Case 16: Rapid Ice Formation

During World War 2, six P38 fighter planes and two B17 bomber planes had to make emergency landings in Greenland.  All of the pilots and crew survived and were rescued but the planes abandoned in the remote area.  In 1988 private salvage hunters (United States citizens) funded a salvage operation to dig out the planes.  Surprisingly, they found the planes were now buried under 250 feet of ice and snow.  This is 250 feet of snow (hardened to ice) accumulation in less than 50 years (5.4 feet per year).

Cores through ice in the north arctic and in the south Antarctica have been falsely characterized as "millions of years" or "hundreds of thousands of years" or "tens of thousands of years" of accumulation.  A 3000-ft long ice core could represent just 2,000 years of snow deposition in perennial cold climates based on the empirical evidence.  The photograph below is from the ice cave excavated around one of the planes.  Parts were hauled up through a vertical shaft to the surface and planes reassembled elsewhere.