Here is an excerpt from Minds in Ablation, Part One: Ice Cores and Ideology by Sean Mewhinney discussing Velikovsky and ice cores along with some of the wacky ideas the Velikovsky believers have come up with in attempting to dismiss the evidence.
The entire site (link above) is a good read on Velikovsky and the efforts of a few die hard believers.
Cheers
Jim
" The evidence itself is straightforward enough. Virtually every kind of analysis that you could think of asking for to test Velikovsky's theories has already been performed. There is no trace of the petroleum or meteoritic dust that Velikovsky said fell on the earth in great quantities, or of the manna that shrouded the planet in darkness for 40 years as it fell, feeding the Israelites, no layer of soot from worldwide conflagrations, no sulfates such as would be produced from the simultaneous eruption of thousands of volcanoes, no sign of any exchange of atmospheres with other planets in bubbles of ancient air trapped in the ice, no layer of salty, bubble-free ice from a giant wave. We didn't pick up any chlorine from Saturn or argon from Mars. We didn't lose any oxygen burning hydrogen from Saturn.
The best evidence, though, is in the oxygen and hydrogen isotopes of the ice itself. Water molecules composed of the heavier isotopes are more sluggish than their neighbors. They are somewhat slower to evaporate from the oceans, and they condense and fall to the ground more readily. There is a net atmospheric transport of water vapor from the tropics, where most evaporation takes place, to the higher latitudes. So water in the atmosphere becomes progressively more and more depleted in the heavier isotopes as it moves toward the higher latitudes and cools off. There is a very strong correlation between depletion in the heavier isotopes and colder temperatures, higher latitudes, higher elevation above sea level, and greater distance from the source of precipitation. The local correlation over Greenland and Antarctica is a little less than one part per thousand depletion in oxygen 18 for every degree Celsius fall in the temperature of precipitation. (See Fig. 1.) Any significant change in temperature, latitude, or elevation of the site, or in the distribution of land and sea, will affect the oxygen-isotope ratios of the ice. This means that any change in the earth's orbit, axis, inclination, speed of rotation, or sea levels will show up in a gross, obvious change in isotope ratios. Amazingly, after years of debate about ice cores, there are major figures in the Velikovskian movement so hermetically isolated that they are still not aware of this. "
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