Ice Cores with Lava Dust (a k a Tephra Layers)

Hugh Ross series:

1) Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... on Angels and Men in Hugh Ross Context , 2) Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... on Hugh Ross' take on Day Four, 3) Creation vs. Evolution : Ice Cores with Lava Dust (a k a Tephra Layers), 4 ... on Moses, Church Fathers, Oxygen and Hydrogen (featuring Kent Hovind and Hugh Ross, separate videos)

Hugh Ross mentioned ice cores with lava dust.

Supposedly ice cores in Northern Greenland cannot have as many layers as those in Southern Greenland.

As to that, climate has shifted in Southern Greenland, which was in early 1400's inhabited by Norsemen who were using agriculture and who were the Northernmost diocese in Communion with Rome back then. They did pay the Peter's Penny. Since then Southern Greenalnd is far less inhabitable - and possibly what Northern or possibly just what Midmost Greenland was like back then. And if so, Northern Greenland back then, including periods from which we do have ice cores (accessed or not) was like Midmost or even Southern Greenland is now. Which means the supposition that layers are different and annual up there is a bit suspect, to say the least.

Also, they can be dated by lava dust from volcanic eruptions - the ice layers between lava layer for Vesuvius 70 A.D. and Krakatoa 1883 A.D. match up with the 1813 years between these two events. And in total there are eight lava layers.

But here we might caution a bit that Vesuvius and Krakatoa are not the only ones in last two thousand years, we do not know if the two layers identified as from Krakatoa and Vesuvius are not in fact both more recent and closer, like Stromboli 1930 and Krakatoa.

We might wonder even further due to the fact that Krakatoa had another eruption earlier. French Wiki cites a page that no longer exists:

Sa géographie a été bouleversée au moins à deux reprises, au cours des deux grandes éruptions des années 416 ou 535³ et 1883⁴.

And note three gives a link with title:

(en) Ken Wohletz, Were the dark ages triggered by volcano - Related climate changes in the 6th century? (If so, was Krakatau volcano the culprit?) [archive], Los Alamos National Laboratory

Here is the cache: [archive], but the paper itself is gone:

Not Found

The requested URL /ees11/geophysics/geody/Wohletz/Krakatau.htm was not found on this server.

Why is it gone?

Thing is written sources about eruption give year so and so on that calendar "misaligned with AD 416" and the ice core dates give AD 535. Ken Wohletz overruled 416 in favour of 535, relying on tephra layers in ice cores ... if historic research overruled that guess? Well, that might be one reason why the paper is gone.

Now, Hugh Ross mentioned one other calibration of ice cores, namely carbon dating. And this also as used for calibrating that method by the ice cores.

Now, here I am a disbeliever, simply. Lava per itself does not contain organic material. I do not know if it contains trapped carbon dioxide from the air. That would be a possibility. I try a search and find this:

A 22,000 ¹⁴C year BP sediment and pollen record of climate change from Laguna Miscanti (23°S), northern Chile
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818100000631

22,000 ¹⁴C year BP? Sounds like one Creationist estimate of "carbon dates" for the flood according to one article:

Radiocarbon in dino bones
International conference result censored
by Carl Wieland
http://creation.com/c14-dinos

But as to linking ¹⁴C with lava layers in the ice cores?

The Greenland Ice Core Chronology 2005, 15–42 ka. [quoting from pp. 6 f.]
http://www.iceandclimate.nbi.ku.dk/publications/papers/pdfs/240.pdf

Identified volcanic tephra layers in ice cores provide a very important link to other paleoclimatic archives and facilitate the validation of ice core chronologies. If tephra layers have been radiometrically dated by means other than ¹⁴C they can be used to validate the ice core chronology, whereas an additional ¹⁴C dating links the ice core chronology to the ¹⁴C calibration curve. In the time interval 10–42 ka b2k, three tephra layers with known source and independent age determination have been identified in Greenland ice cores. Two of those are the Saksunarvatn ash layer (early Preboreal) and the Vedde ash layer (Z1, late Younger Dryas), which both demonstrate an excellent agreement between IntCal04 (Reimer et al., 2004) and GICC05 around the last termination as discussed in Rasmussen et al. (2006c). The third tephra layer is the Fugloyarbanki tephra, recently identified in the NorthGRIP ice core at 1848m depth and about 1 ka after the onset of GI-3 (Davies et al., in preparation). The GICC05 age of the Fugloyarbanki tephra layer is 26 740+/-390 yr b2k. This tephra layer has been identified and dated in several marine cores from the North Atlantic with ages in the range 22.85–23.3 14Cka BP and an average of 23.1 ¹⁴Cka BP (Rasmussen et al., 2003). A reservoir age of 400 yr has been applied to these ages (T.L. Rasmussen, 2006, pers. comm.). This age goes slightly beyond the IntCal04 calibration curve but is covered by the calibration proposed by Fairbanks et al.(2005). In Fig. 6 it is seen that the Fugloyarbanki tephra data point falls more than 0.5 ka away from the ¹⁴C calibration curve, therefore suggesting that either 1) the GICC05 age is too young, 2) the ¹⁴C calibration is too old, or 3) the applied marine reservoir age correction is too small. A direct and absolute dating of this and other tephra layers from terrestrial sources is required to eliminate the latter possible source of error.

Two problem's with Hugh Ross' claim: the tephra layers here talked about are from eruptions before historical dating, and they are not confirmed by ¹⁴C, but confirming it, and being confirmed in their turn by radiometric datings of the kinds creationists usually consider useless. A far cry from identifying Vesuvius and Krakatoa and linking that with ¹⁴C dating to confirm it. Also the correlation between different dating methods is clearly not perfect.

The funders of this project are the Carlsberg foundation. Now, the Carlsberg breweries have taken over the Swedish Pripps breweries, and then closed down one factory, with 200 Swedish brewers out of work. I am not keen on having confidence in that particular brewery. They have a clear agenda of making much money and as clear an agenda of making culture speak in their favour. If you have visited the Glyptoteket you may see what I mean. And this second thing is not quite achievable if the researchers give conclusions differring too widely from the opinion of the very brainwashed evolutionist and old earth Nordic peoples (we have very oppressive school systems, though Denmark gives better freedom for homeschooling than Sweden). While we are at beer, if you are in Denmark, there is Faxe Fadøl and smaller breweries.

Hugh Ross also mentioned that lives have been lost while doing the research for ice cores. This is very possibly a sinful waste of human lives, or even a kind of Pagan human sacrifice. It is possibly a reason to admire the ones risking their lives, but not a reason not to distrust any of the research. I was proning the moontruthers' scepticism about moon landing 1969 a few years ago and got one reaction from an Indian lady who felt I was being unjust to the Indians who had been killed in the space shuttle. But what if that Indian was fooled into it by some superior not risking his life? And risking a fast brutal death is not quite like risking martyrdom either when it comes to determining honest belief.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
BpI, Georges Pompidou
Vigil of St Bartholomew
23-VIII-2013

PS, Hugh Ross on word "min" as in "kind" with reference to Leviticus 19:19 ... he is saying that "min" in Genesis cannot mean things like genus or families because in Leviticus it means things like species or subspecies ... it is not as if "min" could have only exactly one well defined meaning. If he is open to yôm having different meanings why not min? It is even applied to human beings, like "minim" as in Jewish heretics or schismatics, where it is clearly something other than in either Genesis or Leviticus. But he is a Calvinist (correct me if I'm wrong, but you cited the Belgic Catechism!) and may be taking the Bible as a law book ... and what if producing mules were not the exact thing prohibited in Leviticus 19:19 but rather totally infertile unions? I mean, Jews can read "boil not the calf in the milk of the cow that bare it" and concoct a system of two kitchens, two sets of plates and knives and forks and spoons, and a minimum of two hours between a dairy meal and a meat meal. Not making a separate refutation article on that one though.