WW II Aircraft lost on Greenland
The two most notable aircraft losses on Greenland back in the 1940’s were

1)the B-17/P-38 flight which crashed in 1942 in southeast Greenland 17 miles from the coast (google P-38 Glacier Girl) later found buried and recovered piece by piece from over 260 ft of ice and… “”

Jeff; I had forgotten that illfated Darryl Greenameyer B-29 project. Airplane buffs (me included) were totally stunned by that very sad loss.

But your point ois very important.
A criticism often levelled at the “lost squadron” event was the suggestion that the planes simply sank into the ice. Remember the high school science experiment where a wire cuts its way through an ice cube as a result of the pressure under the wire raising the melting point. The ice melts under the wire, and the water flows around the wire and refreezes.

So they aregued that over sixty years the planes cut their way down.

Well Greenameyer;s B-29 nproves that the planes didn’t cut through the ice. The B-29, was actually on a forzen lake I believe to it wouldn’t have to cut very far to end up in the water.

In fact if the B-17s and P-38s had sunk into the ice, they very soon would have been buoyant, and the pressure wouldn’t be anywhere near high enough to cause melting. Also the ambient temperature was likely way to cold to permit melting at any achievable pressure.

So those planes were buried in snow, which slowly compacted. Now one atmospher pressure of water is 34 feet, so 262 feet would be 7.7 atmospheres if it was water; but ice is less dense so solid ice would be a bit mode than 8 atmospheres; but then again the average compaction of that much snow would tend to be lower density.

In any cae, 8 atmospheres of external pressure would not necessarily crush the planes too much. Some of them actually contained some ice inside through broken windows; but in any case the net pressure wouldn’t be high enough to cause melting of the ice; so they didn’t sink; they were buried; and with much more than 262 feet of total snow accumulation. It was 262 feet of compacted snow/ice.

Evidently the location of that squadron, was further south, where ther was plenty of precipitation, as compared to further north, where colder temperatures prevent high levels of precipitation.

The ice at the north pole simply isn’t very thick; remember a nucllear submarine surface through the ice at the north pole.

So Jeff, I think you just hit the Jackpot; it all makes sense to me.

Growing ice fields and glacier ice won’t be very fast in more northely drier atmospheres; so the 2 inches per year ice gain; is not inconsistent with 262 feet of precipitation in a more southerly location.

While that has been true for most of this ice epoch, there is an argument to be made that we are exiting the ice epoch and glaciation will start to reduce. Please see the page at: http://www.sciencebits.com/ice-ages

About 1/2 way down is a chart with our position relative to the spiral arms of the galaxy over time and ice epochs over time. All of our recent glaciations have been in the last (left most) ice epoch. Notice the tight correlation of epochs with arm transits? Milankovitch cycles determine the entrance and exit from glaciations inside an epoch, but the ice epochs are a larger cycle driven by arm transits. We are probably as bad as it gets for cold in this epoch (or close to it) in either the last or next glaciation.

The good news is that we’ve just exited a spiral arm and ought to be heading toward warmer times. The bad news is that ice epochs lag the arm transit and all this is measured in 100s of millions of years; so we could be ‘right on the top’ of the present ice epoch (more glaciations to come but milder) or could have a bit more increase in the strength of the next glaciation or two before we are on the downhill side. (What’s .1 or .2 million years on a 10 million per tick graph ;-) Basically, we need more understanding of this process and a finer grained chart to get some kind of clue what happens next (in a few hundred thousand years).

bedrock in Northern Canada that will be under a mile of ice for 100,000 years starting at some point in the not too distant future.

Interesting idea, but ‘not too distant’ could be 10,000 years. Waste is 1/2 decayed by then and 10 civilizations will have come and gone.

My favorite disposal idea is vitrified canisters deposited in a subduction zone. Comes back a long time later after a near mantel experience diluted with magma… Don’t know how hard it would be to drill a hole into 5 miles of ocean and seabed sediment to place the canisters, though ;-)

But I’d really rather not treat fuel rods as ‘waste’. Most of the energy value is still in them. Send the used wash cloths and bunny suits, the coolant pumps and other low level wastes to storage, but turn those fuel rods into new fuel.

And since the switch to glaciation appears to happen quite rapidly we need to have at least some idea of what we are going to do to help our citizens in Alaska and our neighbors in Canada when climate shifts suddenly and their land becomes uninhabitable.

They can join us in Mexifornia and Texico … Seriously, I’d expect the southern US to become part of Mexico as everyone huddles up close and heads for warmth. If an ice age happens, the chaos will make our present idea of “countries” a quaint memory. Then again, in a hundred years we will all be speaking Spanglish anyway and having tacos with our tea & scones.

(My BF as a kid was a Mexican neighbor. I grew up eating tacos at his home and he drinks tea with his pinky out thanks to meals at my home. Yeah, I guess I started it all… ;-0 and we both speak both languages.)

The nice thing is that while the entry is somewhat abrupt, the slope is spread over a long time to the bottom, so we’ve got a few thousand years before it gets really really bad. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png

Notice how the ice volume builds over about 100,000 years? It takes 1,000 years just to get started. Lets just say I’m not worried about an ice sheet in my or my grandkids lifetimes. Cold, yes, ice, no.

As we are entering a period of orbital shape that is increasingly favorable to glaciation, it might take only one deep solar minimum to trigger the switch.

It looks to me like a stochastic resonance problem. There is just a lot of slop in the exact entrances and exits. It’s not just a solar minimum, it’s also rock falls from space and volcanos and continental drift and ocean currents that could trigger an entrance.

We do know that we’re likely near the end of this interglacial. We just don’t know if the start of the next glaciation is 20,000 years in the future or if it already started 500 years ago and the present is a last gasp counter oscillation on the way down. It could also be that the GHG theory is ’spot on’ and it is the only thing keeping the ice age away (in which case, please keep burning that coal !!!)

If the Little Ice Age were to repeat today, we might not come out of it. And if we do, and if it happens again 200 years from now, we would stand an even better chance of not coming out of it as the orbit will be even more favorable to glaciation than it is now.

Yup. Unfortunately, there is a great range of possible start dates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles

gives a decent treatment. Notice way down at the bottom they site two sources for ‘where we are now’. One saying cooling started 6k years ago, another saying we’ve got about 50,000 years of no worries.

So many words to say “we don’t know.” Sigh.

The good news is that it’s all in geologic time. The next glacial period could have begun in 1500 A.D. and we’ll find out for sure in about 3000 A.D. Yes, it’s that slow, and with 1500 year climate cycles built on top of it.

So I wouldn’t worry about it. Even if the next glaciation already started, it will take 10 lifetimes to become ‘an issue’. That is ‘quite rapidly’ in geologic time…

Which really is meaningless. At the same time, the actual bay has shrunk due to dumping fill in some areas and natural deposition in others. Alviso was a seaport where ships were built for WWII. It is now substantially landlocked. The sports docks have turned from occupied (about 25 years ago when I was looking for a place to put my boat) to now being a reed filled marshy mud flat. Shortly it will be dry land. One can no longer launch a boat from the ramp due to the dirt & mud making it hard to row…

(Alviso is the very southern most tip of the S.F. bay)

Where did all that bay rise go? Swallowed by the earth rise I guess …

My boat was great for the bay. It was a 27′ motor sailer with about 27 inches of draft! Skidded sideways like crazy on a tack, but it was great fun to sale outside the channels around folks stuck in the mud with their fin keels. Much of SF and San Pablo (the north 1/2 of “SF bay”) bays are very shallow. Mostly under 10 feet, often under 3 feet. SF bay is really just a fat river with a very shallow flood plane on each side. The biggest risk to SF bay is not water rise, it’s the sedimentation turning it into a river…

I am a lying scumbag, and I believe that every other “scientist” should lie through his/her teeth even if they have reasonable doubts.

Mike

How can they possibly know the cause? They have perfect knowledge of the plate tectonics under Greenland?

They have also found that the rate of rise has dramatically accelerated in recent years

Anyone who thinks they can determine a trend in a geologic time scale event from a few years data is is is … words escape me. Certainly not a very good mathematician and a worse geologist. I live in shaky California and things move a lot, then don’t, then sometimes a whole lot, then nothing. Yellowstone breaths in and out. The lake tilts, then doesn’t. And they think that they can attribute causality from a few years movement?

1)the B-17/P-38 flight which crashed in 1942 in southeast Greenland 17 miles from the coast (google P-38 Glacier Girl) later found buried and recovered piece by piece from over 260 ft of ice and…

2) B-29 ‘Kee Bird’ that went down in 1947 in NW Greenland north of Thule. This aircraft was found in the 1990s and was still at the ’surface’ with little snow around it. Darryl Geenamyer and a crew attempted to resore the B-29 on site and fly it out. When they were taxying the plane on the ice, after the restoration, while bumping over some snow drifts, a running APU (Auxilliary Power Unit) in the tail broke lose, caught fire and wound up destroying the plane on the ice :-(

Question – with two separate events happening at around the same time (1940s) yet later found at around the same time (1990s) in very different circumstances (P-38 in deep ice, B-29 at surface)…why???

Reguards,
Jeff K

You are right-still it is a good article so I hope people will take the trouble to open the link

TonyB

Their studies suggest Greenland’s icecap was less than half the volume then as today.

“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

May I translate? Thank you:

“Lying is an appropriate tactic to further the AGW agenda.”

I am a skeptic with an open mind. I live in California. I would like to find out how to distinguish between alleged global warming, caused in part by human activities and the periodic La Nina, which much predates the industrial revolution and cars.
Thank you.
jdelacroixliberty@gmail.com
jacquesdelacroixliberty.wordpress.com

Consider going up the hill from where you are to the Lawrence Hall of Science, just above UC Berkeley. They have a computer console display of the sea level changes in the vicinity of San Francisco over the last 10,000 years. You’ll note that 10,000 years ago the shoreline was out where the Farralon Islands are today. There was no SF Bay. Since about then the sea level rose about 120 meters and stabilized about 7,000 years ago. 7,000 years ago marks the beginning of the urbanic civilizations we know of today. Before then the sea level rise was too great for coastal urban areas to develop. There hasn’t been much sea level variation since then even though we’ve had major periods of warmth as well as cold.

Hopefully this link goes direct to the page. It is an interesting article and worth reading.

tonyb

http://hallolinden-db.de/baseportal?htx=/hallolinden-db.de/Klima/Klima&cmd=list&range=900,100&Datum==*&cmd=all&Id=1680

This ecosystem could be the poster child for “act locally, think globally”, i.e. fix any natural climate change issue of the ecosysytem by fixing it, as opposed to participating in a bogus movement that will fail to legislate against some insignificant molecules floating around above it.

IMHO The underlying problem is “Fear of Powerlessness and Insignificance”.

I agree totally, and the fear is understandable. But it is the response of many current “Environmentalists” which is indeed pathological: to necessarily involve the rest of us in their grand neurotic schemes of personal salvation, also in spite of the deleterious side-effects of those schemes. Imo, from one point of view they seem to have externalized what would otherwise be only a personal obsessive-compulsive disorder based upon an otherwise understandable fear, such that everyone else simply must be incorporated into it, quasi-religiously – or else!

I can across this article by Kurzmeldungen Klima.

http://hallolinden-db.de/baseportal?htx=/hallolinden-db.de/Klima/Klima&cmd=list&range=0,100&Datum==*&cmd=all&Id

I hope works

Add to your observation the 30 day animation from
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/ where the amoeba of ice recoils off Iceland at some point

and the anomaly plot loop from
(http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sst/)

http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sst/sst_anom_loop.gif

where one sees an isolated hot spot appearing between iceland and greenland and the volcanic activity view is on the table.

The only way I could mathematically see a hots pot developing between the islands from a storm front would be if a type of focusing around iceland were possible, lower temperatures coming from right and left and adding up in the middle.