Early in the morning, six P-38 Lightning fighters and two giant B-17 bombers took to the air from a secret US Air Force base in Greenland. It was July 15, 1942, and the planes were heading to a British airfield to take part in battles against the Nazi army.
The planes were flying east over the polar ice caps when they got caught in a blizzard. Flying blindly, they heard that their first scheduled refueling stop in Iceland had been canceled. This made them head back to base. Approaching the base with a small supply of fuel, they found that it was also closed. The pilots realized that they had no choice but to crash in the icy expanses of the east coast of Greenland.
An emergency landing of the P-38 aircraft with the landing gear retracted was the only way out of this situation. During the landing, the nose wheel of the first plane hit a crevasse in the glacier, causing the plane to bounce. Fortunately, the impact on the canopy of the eight-ton P-38 aircraft was softened by snow, and the pilot's damage was minor. After the successful landing of the first aircraft, the rest of the squadron began to descend, removing the landing gear. As a result of the landing, the planes were only slightly damaged.
All members of the squadron remained safe and sound and were rescued after about 10 days. However, the planes were left at the landing site.
As the years passed, several people accidentally remembered the legendary Lost Squadron. But it was not until 1980 that they began to talk about saving the planes. American airplane dealer Patrick Epps told his friend Richard Taylor that the planes should be as good as new. “All we have to do is scrape off the snow from the wings, fill them with fuel, start and lift them into the sky. And nothing more.
It took these two many years and a lot of money to complete the mission. Several expeditions were undertaken, and only after that they learned at least something. In 1988, an Icelandic geophysical engineer using sophisticated radar discovered eight large objects under the ice.
As the small, homemade steam probe drilled a hole in the ice, the expedition members watched in surprise as the probe had to be lengthened all the time. Finally, the first plane was found at a depth of 75 meters!
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None of the members of the expedition thought that the aircraft could be located at depths exceeding a thin layer of snow or ice. And why should they have thought differently? In the end, the public got the impression that glacial ice formation takes place over very long periods of time - it takes thousands of years for only a few meters of ice to form.
Ice cores (columns of ice) in Greenland are used for dating based on the assumption that layers containing different isotope ratios have been deposited over many tens of thousands of years.
This is the same belief that many people think it takes millions of years for coral reefs to form, stalactites to grow, etc. This is despite the abundance of evidence that it didn't take huge periods of time to form all of this.
Epps and Taylor realized that it was impossible to simply dig up or blow up such a huge amount of ice that had accumulated in less than 50 years. In 1990, they returned to the area, carrying a simple device called the Super Gopher. The height of this apparatus was one and a half meters, it was wrapped in copper coils through which hot water was pushed. This device melted a 1.2 meter wide shaft in the ice and descended at a speed of about 0.5 meters per hour until it hit the B-17 wing. After the aircraft reached the wing, hot water was fed through the sleeve to form a cavity around the aircraft. Unfortunately, the huge bomber was destroyed.
Frustrated, Epps and Taylor returned home. However, after just a month, they realized that the smaller and more durable P-38s had a better chance of remaining intact under such a huge layer of ice. They returned in May 1992. As they expected, the recovered P-38 was in perfect condition.
After many weeks of strenuous effort, the wings and body were raised to the surface through a huge hole made with a "gopher", as well as four adjacent holes. Interestingly, the planes found under the ice were in the same position in which they made an emergency landing, but were displaced (as a result of the movement of glaciers) 5 km from their initial location!
Evolutionists and other long ages theorists often say that "the present is the key to unraveling the past." In such a case, a cylindrical column of ice 3000 meters high [from the Greenland Core Drilling Project (GRIP) 1990-1992] would represent only about 2000 years of ice accumulation. If we also take into account the compression of the underlying layers (which is compensated by the effect of the global Flood, namely, increased precipitation and snowfall over several centuries6) in the 4000 years or so since Noah's Flood, there was enough time for the existing the amount of ice - even in today's generally non-catastrophic conditions.
As always, it is not the facts that speak against the Biblical description of recent creation, but the way of thinking of our culture. Everyone unintentionally speaks about "millions of years" so often that we unconsciously perceive all natural changes as occurring over long periods of time. This is why many people are simply "amazed" when they hear facts such as the formation of 180 meters of layered sedimentary rock in the months following the Mount Saint Helena eruption on May 18, 1980.7 Or when people hear that precious opals are formed within a few months, 8 or that coal is formed in a matter of months as a result of simple heating of wood.9 Or that the flag, tent and sled, which were left at the South Pole by the Antarctic explorer Amundsen in 1911,were discovered today under the ice at a depth of 12 meters, 10 or as the Lost Squadron described by us, deeply buried under the ice.
However, we should not be too surprised when the facts say that events usually happen much faster than is generally assumed in the framework of evolutionary thinking, because "The basis of Your word is true, and all judgment of Your righteousness is eternal" (Psalm 119: 160).
Karl Wieland