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Part IV

True cause of isotope separation in ice cores unrelated to age:

Given the Devil's Hole core findings, one must wonder if the ice cores are
really a true reflection of the process described by Ellenberger,
Mewhinney and the scientific sources they site.

Long ago, Fred Hall pointed out that seasonal variations of oxygen-16 and
oxygen-18 in ice layers are not related to climate at all. He claimed that
a

vastly different picture is presented by specialists who
actually have to deal with the subtleties of the ice cores. To
begin with, there is far too much mixing of gases, over time, to
allow for Ellenberger's simplistic assumption. I refer the
reader, for example, to the December 23, 1988, issue of Science
and the article "Gravitational Separation of Gases and Isotopes
in Polar Ice Caps," by H. Craig, Y. Horibe and T. Sowers, pp.
1675ff.

What will be absolutely clear to the objective reader of this article is
that the atmospheric gases left in deposited layers [of snow] do not
remain in those layers. Rather, due to gravity, they are diffused
downward, tending to accumulate on top of more dense layers or ice below.

The accumulating firn [ice-snow granules] acts like a giant columnar sieve
through which the gravitational enrichment can be maintained by molecular
diffusion. At a given borehold, the time between the fresh fall of new
snow and its conversion to nascent ice is roughly the height of the firn
layers in [meters] divided by the annual accumulation of new ice in meters
per year. This results in conversion times of centuries for firn layers
just inside the Arctic and Antarctic circles, and millennia for those well
inside [the] same. Which is to say--during these long spans of time, a
continuing gas-filtering process is going on, eliminating any possibility
of using the presence of such gases to count annual layers over thousands
of years.28 (Emphasis added.)

According to the cited article, the percentages of gases in the pores at
the base of the firn layer, where ice becomes solid, were much higher than
those obtained in atmospheric gases. One of these gases turned out to be
oxygen-18. The oxygen-18 had diffused downward and condensed at the
bottom. The maximum enrichment of the heavy isotopes (nitrogen-15 and
oxygen-18) observed followed patterns predicted for gravitational
equilibrium at the base of the firn layer, as calculated from the depth of
the transition layer and the temperature of the firn.29

The authors then showed examples where oxygen measurements are totally
inconsistent with present-day atmospheric content in temperature regimes
expected to be almost exactly the same as at present: "O2 trapped in
2,000-year-old ice from Camp Century, Greenland, has an 18O/ 16O
enrichment given by (18O) = 0.61 per [millimeter] versus present-day
atmospheric O2."30

They claimed that this evidence supports the concept that the layers of
oxygen-16 and oxygen-18 relate to filtration and condensation in the pores
of the firn, and not to accumulation of oxygen-16 and oxygen-18 layers
from snow containing different amounts of these isotopes. The past
2,000-year-old record should not be so different from the present-day
record if the climate layering concept is correct.

If this is the process responsible for oxygen isotope layers, the entire
argument presented by Ellenberger and Mewhinney is wrong. How do they
explain away this evidence? To date they have simply ignored it! Warm and
cold snaps occur repeatedly over the Greenland icecap and, therefore,
rapid meltings and freezings will leave several deposits of oxygen-16 or
oxygen-18 in the ice, based on the gas diffusion process attested to by
Craig, Horibe and Sowers. That is, instead of having one layer of
oxygen-16 or oxygen-18 per year, three or four layers may be produced by
this method each year; thus, the record is actually a reflection of this
diffusion process and not of the climate. If the temperature 2,000 years
ago was similar to that of today, there should never have been such a
large difference in oxygen-16 and oxygen-18 content in the ice. The age of
the ice, based on this concept, could be quite different from what we are
led to believe. Ellenberger and Mewhinney assert that the volcanic
signatures support the validity of the ice cores. This diffusion process
could only occur in the winter, when the firn lacks water from summer snow
melts on the cap, or during hot and cold spells in the spring or fall.
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