Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Larry Vardiman explains the nature of ice cores and how their interpretation is used for dating the age of the earth.
DEL: Well Larry, that brings us to an issue that a lot of people have and has to do with ice cores and the dating associated with those ice cores. What has your study shown?
LARRY: Well first of all ice cores are made generally in Greenland and Antarctica. That’s where they come from. Greenland is kind of a bathtub shaped region in the northern hemisphere and it’s accumulated ice from after the Genesis flood and it’s still there today because the conditions around Greenland are such that it replenishes the ice as it slowly slides off into the ocean but it maintains it. Same thing on the Antarctica.
The difference is Antarctica is at the south pole and it’s like 9000 feet thick. It’s a very large amount of ice there and it’s basically maintained itself the whole time. Cores are taken by drilling about a six inch to eight inch core down through the ice, drilling down all the way down to bedrock at the bottom and pulling them out very gently maintaining them in cold conditions so they’re preserved. And then you look at the detail in the ice through that long length. The ones from Greenland are about 4000-5000 feet long.
The ones in Antarctica up to 9000 feet long. And in there you have visual layers that you can look at that were formed as the ice compacted and went from snow to ice and it maintained the bubbles that are in there. It has various chemicals that are in there, dust layers that are in there, looking at oxygen 18 isotope ratios. From all of those various features you can see the variation with time down through the ice core as it accumulated material. Now if in fact you would – if you assume that the Genesis flood occurred a few thousands, six, eight, ten thousand years ago you would expect that that ice would show features of that kind of event. And there is a number of things that argue for the Genesis flood model being legitimate, that it actually happened just a short time ago.
For one thing is that you would expect there to be one ice age following the Genesis flood and you see that in the record. Where most of the evidence is presented that there were multiple ice ages is at the very bottom of the core where it’s the hardest to interpret and it shows that it was disturbed very strongly down at the bottom of the core as well as the fact that there was all kinds of dust and chemicals and features that you have a very difficult time trying to interpret. If in fact the Genesis flood was caused by a catastrophic event and it produced all kinds of volcanic eruptions and the earth surface being disturbed greatly you would expect to see that at the bottom of the core and that’s exactly what you find. And it’s not just a small, thin layer down there. It’s up through quite a depth through the bottom of the core. So that fits very naturally with the Genesis flood idea which was a catastrophic process that occurred there.
