http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnews/20081217/ts_usnews/arcticicemeltingatalarmingpace

That would not be the old ice that has shed its brine.

Only if it were new ice, multiyear ice will have expelled the brine by the mechanism referred to and is essentially fresh.

George E. Smith (11:50:04) :
“” crosspatch (19:07:45) :

Arctic sea ice is frozen sea water but the longer it lives the more the salt works out of it. The older it gets, the fresher it gets. “”

………….

But there really isn’t any “outsalting” process that goes on once the water is frozen. The very concept of solid means that the molecules are NOT free to move about in the solid, so any small amount of salt in the solid is not going to move about and get ejected from the solid.

Actually George crosspatch is right, see here for example: http://www.nsidc.org/seaice/characteristics/brine_salinity.html “”

Well Phil, I guess it depends on your point of view. I would have to agree with what crosspatch said; only to the extent, that if you grabbed a chunk of that ice/brine cocktail and ate it, that you would get the benefit of the brine salt.

But brine is not ice; and the ice, sans brine, is fresh water of quite high purity.

If you dig up your potatos or yams, and you don’t pay attention to not collecting the weeds between them; then you could reasonably claim that potatos or yams have a lot of weed content.

But touch! crosspatch ! ; I never pass up an opportunity to learn something myself.

George

That said, why has extent leveled of over the last few days? Is it real? Wind compacting?

Dec 10 11650000
Dec 11 11678594
Dec 12 11681563
Dec 13 11662813
Dec 14 11640625
Dec 15 11682813

Source IJIS web site today.

Is this to make them consistent with NANSEN?

Don’t know…….but it sure raises questions…..in the interest of science.

Comparing the Nansen graphs with AMSR. What is going on at AMSR. They are showing that ice extent has fallen for the past week or so. I remain sceptical of the reasons for changing the graphs. Too convenient.

Have a look at the animation in cryosphere http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/ .

There is a retreat the last few days.

If you look at the water temperature anomalies, another animation at the bottom of the index page http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sst/, you will see a “hot spot” south of Iceland after mid november. Volcano/geothermal activity?

And if you look at the other curves you’ll notice that it’s not an uncommon event even in January.

But there really isn’t any “outsalting” process that goes on once the water is frozen. The very concept of solid means that the molecules are NOT free to move about in the solid, so any small amount of salt in the solid is not going to move about and get ejected from the solid.

Actually George crosspatch is right, see here for example: http://www.nsidc.org/seaice/characteristics/brine_salinity.html

Link to AMSR

http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png

On 13th December the ice area and extent were recalculated and new curves plotted for 01.09.2008-12.12.2008 due to error in new version of software.

I looked in over at the Nansen site, today. Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see any mea culpas over there. Perhaps they think that posting on “Watts” is enough?

I kinda gotta throw in with Thorn (Charlton Heston) when he mocked Sol Roth’s (Edward G, Robinson) lament “Greenhouse Effect! Everything’s burning up!”.

(See Soylent Green, 1973 – a true classic SF movie)

Arctic sea ice is frozen sea water but the longer it lives the more the salt works out of it. The older it gets, the fresher it gets. “”

Well not exactly; the solubility of the salts in the solid phase (Ice) is very much less than in the liquid phase (water). The ice “grows” at the interface between the liquid phase and the solid phase, and the salts are excluded from the solid at that time, which makes the liquid at the interface even more salty than normal, but the ice as grown, is quite fresh. I don’t know exactly what the segregation coefficient is for the common salts in sea water; but presumably any of those Oceanographer types from Scripps and such places could tell us.

For sea water with 2.47% salinity, the maximum density occurs at the freezing point which is about -2.5 deg C. Normal sea water is about 3.5% salinity, and freezes at an evan lower temperature, and also keeps getting denser till it freezes.

The floating ice, being freshwater, melts at zero C so once the sea freezes, it tends to grow quite quickly.

But there really isn’t any “outsalting” process that goes on once the water is frozen. The very concept of solid means that the molecules are NOT free to move about in the solid, so any small amount of salt in the solid is not going to move about and get ejected from the solid.

Freezing, including seeded growth of a crystal, is a very common process for highly purifying materials.

We used to grow single crystals of Gallium Arsenide for semiconductor products (LEDs), using a “:Gradient Freeze” process, whereby the crystal growth started at a seed crystal, and proceeded along the melt driving any impurities in front of the growth face, so all the impurities were caught in the extreme end of the crystal, or uually left in a small liquid “slag” puddle at the 3end of the growth. We also reprocessed recycled gallium and purified it to seven nines purity (99.99999%) by repeated crystallization, and remelting.

George

Aren’t the warmist hoaxers required to prove their hoax, instead of others disproving it? There is no proof that stands up that global warming caused by man exists.

Why is everyone falling into this trap? It is not anyone’s responsibility to DIS-prove global warming. Global Warming, anthropogenic or otherwise, has never been proven. The Burden of Proof is on the warmists, and always has been.

The answer is in the HADCRUT data and always has been. THERE HAS BEEN NO GLOBAL WARMING. This is not something that you or I have to DISprove. THEY have NEVER proven it. All temperature data that the warmists rely on that is prior to 1940 is MADE UP. Anyone ever hear of BOOTSTRAPPING? It can only be reliably used on NORMALLY DISTRIBUTED data – which temperatures are not.

How do folks here justify a Global Average Temperature for, say, 1860, that is based on data from less than 16% of the globe?

Where is the temperature data prior to 1940 FROM? Are they reliable sources? Were they all collected according to ONE standard methodology?

In order to try to DISprove global warming, one must first accept that the data presented to prove it is reliable/acceptable proof. Why is everyone here proceeding as if they are trying to DISprove something that has been proven?

Besides which, it seems that the data are all collected, recorded, and presented by individuals who have a vested interest in having the evidence support Global Warming — how is it that either graph is reliable?