What can a squadron of airplanes that landed and were abandoned on Greenland in World War
two, but found and restored 50 years later tell us about the ice age?
The lost squadron, this week on Creation Magazine LIVE!
Welcome to Creation Magazine LIVE!
My name is Richard Fangrad. and I'm Calvin Smith.
This week on Creation Magazine LIVE our topic is really about the Ice Age and the Bible, and
we'll get there later.
We want to begin with the amazing account of "The lost squadron", as it's come to be known.
This story helps to demonstrate that the Biblical history is a far superior explanation for,
for example, the massive buildup of ice on Greenland, which is in some areas more than
10,000 feet thick.
So let's begin with the account of the lost squadron.
We'll read portions of an article from the June 1997 article, issue of Creation magazine and then we'll go from there..
"From a secret US Army air base in Greenland, six P–38 Lightning fighter planes and two
gigantic B–17 Flying Fortress bombers rose into the early dawn.
The date was the 15th of July 1942, and they were headed for a British airfield to join the war against Hitler."
The P–38 Lightning was one of the deadliest planes to come out of WWII.
Powered by twin Allison V–12 engines, it had one 20 mm cannon and four .50 calibre
machine guns in its nose.
It was operational from 1941–1949, the nickname given to it by German pilots, because of its
double tail, was Der Gabelschwanz Teufel which means the fork-tailed devil. I remember having a model of one and thought it was a cool airplane. Anyway...
The article continues, "Heading east over the polar icecap, they ran into a massive blizzard.
Flying blind, they heard that their first planned refuelling stop, in Iceland, was 'socked
in', forcing them to return to their home base.
As they approached this, however, critically low on fuel, they found that it, too, was closed.
Realising that their only hope was to crash-land on the icy wastes of Greenland's east coast,
they desperately searched till they found a break in the cloud cover.
The nose-wheel of the first plane to land hit a crevasse, which caused it to flip.
And you can see a picture of that actual plane right here.
Fortunately, the impact on the canopy of the 8-ton P–38 was cushioned by snow, and the
pilot's injuries were minor.
After they saw this, the rest of the squadron came in with their wheels up for belly landings.
The planes were only lightly damaged.
All the crewmen were rescued unharmed by dogsled, about nine days later.
However, the planes had to be abandoned where they had slithered to a stop." It continues,
"In the years to follow, a few people occasionally recalled the legendary Lost Squadron of 1942,
but it was only in 1980 that anyone thought of a salvage mission.
U.S. airplane dealer Patrick Epps told his friend, architect Richard Taylor, that the
planes would be like new.
"All we'd have to do is shovel the snow off the wings, fill them with gas, crank them
up and fly them off into the sunset.
Nothing to it."
The P-38's are a highly prized collector's item; only five were believed to still be flying
at the time that the Lost Squadron was salvaged.
The article continues, "It took the two of them many years, much money and several
failed expeditions before the first real clue came.
Using a sophisticated form of radar with the help of an Icelandic geophysicist, they located
eight large shapes beneath the ice in 1988.
As a small, makeshift steam probe began to melt a hole in the ice, expedition members
watched dumbstruck as more and more extensions were added to the hose, some 75 m (or 250 ft)
before reaching the first airplane!"
Here's a picture of what they called the 'gopher' that melted that 250 deep, 4 ft diameter hole
straight down through the ice to reach the aircraft.
Hot water is pumped through the copper tubing you see there at the bottom end and that's what melts the ice.
The article continues, "None of the discoverers thought that the planes could possibly be
buried under more than a light cover of snow and ice.
And why would they?
After all, the impression the general public has is that the build-up of glacial ice takes
very long time periods—thousands of years for just a few metres."
Well, this story vividly shows how the impression that the build-up of snow takes a long time, that's just the way people think about it
because of what they've been taught about it by evolutionary teaching. Exactly.
There are documentaries about these expeditions to retrieve and ultimately restore these airplanes
on YouTube, you can watch them.
The team frequently encountered snow storms.
One part of the documentary shows them digging out of their tents after one of these snow storms one night,
and the snow is six feet high at the top of the door they're digging out,
six feet of snow fell in one night, amazing.
The published figures of average ice accumulation rates are quite a bit lower than 1 and a half
meters per year (or about 5 feet per year) that happened here, but not nearly as low
as the salvagers actually thought.
It shows how much this 'millions-of-years' ideas has permeated into the general public,
and the point of the article, and our show today is to show the error with this common
preconception.
And we'll do more of that in just a minute.
Have the fish in New York's Hudson River evolved into 'super mutants'?
A large proportion of the river's Atlantic tomcod fish have developed resistance to certain
poisons, and the mass media has heralded this as a dramatic example of evolution in action!
However, far from supporting microbes-to-man evolution, these mutant fish have actually
devolved, not evolved!
That's because the fish have become resistant through a loss of genetic information.
Non-resistant fish have special proteins in their cells that allow the poisons to bind.
However, due to a genetic mutation, the proteins of resistant fish cannot bind the poisons
as readily.
So, 'corrupted' proteins have made the fish resistant.
And in the poison-rich environment of the Hudson River, it's no wonder that the mutated
gene facilitating resistance has quickly spread through the tomcod population.
It is misleading to call these changes 'evolution', because evolution requires the addition of
new genetic information, but these resistant fish have only demonstrated information loss.
To find out more from Creation Ministries International visit our website Creation.com.
If you've just tuned in, this week we are talking about, "The lost squadron".
These are 8 aircraft that crash landed on Greenland in 1942.
And plane enthusiasts wanted to salvage and restore the planes thinking that they would
still be on the surface under a light cover of snow.
They were surprised to find them buried more than 250 feet deep.
We were just talking about the very common perception that most of the public has about
the world being 'millions of years' old.
Everywhere we look, on TV, in books, throughout the education system, in popular movies…
we see the idea that the world must be millions of years old because, we've been told, certain
things, like the buildup of the Greenland ice sheet happened very slowly.
So when someone reads the Bible and makes the simple deduction that God created recently,
and then go on to tell others about it, people look at you like you've got a couple gears short
of a cuckoo clock. You really believe the earth's young?
Then, what often happens with Christians is, they begin to doubt what God's word says.
Let's face it, the deduction that God created recently, in 6 real days, is what you get
by simply drawing the meaning from the text, and carefully considering the context, interpreting
Scripture with Scripture, and applying all of the rules of hermeneutics and so on, you get that conclusion.
Here's the problem: if you're then swayed by the very popular notion that the universe
is much older than the Biblical text allows, even though that's what the text plainly
says, then it causes people to doubt their ability to understand Scripture.
If we can't really trust what the text plainly says, then there's little hope of being
able to really understand what God's Word actually says right?
Even worse, if we allow modern philosophies, like the idea that the earth is billions of
years old, to overrule the Biblical text, well then we're lost.
And, ice cores from Greenland have been used for dating, based on the belief that layers
containing varying isotope ratios were laid down, somewhat like the rings of a tree, over
many tens of thousands of years.
The account of "The Lost Squadron", provides us with the actual rate of ice accumulation
on Greenland, not a belief or a theory about how fast ice might accumulate but an actual measurement we can take.
And the story isn't over.
They returned in 1990 and the first plane that the gopher touched was the one of the big B-17s.
The article goes on to describe what took place.
"A worker lowered down the shaft then used a hot water hose to make a cavern around the plane.
To their disappointment, the huge bomber was crushed and mangled, beyond worthwhile salvage.
Dejected, the pair returned home.
However, only a month later they realised that the more solidly-built P-38s would have
had a much better chance of having survived the ice's weight.
In May, 1992, they returned with fresh financing from investors in a high-precision effort.
True to expectations, the P–38 they located seemed in superb condition.
After many weeks of intense effort, the wings and fuselage were brought to the surface through
a large opening made by using the 'gopher' to sink four more holes side by side.
The pieces were helicoptered to a Greenland port, then sea-freighted to the US for final restoration.
This turned out to be a little more difficult than imagined, as the plane had actually been more
damaged by the crushing weight than met the eye.
However, when operational again, it will be using around 80% of its original parts.
Interestingly, the planes under the ice were in exactly the same pattern in which they
had landed—except they had been moved (by glacial flow) three miles from their original location!"
After this article appeared in Creation magazine the planes were restored and in mid-2003 one
of the P38s which was named 'Glacier Girl', very appropriately, flew again.
Glacier Girl's story is a powerful reminder to us that thick layers of ice don't have
to take immense time spans to form.
Rather, this 'slow and gradual' belief of how things like this form is so ingrained
in our society today that it comes as a shock to people when they read stories like that
of Glacier Girl and see these documentaries and so on.
This is exactly what happened with the salvage team, who expected the planes to be under
a thin sheet of snow and ice.
This belief had nothing to do with the actual evidence, but was an assumption made about
the past used to interpret the evidence in the present.
However, Glacier Girl is only the tip of the iceberg we could say of evidence that contradicts this
pervasive 'slow and gradual' belief.
To discover a little more evidence for a recent creation see our "young age of the earth
and universe" article, or the Q+A page at creation.com/young And we'll be right back to continue...
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On this week's episode we are talking about the Lost Squadron and what it reveals about
people's preconceived ideas about how things like ice sheets form, for example.
Evolutionists and other long-agers often say that 'the present is the key to the past'.
Now, we realize that that faulty idea is finally being rejected by more and more evolutionists,
but it's still part of the mindset in most cases.
Let's apply that slogan, the present is the key to the past, to the 3000-meter-long ice core brought up by the joint European
Greenland Ice-core Project (or GRIP) in Greenland, that was in 1990–1992 they worked on that.
The average rate of ice build-up between the time since the Lost Squadron left their aircraft
in 1942 and the time they were discovered in 1992 works out to about 1 and a half meters per year. About five feet.
So, at that rate it would take only 2,000 years of accumulation to deposit the GRIP
research project's ice core.
So, beginning about the time that Jesus was on the earth is all that's needed to get
the 3000 meters (or over 10,000 feet) of ice currently on Greenland. That's right. Easy to fit into the time frame that we have to work with.
In reality it likely started long before that time.
The Ice age that immediately followed the flood could have built up the great majority
of the Greenland ice sheet during the 700 years or so that it lasted right after the Flood.
Higher precipitation and snowfall for a few centuries after the flood is the natural result
of the global flood.
So, how does the flood trigger the ice age?
Creationists believe that there was originally one continent that broke apart during the flood.
There's ample evidence that the continents moved apart and the only place in Biblical
history that this fits of course is during the Flood.
All that tectonic activity would generate a lot of heat in the oceans.
Warm oceans lead to more evaporation.
When that moisture gets over the continents, especially in the higher latitudes, like further north or further south, like Greenland, its going to fall as snow.
The summers would be cooler because of the massive amount of volcanic activity that happened
during the flood.
The volcanoes would put a lot of dust into the atmosphere shielding out the sun's energy,
making the continents cooler and, presto, instant Ice Age.
We've done whole shows on both the Ice Age and plate tectonics before.
If you missed the broadcast…
well they were broadcast years ago… but all our past shows (over 140 episodes now) are
free to watch in the media center on our website Creation.com.
The Ice age episode that was way back in Season 2, episode 24, here's the link here.
And the episode on continental drift, that was episode 7 of that same season, of season 2.
So the flood was over 4000 years ago.
That allows plenty of time for the existing amounts of ice to have built up—even under
today's generally non-catastrophic conditions.
As usual, it is not the facts which speak against the Flood account of a recent creation, or the Biblical account of a recent creation and a global flood rather,
but the mindset of our culture.
'Millions of years' are casually tossed around everywhere so often that we unconsciously perceive
all natural changes as being slow changes and taking long timespans.
That is why many are 'amazed' to hear of facts like hundreds of feet of layered
sedimentary rock built up in months after the Mount St Helens eruption on 18 May 1980.
Or when hearing of opal formed in months, or coal from simple heating of wood in mere months.
Or about the flag, tent and sled left at the South Pole by Antarctic explorer Amundsen
in 1911 now its buried under more than 40 feet of ice, or what we've been talking about
today, this deeply buried lost squadron. These are amazing little stories that come up that speak against this millions of years notion.
It's ironic to note the basis on which some evolutionists have critiqued CMI's is use of
the 'Planes in Ice' story.
They say things like, 'We know from actual measurements that snow and ice builds up fast
in that part of Greenland to account for the buildup of that much ice in only 50 years'.
They seem to somehow be implying that this somehow undermines the creationists' use of this evidence.
But that is precisely the point we're making! We can observe it!
The measured observed rate of ice build-up confirms that it could happen quickly.
What they need to do is to show that their belief that it builds up slowly elsewhere
in Greenland has sufficient support to overthrow the measured data that it builds up quickly. That's what they need to do. What a spin-doctor position that is...
The bottom line is: many people today believe that it must take hundreds of thousands of
years to build up the huge ice sheets that exist today.
But if planes can be buried under that much solid ice in 50 years even at today's rates
of deposition (not even taking into account the increased precipitation from the warmer
waters after the Flood for example) then clearly there is ample time to lay down the ice sheets of
today well within the biblical timeframe of history.
When we start from the Word of God with history, Glacier Girl's story actually makes sense.
And we'll be back…
Does the human Y chromosome suggest that men are headed for extinction?
In 2003, an Oxford University geneticist claimed that the human Y chromosome was "crumbling
before our very eyes" and that the demise of men was imminent.
Since this time, other researchers have pointed out that these doomsday predictions were overstated.
For instance, the Y chromosome has a unique mechanism for correcting harmful mutations.
Nevertheless, the Y chromosome certainly shows signs of overall decay, as do the other chromosomes.
Human genetic decay is a real phenomenon, but it flies in the face of evolutionary ideas.
According to evolutionists, all the complex coded information in our genomes supposedly
arose through a slow accumulation of random changes called mutations.
However, what we see with the Y chromosome is that such natural processes consistently
degrade the genetic instructions, as opposed to creating them.
Since the time of Adam, we live in a decaying world, just as the Bible says.
To find out more from Creation Ministries International visit our website Creation.com.
Our subject this week is The Lost Squadron.
That's a fantastic story that has some big implications for the controversial issue of
the age of the earth.
That's right.
It shows how the data fits the Bible's account of the history of the earth much better than
it fits the evolutionist's millions of years idea.
Realizing that the story of 'Glacier Girl' doesn't fit well with the millions of years
scenario, some people have suggested that maybe the planes sunk through the ice.
Okay, we should consider that.
Some of you might remember the common school experiment in where you get a wire tensioned with
weights and how it 'sinks' through a block of ice.
But, the wire sinks through the ice in the experiment only if it is done at room temperature.
Do the same experiment with the whole thing in a freezer, which would actually mimic the situation
with the planes, they were all in the big freezer, and it won't work.
The common explanation for this wire and ice experiment, is that the pressure of the wire melts the ice
but that's wrong—such a little device doesn't generate enough pressure to melt the ice.
Heat transferred from the air in the room to the metallic wire, which is an efficient
conductor of heat, melts the ice, which is a poor heat conductor, to allow the wire to
'cut' through the ice.
A supporter of Creation Ministries International from the UK actually gave another reason why the 'plane
sank through the ice' explanation doesn't fit the data.
His response was printed in the March 1998 issue.
And he said this, "It is true that the pressures involved would not cause the planes to descend
through the ice but there is a simpler and more visual way to determine whether this
has happened or not.
To attain forward directional stability, aircraft must have their centre of mass ahead of what
is termed their 'aerodynamic center'.
The centre of mass is moved forwards by sitting engines and other heavy elements towards the
front and adding control surfaces such as tail fins whose surface area pulls the aerodynamic
centre to the rear.
A simpler equivalent is the arrow (weight in the nose, flights at the rear) which attains
forward directional stability by the same means.
The consequence is that, barring control mechanisms acting, an arrow or aircraft will pitch forward
and fall nose-down when allowed to fall freely through a medium—whether air, water or ice.
So if the aircraft had indeed moved through the ice, they would all have been found in
the same nose-down position.
They were not.
So the planes could not have sunk through the ice; they were buried by the accumulation
of snow, which then becomes ice as it is compacted.
Mike Oard, he's a retired meteorologist who has done a lot of work to model the post-flood ice age.
Since weather and climate is his area of expertise, he is well-suited to comment on the effects
that a global flood would have on climate of course.
He wrote an article that was in the October 2013 issue of Creation magazine titled, "Are
the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets old?"
In that article he made a short comment that puts the whole creation/evolution issue and age
of the earth debate in the right context he said this, "Ice cores are considered strong
evidence against the biblical time scale of around 6,000 years.
Some professing Christians have used ice cores as the 'ultimate proof' that Noah's Flood
was not global. Is this all true? No, it is not!
A little checking of the data and their interpretations reveals this."
Here's the part that puts it all into context, "We need to apply 1 Thessalonians 5:21:
Which is; "But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good".
This is my theme verse for research, Mike said.
I am holding fast to the Bible as God's accurate communication to us and to Jesus
as my Saviour and Lord.
Then I go beyond the superficial interpretation of the data that the world presents.
I have discovered that there is another story to tell based on the biblical worldview."
That's great, and that's the perspective that all Christians need to have when we are presented with data
that conflicts with what the Bible says.
The Bible is the word of the One who knows all things.
It will always be superior to any other data.
And we'll be back with more in just a moment…
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Well welcome back. This is the Feedback section of the show here where we take letters and emails from people....sometimes they're positive,
sometimes they're not. And this is one that is trying to challenge us here. We've titled the article 'Evidence and evolutionary bias' and this is from John H.
from the UK and he was writing in response to our Question evolution! campaign, we had out a little while ago showing people what evolutionists are saying
have huge holes in them and here are fifteen questions you could ask them. Fifteen questions evolutionists can't answer.
So he starts off a little sarcastically, he said, "Thanks for the best laugh I've had in months." And our Dr Don Batten responded, "That's nice, but there is a saying that "He who
laughs last laughs the loudest". And John continued, "I know I won't be able to change your views as your mind is clearly made up, fixed, closed to the ongoing process
of evidence-based-reasoning that is what scientists rely upon. So Dr Don Batten, being a PhD scientist said, "I probably shouldn't bother to reply to you because clearly
your mind is made up too. But I guess it is only the people you disagree with who are opinionated, obstinate, philosophically biased, not open to evidence, etc.", and
then he put a little smiley face there. He said, "Please see this admission, which shows that your 'high priest' scientists are not as objective as you think." And he listed
a couple of articles there: 'Amazing admission' and 'Blinkered thinkers: How materialism harms science' so if you want to check those out you can look those links up.
Yes, obviously there are articles already dealing with this on the website. Then John from the UK continues, "What I would point out is that just asking questions doesn't
prove your position." He's responded to these fifteen questions for evolutionists. And our response, Dr Batten's response was, "Nowhere did we suggest that asking
questions about evolution proves our position. But did you bother to look at the rest of the creation.com website? There are over 10,000 freely available articles
that provide plenty of evidence for our position." And then it goes back to what John wrote in, "You have to provide more credible and likely answers, not just "what
else could it possibly be other than God?" type questions." And this is the response from Dr Batten, "Note that when it comes to the origin of things there are three
possibilities. They always existed. This can be ruled out for the origin of life and species (but also the universe; see: who created God?)" There's a great article, and you
can just do a search for that at Creation.com, Who created God? A big question for many people. "Number two, They made themselves. Number three; they were created.
Those are the three possibilities. That leaves two possibilities. Evolution is the materialists' myth about how things made themselves.
If the materialist explanation of origins is shown to be inadequate, then that leaves creation. Creationists did not invent this line of reasoning; evolutionists have been
using it since Darwin. The modern day hero of God-haters, Richard Dawkins, uses this argument all the time.
For example, he argues that the human eye is badly designed, so therefore it could not have been created by an omnipotent Creator; it must have evolved (the details
are somehow sidestepped here Dr Batten has in brackets). "Of course Dawkins is wrong about the eye being badly designed, so his argument falls flat."
And there's again, articles that are linked there in this text. Yes I've heard this before from skeptics, maybe it's something else other than creation or evolution.
Well just study logic, the law of the excluded middle says it either needs to be this or that, there's only two explanations for the origins of something.
And then he finished, "An entity you call God maybe did make the whole process start—but a) not one single piece of independently verifiable evidence supports that
assertion; it is simply something you choose to believe. So Don just said, "This statement reveals either your ignorance or your bias.
See for example, the article above, Who created God? You need also to think about just how rational it is to believe in
incredible miracles happening with no cause, which is the sad position of an atheist."
Anyway, check that article out for more. We get this type of feedback here and there but anyway I think Don did a good job dealing with it.
Yes. Creation magazine, you can view a free copy online, Creation.com/free-mag, and
next week: Geniuses in the genealogies. We'll see you next week...
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