Ice Core Dating? We must begin with a basic logical tool discovered by the Greek philosopher Pythagoras (circa 600 BC). He is generally regarded as the first European to claim that the Earth is round and that it can be divided into climatic zones (polar, temperate and equitorial). He also introduced the notion of 'antipodes' by being the first to claim that people could live on the opposite side of the earth. The Greek word for 'feet' is pode and so Pythagoras called land in the southern hemisphere antipodes because the feet of the people living there were pointing in a direction that was counter to we who live in the northern hemisphere. Antipodes means 'counter-footed.' This notion of antipodes is a fundamental logical tool for evaluating the reliability of the ice dating method. It is a tool that Charles Hapgood used to help persuade Albert Einstein to adopt the theory of earth crust displacement.Geologists almost never tire of repeating the phrase first coined by James Hutton that 'the present is the key to past.' Stephen Jay Gould in a 1965 article entitled "Is Uniformitarianism Necessary?" cast some doubt upon the total reliablity of this phrase but it is still, nevertheless, a central concept in geology. If we wish to understand the past we must first understand the present. This is good advice and provided we remember that rates of change can vary without violating physical laws, it is advice that we need to take seriously. Today we do not find ice sheets accumulating in temperate zones (except in mountain ranges) nor do we find temperate adapted animals living in polar zones. What we find today is ice accumulating at the poles and only a small range of polar adapted animals living within the polar zones.
When we look at Lesser Antarctica through the lens of ice core dating we get one set of "facts" but when we compare these results with the evidence of the antipodes to Lesser Antarctica then another contradictory set of facts emerge. What we find from the ice core dating is that Lesser Antarctica has been covered in ice for at least 122,000 years, if not more. But when we shift our attention to the opposite side of the globe and look at Siberia, Beringia and Alaska we do not find equivalent ice sheets. Instead we find evidence of many large mammals such as horses, bison and rhinoceros swarming over grasslands. LaViolette gives a range of dates for when these animals lived in an area that freezing cold today:
How can one part of the globe be under ice for at least 122,000 years while the exact opposite of the globe has no ice and large mammals with dating from 11,000 to 70,000 carbon-14 years ago? This does not compute. Either the evidence from the north is wrong or the evidence from the south is wrong."Radiocarbon dates obtained on wood and animal collagen in these frozen flood deposits have been found to range from about 11,000 carbon-14 years B.P. (equivalent to 12,7000 calendar years B.P.) to about 70,000 carbon-14 years B.P..." p. 211What LaViolette is proposing is something for which we have no experience in the present with: he is claiming that at one time, one side of the globe was under ice while at the same time, on the exact opposite side of the globe, large mammals were rooming in ice-free grasslands. This is simply not logical. Where on Earth today can we find such a combination? We can't. Something is wrong here and I think it is with the ice core dating. This method of dating is not as reliable as LaViolette assumes. If Siberia/Beringia/Alaska demonstrates evidence from a wide variety of dating methods and they all point to this area being much warmer before 9,600 B.C. then we have every right to assume that the same must have been the case on Lesser Antarctica. It is simple logic and it is as old as Pythagoras. Next