Ice cores are claimed to have as many as 135,000 annual layers. Yet
airplanes of the Lost Squadron were buried under 263 feet of ice in
forty-eight years, or about 5.5 feet per year. This contradicts the
presumption that the wafer-thin layers in the ice cores could be annual
layers.
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 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).
