WW2 Aircraft Found Under 300 Ft of Greenland Ice

How long does it take to bury an aircraft under hundreds of feet of ice? Try 76 years.

A second member of the “Lost Squadron” has been located under Greenland ice using ground-penetrating radar. The first P-38 dubbed “Glacier Girl” was found in 1992 at a similar depth, causing amazement at the time that it was so deep under the ice. After recovery, it was eventually restored to flying condition.

Hundreds of U.S. aircraft flew this route during World War II as part of Operation Bolero, which delivered warplanes, pilots, equipment and supplies for the planned Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.

Credit: US Army

Now, reports Live Science, a second P-38 has been located, and there are others waiting to be found. Drones are making the search easier than before.

The search leader, California businessman Jim Salazar, told Live Science that the team found the wrecked P-38 on July 4  beneath more than 300 feet (91 meters) of ice using a ground-penetrating radar antenna fitted to a heavy-lift aerial drone. The drone was scanning a part of the glacier where hints of the buried warplane were detected in 2011.

The “Lost Squadron,” consisting of six P-38s and two B-2 bombers flew over this part of Greenland in 1942 but got caught in bad weather and had to land on top of the ice. Although survivors were able to radio for help, bad weather and crashes of search and rescue aircraft prevented some of the crew from getting back alive, Tom Metcalfe writes.

The buried plane was in a remote region made dangerous by hidden ice crevasses, sudden storms and hungry polar bears. “This is a very cold-weather region and an inhospitable location,” Salazar said.

Metcalfe does not explain how the aircraft became buried so quickly. A thermal probe that can melt the ice was required to reach the craft. Search leader Jim Salazar, who runs a machinery business in Pasadena, California, plans to extricate the craft from the ice next summer with mostly his own funds.

How can Metcalfe ignore the obvious question? People reading this would want to know how a WW2 plane became entombed 300 feet deep in ice in just 76 years. Creation Magazine reported on the discovery of the first P-38, saying that the find challenges slow-and-gradual preconceptions. Carl Wieland tells the story of the crash landings, and notes that searchers in the 1980s expected to find them sitting on top of the ice in pristine condition in the deep freeze of Greenland.

In the years to follow, a few people occasionally recalled the legendary Lost Squadron of 1942, but it was only in 1980 that anyone thought of a salvage mission. U.S. airplane dealer Patrick Epps told his friend, architect Richard Taylor, that the planes would be like new. “All we’d have to do is shovel the snow off the wings, fill them with gas, crank them up and fly them off into the sunset. Nothing to it.”

To their surprise, the searchers found the first bomber in 1988 not on the surface, but under 250 of ice. The deep burial had occurred in just 50 years. The bomber had been crushed by the deep ice. It wasn’t until 1992 that the sturdier P-38 “Glacier Girl” was recovered. All the planes were in the same position, Wieland notes, but had moved horizontally 3 miles inside the glacier.

Wieland responds to critics who say that a common school experiment shows that a metal grid can sink through a block of ice. He says it only happens at room temperature, not in a freezer. In addition, if the planes had sunk, they would have ended up nose down, but were found in a horizontal position. The aircraft did not sink, therefore, but became covered by accumulating snow that compacted into over 300 feet of ice in just a matter of decades. What does this mean for dating methods? “Millions of years” are tossed around so casually, Wieland says, that people come to assume that everything in nature requires long ages. This case demonstrates that the assumption needs to be challenged.

Evolutionists and other long-agers often say that ‘the present is the key to the past’. In that case, the 3000-m-long ice core [brought up by the joint European Greenland Ice-core Project (GRIP) in Greenland in 1990–1992] would only represent some 2,000 years of accumulation. Allowing of course for compression of lower layers, (which is also offset by the inevitable aftermath of a global Flood, namely much greater precipitation and snowfall for a few centuries) there is ample time in the 4,000 or so years since Noah’s day for the existing amounts of ice to have built up—even under today’s generally non-catastrophic conditions.

Wieland lists other surprising cases of rapid change to phenomena of known date, like the flag and sledge left in 1911 by Amundsen at the South Pole that was found under 40 feet of ice. Changes can occur rapidly if the conditions are right. In some cases, the assumption of millions of years actually becomes part of the problem, not part of the solution. If 300 feet of ice can accumulate in just 76 years, how about millions?