Christadelphian apologist Dave Burke has posted a rather useful article on his Academia Web Page:
What I appreciated most about this article is that Burke refutes a popular YEC "argument" that has been making the rounds on facebook and elsewhere, such as here:
Here is how one creationist sums up the "evidence":
Ice doesn't take millions of years to build up. Here's a great example of how we know that:These war planes were found under 250 feet of ice. Scientists claim these layers form very slowly over millions of years. Nope. Not true!The earth is young and created by God. Not millions of years at all!
In response to this, Burke writes:
Ice Core Dating
Claim: the discovery of World War II aeroplanes buried under 250 feet of ice and snow in Greenland refutes the assumptions upon which ice core dating are predicated.
Answer: 'Ice layers are counted by different methods (mainly, visible layers of hoar frost, visible dust layers, and layers of differing electrical conductivity) which have nothing to do with thickness. These methods corroborate each other and match with other independently determined dates (Seely 2003)
The airplanes landed near the shore of Greenland, where snow accumulation is rapid, at about 2 m per year. Allowing for some compaction due to the weight of the snow, that accounts for the depth of snow under which they are buried. The planes are also on an active glacier and have moved about 2 km since landing. Ice core dating takes place on stable ice fields, not active glaciers. The interior of Greenland, where ice cores were taken, receives much less snow. In Antarctica, where ice cores dating back more than 100,000 years have been collected, the rate of snow accumulation is much less still. A report of “many hundreds” of layers in the ice above the Lost Squadron may also be explained by the airplanes' location on Greenland. That location is relatively warm because it is low and more southerly; its surface gets repeatedly melted during the summer, creating multiple melt layers per year. At the site of the GISP2 ice core, melting occurs only about once every couple of centuries. Melt layers are easily distinguished in ice cores. The more than 100,000 layers in ice cores are definitely not melt layers (Seely 2003).’
Quoted from: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD410.html). See also the following article: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icecores.html
