Those masters of disaster are at it again, and it appears our friendly scientists at that National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) help this story along each year.
Thanks to WUWT reader Ron de Haan who spotted this on:
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/AntarcticWilkinsIceShelf.htm
Note the dates for these two stories are a year apart, but use the same photo.
It seems that not only is the photography recycled, so is the storyline. It seems to happen every year, about this time. Note the photos show shear failure and cracks, not melted ice. Shear failure is mostly mechanical-stress related, though ice does tend to be more brittle at colder temperatures.
National Geographic reported this story headline last year, March 25th 2008
PHOTO IN THE NEWS: Giant Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapses
Don’t let the date in the upper right fool you, thats just an automatic “today’s date” javascript element found in many webpages.
From the Nat Geo story:
“[It’s] an event we don’t get to see very often,” Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, said in a press statement.
Now, how is it that an ice shelf breaks up in the spring of 2008 and again in the spring of 2009 and it’s “not very often”? Hmmm.
It seems NSIDC’s Ted Scambos gets around. Doing a Google search for
Wilkins ice shelf + “Ted Scambos”
yields about 4,930 results. Yep, he sure gets the word out every year.
Ted Scambos said something similar in 1999:
“On the southwest side of the peninsula, the Wilkins ice shelf retreated nearly 1,100 square kilometers in early March of last year [1998], said Scambos. … Within a few years, much of the Wilkins ice shelf will likely be gone” [http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?ID=3209&Method=Full&PageCall=&Title=Antarctic%20Ice%20Shelf%20Break-Up%20Accelerates&Cache=False].
But, as can be seen from the following January 1996 and March 2008 images, there has been hardly any change in a decade. Look at the photos below from the appinsys web site:
But wait, there’s more examples of that “not very often” Wilkins ice shelf breakup, again from the appinsys web site:
As the following historical satellite images of the Wilkins Ice Shelf show, the disintegration / re-growth is an annual event (winter ice re-growth season; summer melt season).
But we just know warming is involved, NSIDC says so:
The MSNBC 2008 article reports on a NSIDC article which states:
“NSIDC Lead Scientist Ted Scambos, who first spotted the disintegration in March, said, “We believe the Wilkins has been in place for at least a few hundred years. But warm air and exposure to ocean waves are causing a break-up.”
The closest station to the Wilkins Ice Shelf in the NOAA Global Historical Climate Network database is Rothera Point. The following figure shows the historical data for Rothera Point, with monthly temperatures in blue and the annual January temperature in red. Summer (Dec – Mar) temperatures have not increased – the 2000s January temperatures are similar to the 1940s (the oldest data available). So why does NSIDC’s Scambos blame it on air temperatures?
The appinsys article goes on to talk about ocean currents and sea surface temperatures being a contributor, and it is worth the read. See it here.
The real question is, how often are we going to see the Wilkins Ice Shelf be a lead news story as poster child for “global warming” to illustrate ice loss in Antarctica that is actually growing.
I guess as long as we have NSIDC’s Ted Scambos to help the media, it will be “something we get to see fairly often”.
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Unbelievable.
How many other busted stories will you need to expose until they catch the drift?
Excellent post, very disturbing that this type of subterfuge is appearing so frequently.
In my own line of work (Landslide/rock fall risk assessment) I find using historical photos incredibly useful in establishing process rates that help to predict failure frequency and then the need for remediation measures, monitoring, or do nothing etc. The tale from the historical series above, even on the short time scale indicates that there is nothing to worry about here!
What I find fascinating is the area to the southeast (?) in the satellite imagery, the section of the shelf that stretches between Latady Is. (the longish one in the center of the above photographs) and Alexander Is. (the land in the bottom right corner). Compare February 1994 to February 2009. It appears virtually unchanged over 15 years.
MarchH says, ” there is nothing to worry about here!”.
Sorry sir, I for one do not agree with you, because that´s just what there are. This story is not just about ice breaking up, but also, and actuallly more, about officials, representing public institutions, trying to quite deliberately to mislead the populace into believing something which is completely false and looks fabricated too indeed.
On top of that they are doing it knowing very well that they are at great risk getting caught “in the act” on the internet on sites like Wuwt. This points to a
frightening indifference and arrogance towards thruth and respect for people in general. That´s frightening!
You know, come to think about it – I kept thinking that picture looked really familiar.
The Wilkins Iceshelf is on the west side of an island, which is on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula. A location that will be particularly affected by ocean and ocean current changes. And by changes in the westerly winds that blow with hurricane force most of the year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ant-pen_map.png
By citing the Wilkins Iceshelf as evidence of AGW, they are highlighting the weakness of their case. Interestingly the media seems to be catching on.
From the Australia article,
Dr Allison said there was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting. “The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west,” he said. And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude seen recently in west Antarctica might not be unusual.
“Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off – I’m talking 100km or 200km long – every 10 or 20 or 50 years.”
A point I have made repeatedly. Icesheets will break up irrespective of whether the climate is warming or cooling. This is because glaciers transport ice from where it doesn’t melt to where it does melt. This is true even in the depths of an ice age.
Only longer term (100 years or more) data will tell us whether the trend of breakup is increasing, but we don’t have that data.
Hmmm. Hey Phil.
===========
Why do these supposed scientists find it so hard to grasp the concept that the Arctic and Antarctic have been losing and recreating most of their sea ice each and every year for far longer than any of us have been alive. Mostly due to ocean currents, tides, and gyres breaking it up and flushing it to warmer waters, since polar atmospheres seldom get warm enough to materially affect the cycle. Your previous post on the rebound of Antarctic ice clearly shows that the melt cycle is over, so the chance of the broken Wilkins Shelf drifting away before it once again refreezes is slim.
As an aside, is CT still using data from that faulty satellite? I looked at their 30 day Antarctic animation and it seems to have some suspiciously jumpy areas of open water.
In the Oct 2003 picture you can clearly see the edge of the icesheet running from the upper island down along the northern end of the lower island. In the Feb 2009 picture there has been break up at the northwestern edge, but none further south and east.
In the January 1996 picture there is large scale break up of the ice sheet at its northern edge, at least 50 kilometers in depth. None of the later pictures show additional break up in the north.
From these pictures it’s clear most break up (around 90%) occured pre-1996.
One could conclude that in recent years we have seen a dramatic reduction in ice break up on the Wilkins Iceshelf. But a couple of decades is far too short a timeframe to establish a break up trend in these very large Antarctic glacier/icesheets.
Another ‘gotcha’ moment brought to you by WUWT.
The -fill in the blank- ice shelf collapses {or is in danger of collapsing} * * *
* * * again and again and again…
I’m intrigued by the words chosen to describe what appear to me to be somewhat infrequent but naturally recurring events. In Antarctica the word of choice is “collapse” and in the Arctic it is “ice free.”
I’m not real sure what either term means. Take “collapse.” So a piece of floating ice cracks and floats around for awhile and may or may not slip away eventually from Antarctica but seems just or more likely to stay in place, re-attach, and break away again. Yet each time it “collapses” it is a catastrophic event. Yet the total ice mass there seems to be growing if the photos of ice and snow buried weather stations and industrial size cranes are to be believed. These collapses seem no more a catastrophe than broken ice flushing out of the Arctic Ocean in whole (“ice free”) or in part (subs can surface at the NP and ice breakers can navigate around big ice or through thin ice). This is a game of words. There is no problem.
Nice work on this – the one photo – two years – same story is hilarious.
nothingtocareabout (23:34:19) :
point taken…note that I am also concerned about the way this is being handled by the media.
NSIDC Ted Scambos at the helm
Sinking ship on ice
Oh, I messed up- supposed to be haiku!
Fox news has a slightly different take. Is Wilkins on the Left (wing) side of Antarctica, and all the rest of the Right?
Report: Antarctic Ice Growing, Not Shrinking
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,517035,00.html
It would only stand to reason a person named “Scam”bos would perpetuate such a scam.
Ron, Anthony, Steven and the reast of you bird dogs sure hunt up some good ones. Thanks
I am not a scientist , just a menial taxpayer.It seems to me that as the ice builds up, it gets heavier and when the layer of ice gets heavier than its strength can carry it will break and settle.
It breaks up, then it reforms, then it breaks up, then it reforms, then it breaks up, etc, etc. Sounds like a cyclical motion to me! As a structural engineer I see this frequently in old buildings & houses, summer time the cracks open up as the moisture content of a soil reduces & the strucutre settles, & they seal themselves up again in the winter when the subsoil moisture content replenishes & the ground heaves the strucutre back up again. If it happens in building structures through natural variations in local conditions, it can happen in natural structures such as ice sheets without the need for calamity. Talking of cracks BTW, not sure if I saw correctly but it looked like lots of shallow radial & parallel crack marks in the top right of one of the reforming photos? Reminds me of the tide going out & then coming in again.
Why do people, & especially those who probably should know better, jump to conclusions based upon one piece of evidence, yet ignore another completely? Why does an observation that one has not noticed previously, quite possibly because such an observation was impossible, decide arbitrarily to conclude an impending disaster is around the corner, without considering the possibility that “perhaps I have only just noticed this event, perhaps it has been happening all the time & I didn’t know it until now!” Mr Scambos should try consultnig the Three Witches next time his conclusions would be just as valid.
As to comments regarding publicly employed officials deliberately or naively misleading the public by their pronouncements, it is indeed an extremely serious issue of trust, honour, & integrity in my book! I know it happens all over the world at all levels of officialdom, but on a small scale. It’s human nature, but wrong when paid by the taxpayer as a public servant. I can understand whistleblowing in the name of democracy, public interest, & hypocracy scandals (one for the politicians), but not misleading people serving a political cause however noble the sentiment!
Lies, Damn Lies, and Global Warming!
You guys should do a story on the fraudulent use of pictures by alarmists.
There’s this recycled Wilkins one, then there was that other one WUWT covered where NCDC pasted a photoshopped picture of a flooded house into what they were suggesting was a scientific document.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/08/04/ncdc-photoshopping-the-climate-change-report-for-better-impact/#more-2064
Here’s a story on one with photoshopped smokestacks.
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/006020.html
Then there’s the classic. Gore’s laughable use of the polar bears on the melting ice floes picture.
There must be more.
What a coincidence! I just finished a post on the Southern Ocean SST anomalies, ERSST.v3b version.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/04/closer-look-at-ersstv3b-southern-ocean.html
The last graph covers the grid of 80S-65S, 80W-60W, which surrounds the Wilkins Ice Shelf.
http://i44.tinypic.com/a331xv.jpg
SST anomalies there have been dropping since the 1990s. The trend of the data since 1854 is negative. And the SST anomalies were higher in the 1880s than they were the 1990s.
That post, Figure 5, also shows that ~80% of the Southern Ocean had a long slow decrease and increase in SST anomalies. Is that a cycle with a frequency of about 100 years or simply a dip and rebound?
Also note the very large area of break up in the Dec 1993 picture south of Latady Island. Later pictures show no significant break up in this area.
Good analysis at this link.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Wilkins_Ice_Shelf_con.pdf
CT is definitely a AGW site just look at the article they posted in reply to Will’s article in the Daily Tech (its still there despite recent global ice being totally unchanged and recently SH climbing way above anomaly + NH also about to reach “normal” proving Will’s article 100% correct).
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/global.sea.ice.area.pdf
On the other hand, they have NOT manipulated the data (re global ice), so they have maintained some sense of dignity. Beware of “software glitches” to bring the ice down though…. as shown by previously LOL
http://mikelm.blogspot.com/2007/09/left-image-was-downloaded-from.html
I would nor read ANYTHING into these ice changes (up or down) in the context of “climate”
A little O/T
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/5172098/Arctic-ice-is-thinner-than-ever-according-to-new-evidence-from-explorers.html
It is interesting that they are moving the goal posts from Sea Ice area or extent to VOLUME.