> I think YECs would say that the icecaps came post-flood, during the Ice
> Age. And the argument would go that the "annual layers" are periods of
> freeze-thaw, multiples of which can occur in a week, not one per year.
>
> The WW II airplane was found beneath, I think, more than two hundred feet
> of ice. I would think the large surface area of the plane's wings would
> have prevented it from exerting enough pressure on the ice to melt its
> way down through the ice. Assuming that's true, then the ice accumulated
> over the plane since it went down.
The rate of snow (and thus ice) accumulation varies greatly with location in
Antarctica. My research group puts out seismographs and wind generators
on the ice sheet and sometimes
return a year later to find (or try to find!) the equipment beneath
6-8' of snow. However, the rate of accumulation at Vostok is
very low (it is in the high polar desert, and temp ranges from
-20 to -120 F), so that the entire several km thick ice sheet contains
a record of hundreds of thousands of
years. There is no evidence for great changes
in the yearly accumulation of ice there, as would be required by
YEC explanations.
Doug Wiens, Professor
Earth and Planetary Sci
Washington University
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