Ice-Free Antarctica 9,600 B.C.

"Fundamentally, in counting any annual marker, we must ask whether it is absolutely unequivocal, or whether nonannual events could mimic or obscure a year. For the visible strata (and, we believe, for any other annual indicator at accumulation rates representative of central Greenland), it is almost certain that variability exists at the subseasonal or storm level, at the annual level, and for various longer periodicities (2-year, sunspot, etc.). We certainly must entertain the possibility of misidentifying the deposit of a large storm or a snow dune as an entire year or missing a weak indication of a summer and thus picking a 2-year interval as 1 year." -- Alley, R.B. et al., Visual-Stratigraphic Dating of the GISP2 Ice Core: Basis, Reproducibility, and Application, Journal of Geophysical Research, Volume 102, Number C12, Pages 26, 367–26, 381, 1997.

"First glance intuition is often very helpful in coming up with a good hypothesis to explain a given phenomenon, such as the hundreds of thousands of layers of ice found in places like Greenland and Antarctica. It seems down right intuitive that each layer found in these ice sheets should represent an annual cycle. After all, this seems to fit the uniformitarian paradigm so well. However, a closer inspection of the data seems to favor a much more recent and catastrophic model of ice sheet formation. Violent weather disturbances with large storms, a sudden cold snap, and high precipitation rates could very reasonably give rise to all the layers, dust bands, and isotope variations etc. that we find in the various ice sheets today." -- Sean D. Pitman, doctor, December 2006

"One problem with using ice cores or tree rings or ocean floor sediments and so on as a way to date the Earth is that one absolutely has to use certain assumptions in the dating method that cannot be tested and proven. We don't have historical records of continual and documented ice core samples going back for thousands of years, so the results need to be interpreted within the light of the assumptions that are used in the process. This is why vast differences in the ages represented in ice cores are suggested by those within the long-ages scientific community and how YEC scientists find the ice cores make sense from their perspective as well." -- Radaractive, blogger, December 2008