otseng wrote:nygreenguy wrote:You talk about assumtion, but you are making some of your own. You assume we cant tell non-annual layers. You assume we cant tell when it melts.
From what I can tell, it is assumed that layers are formed annually. I don't see anywhere that they even try to distinguish if layers are subannual.
As the ice forms from the incremental buildup of annual layers of snow, lower layers are older than upper, and an ice core contains ice formed over a range of years. (emphasis mine)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cores
This is addressed in some of the information I provided.
One answer to this is that we can observe today how the layers form and so we know that the layers we see forming now are annual.
A second answer is that we can check the dates given by ice cores against other events for which we have independent dating mechanisms. Volcanic eruptions would be one example of this. Even though we haven't been observing ice layer formation in real time for more than a few years, we do know the specific year of a number of volcanic eruptions and evidence of these has been found in the ice layers at the appropriate point.
A third answer is that errors, whether created by mutliple rings or another mechanism, are accounted for as evidenced by the margins of errors provided in at least some contexts. For example, the information I provided for Greenland indicated an age of 160,000 years plus or minus 15,000 years.
A fourth answer is that we can check correlation of different ice cores, either from the same region or from across the globe. Now, I allow that an exceptionally warm year would likely affect the whole earth and all the ice sheets. But this by itself would not necessarily create multiple layers in one year. It seems to me what you would need would be an unseasonal warm spell in the cold season or cold spell in the warm season. This would not necessarily affect the whole world but is more likely to be a more local phenomenon and so would not necessarily affect all the ice fields similarly, especially those on different sides of the equator.
It seems to me in the face of this, the burden is on those who claim multiple layers might be somehow common to show evidence for this, and not mere speculation.
Keep in mind that, given the dating on some of the Antarctic cores, we would need an average of
4 or 5 layers or more per year for many tens of thousands of years to get a date down to even close to the 100,000 year window you postulate for the flood.
Also, note that the information provided on all these cores indicates that the ice formed above ground, exposed to the atmosphere. No indication of infilitration of salt or other evidence of being submerged has been indicated, and clearly if this were the case it would be huge news.
Unless you can come up with some mechanism for forming many multiple layers over long periods, and evidence that this mechanism was in operation for significant periods of time in the past, I really can't see any other reasonable conclusion than there was no flood in the past 100,000 years that covered these ice sheets.
Even if we don't know the dates on the sheets, we can say there was no flood while the layers were forming in these sheets, so whatever the dates are, they provide a lower limit on when a global flood could have occurred.
" . . . the line separating good and evil passes, not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart . . . ." Alexander Solzhenitsyn
