Greenland Ice Cores

"Uniformitarian scientists claim to have counted 110,000 annual layers of ice down one of the ice cores drilled into the central Greenland ice sheet, but this claim is incorrect. They have used

predictions from their long-age ice-accumulation models to interpret ‘annual’ layers using variables such as oxygen isotope ratios, cloudy bands, electrical conductivity, laser-light scattered from dust, major ion chemistry, and volcanic ash bands.
Creationists view the lower portion of the ice sheet as accumulating rapidly during a 700-year Ice Age, while the upper portion represents accumulation in the 4,000 years since the Ice Age.

Annual layers in the very top section of the core are easily interpreted from the ratio of oxygen isotopes, and creationists agree with these interpretations.
--Below this top section, the annual layers interpreted from the two models diverge significantly. Rather than annual layers in the uniformitarian model, the changes in the parameters represent multiple variations within a single year, and sometimes variations over a few days.

One of the variables most used to identify annual layers in the Greenland ice cores is the oxygen isotope ratio in the ice. Oxygen has three isotopes, each with a different number of neutrons in the nucleus of the atom.

For ice core analysis, the ratio between oxygen-18 and oxygen-16 is used, oxygen-17 being too small for practical purposes. Oxygen-18 has a higher mass than oxygen-16 because it has two more neutrons. The difference in mass means that the ratio of these isotopes will change when water evaporates or condenses, and the degree of change depends on the air temperature.
During summer, with warmer temperatures, the ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 in snowfall is higher, while in winter the ratio is lower. This seasonal oscillation in the oxygen isotope ratio can be measured down Greenland ice cores.

Uniformitarian scientists believe the ice sheet is millions of years old and has remained in equilibrium at about the same height and shape for the last few million years. Thus they consider that each annual layer has gradually moved deeper into the ice sheet, becoming greatly compressed in the process. The large number of annual layers they obtain is simply an outgrowth of their extended time

scale.
On the other hand, creationists view both the Greenland and Antarctica Ice Sheets as products of a post-Flood rapid Ice Age, plus the ice added after the Ice Age. In this model, annual layers would be very thick in the lower portion of the Greenland ice sheet (the Ice Age portion determined by the oxygen isotope ratio). Higher in the ice sheet the annual layer thickness would decrease. Since the Ice Age ended about 4,000 years ago, the compression of the ice sheet has been much less than uniformitarian scientists believe, but still substantial. So, one annual layer deep in the ice sheet may be interpreted by uniformitarians as 100 or even 1,000 ‘annual cycles’. However, instead of annual cycles, the oscillations simply represent variations within a single year.
In the creationist model the ice over Greenland and Antarctica built rapidly for about 500 years during a speedy ice age. Then the amount of snowfall tapered off during the next 200 years of deglaciation. The amount of snowfall would generally be proportional to the temperature of the North Atlantic Ocean, the height of the building ice sheet, and proximity to the main storm tracks....during the 700-year post-Flood Ice Age, the oceans would have gradually cooled and the ice sheet

thickened with time. Since the Ice Age ended about 4,000 years ago, precipitation would continue to build the thickness of the ice sheet. This precipitation would be greater immediately after the Ice Age because the ice sheet would have been thinner than it is today.
During all the time since the Flood, the ice sheet would continue to compress vertically and stretch horizontally, but this would be much less than in the uniformitarian model. Annual layers would be quite thick in the Ice Age portion of the Greenland ice cores (approximately the lower half of the 3,000 m thick GRIP and GISP2 cores). In the upper portion of the ice sheet, which represents ice accumulated after the Ice Age, the annual layers would decrease in

thickness.

Furthermore, at the time the snow was building during the Ice Age the elevation of the ice sheet would have been lower and the air temperature warmer. This would have produced more melt or hoar-frost layers (cloudy bands), which is one of the variables uniformitarians used to determine the annual layers. Therefore, what uniformitarian scientists are claiming as annual variations are simply oscillations that occur within a single year.

For example, a storm has a warm and cold sector that produces significant fluctuation in each of the variables and these storm oscillations may be on the order of several days. Even uniformitarians recognise that these storms can produce problems for counting annual layers, as Alley et al. state:

‘Fundamentally, in counting any annual marker, we must ask whether it is absolutely unequivocal, or whether nonannual events could mimic or obscure a year. For the visible strata (and, we believe, for any other annual indicator at accumulation rates representative of central Greenland), it is almost certain that variability exists at the subseasonal or storm level, at the annual level, and for various longer periodicities (2-year, sunspot, etc.). We certainly must entertain the possibility of misidentifying the deposit of a large storm or a snow dune as an entire year or missing a weak indication of a summer and thus picking a 2-year interval as 1 year.’

Besides the subannual layers caused by precipitation factors, subannual layers can also be produced by other factors such as snow dunes.

Conclusion

Uniformitarian scientists interpret variations in measured parameters below the top section of a central Greenland ice core as ‘annual’ cycles. This interpretation is based on their long-ages model with an ice sheet in equilibrium for several million years. So they manage to ‘squeak out’ 110,000 years of ‘annual’ cycles by using several parameters. However, the cycles can be produced by subannual oscillations in the parameters. Thus, the creationist young-Earth model, including a rapid ice age, is just as viable if not more so."
Michael J. Oard/CMI

Out of whose womb came the ice?

and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?

Job 38:29