Tim Cullen has come up with two more posts on how the ice cores were calculated – which will not please the defenders of the faith … see http://malagabay.wordpress.com/2014/12/09/the-great-greenland-snow-job-0… .. and the the great greenland snow job 08 (an no doubt he has not finished yet). I don't pretend to know if his criticism is valid or not but it is interesting to know a bit about how such calculations are made. Simply picking out pieces of odd data and criticising that is not of course enough to rest a case for bunkum. The whole methodology has to be understood. So far, his argument is that the major part of the Greenland ice sheet, a giant glacier, is situated in a trough, a bowl of low ground surrounded by a high lip of hilly topography. He says the ice cores are calculated as if the ice sheet occupied flat terrain – which he is at pains to dispute. As such, movement of the ice sheet horizontally is limited – as it can not expand beyond the lip (until the very top of the glacier). The snow, and the ice, accumulates vertically – and it would appear on the face of it that if it is restricted in its movement horizontally as more and more ice is piled on top of other ice and then the methodology may require some adjustments.
Cullen's argument is that the Greenland ice sheet could be much younger than mainstream allows – and even Holocene dating of ice cores is dodgy. You can make up your own mind by going to the horses mouth at the link above but the cue is to have a critical eye as you read what he says. He jumped on the Heinsohn deep revision saga so we should not assume that he is on a firm footing here either. We would have to get into the heads of scientists of the 1960s in order to fully understand ice cores and how it became such an important dating tool. The fact that ice cores support the Ice Age cycle is in itself one point to ponder – what came first? The Ice Age theory followed by the ice core model, or vice versa. Was the tail wagging the dog, so to speak.