait a while longer.
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