by John Goetz
Rubber Duckie, you’re the one,
You make bathtime lots of fun,
Rubber Duckie, I’m awfully fond of you;
Woo woo be doo
From the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald:
NASA uses rubber ducks to fight global warming
September 23, 2008 – 10:27AM
Rubber ducks are the latest weapons in the fight against global warming, according to NASA.
NASA scientists have dropped 90 of the ducks into holes in the Jakobshavn glacier – Greenland’s fastest moving glacier – in a bid to understand why glaciers speed up in the summer in their march to the sea.
The toys have been labelled [sic] “science experiment” and “reward” in three languages, and carry an email address.
The ducks, if found by someone who emails NASA about their discovery, could tell scientists how melting water moves through ice, Alberto Behar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said.
“It’s a beautiful place to visit. You can watch these icebergs continuously march across and fall into the ocean,” Mr Behar said.
“Right now it’s not understood what causes the glaciers themselves to surge in the summer.”
That’s where the rubber ducks come in, along with a probe about the size of a football loaded with a GPS transmitter and instruments that can tell much about the glacier’s innards.
Mr Behar said he hoped a fisherman or hunter might find a duck or the probe but so far nothing had turned up.
Perhaps the reason glaciers “speed up in the summer” is because it is warmer in the summer and ice melts faster when it is warmer and water under ice helps reduce friction, thereby improving speed?
Just guessing.
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You are in danger of showing commonsense on this…….
Hey, that’s the way hockey skates work! They outta hit the rinks in Houston for research… less GHG generation that way instead of flying to the Far North…
“Perhaps the reason glaciers “speed up in the summer” is because it is warmer in the summer and ice melts faster when it is warmer and water under ice helps reduce friction, thereby improving speed?”
Yes, I think that is the crux of the hypothesis. But there are other possible mechanisms including increased hydrostatic pressure in a deformable till layer below the glacier if the glacier is of the warm bedded type with a till layer and not hard bedrock. In that model as melt increases water infiltrates the sub-glacial till and causes hydrostatic pressure to rise until the shear strength of the till is exceeded and the glacier surges forward. On a large scale, this happened during the last glacial period in places like North Dakota, see: https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs//ndnotes/ndn11.htm
I don’t know how rubber ducks help figure anything out, but if you read the second to last paragraph, they look to be a shot in the dark along with the real instrumentation.
If any of those rubber duckies make it to the arctic, a polar bear could choke on one of them… that would truly be a calamity!
1. Won’t the ducks get crushed under the ice ? If it was all water, I would think the glacier would slide into the ocean rather quickly.
2. Something like this happened a dozen or more years back in the Pacific. A cargo ship lost a container full of “bathtub” toys, ducks, frogs, etc. in a storm. About 28,000 of them. Some did make it ashore, even in the Atlantic. Took many years, and only a handful survived.
90 doesn’t seem like enough. If they do make it out, what does it prove?
It’s quack science.
I guess they got the idea from this story about a consignment of rubber ducks that fell overboard in 1992.
Rocks get all ground up in glaciers. Those rubber duckies must be made of pretty tuff plastic. Maybe some scientist was impressed by the child-proof toughness of the rubber ducky he had at home and thought, “If that damn yellow duck can withstand my kid’s attempt to bite it in half, by gawd it can handle melting ice”. Next stop to rubber ducky fame: Shark beacons.
Your tax dollars hard at work. I wonder how many millions were frittered away on yet another AGW boondoggle.
The comments here seem to show that a lot of people have already made up their minds that AGW is a crock. Such a prejudging doesn’t sound like a very effective way to find the truth out about anything, really.
Let’s repeat – AGW is not proven, neither are its purported effects. That does not mean that nothing bad will happen, it just means it’s not proven – or maybe even provable.
Regard your own fear about the future and its effect on public policy sometime. That’s something we can theoretically change more easily.
Off topic but not really.Over at accuweather weather site on global warming today 09-24-2008 the headline says Antartic ice increase is a side effect of global warming. There people have lost it and will blame any weather occurance that happens in the future on global warming.
A new threat caused by AGW, naturally.
New global warming threat as scientists discover massive methane ‘time bomb’ under the Arctic seabed
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1060041/New-global-warming-threat-scientists-discover-massive-methane-time-bomb-Arctic-seabed.html?printingPage=true
You are getting dangerously close with your analysis.
No expense spared then? Perhaps they’re already feeling the pinch of budgetary cuts!
I always thought that if bits keep breaking off a glacia into the sea it was because it was growing, not melting.
OT. The NASA news release about the lack of solar activity was amazing from what’s been said so far. The almost non-plussed remarks about not being “Climate Experts” is worrying, are these guys not astrophysisists. They ought to take a leaf from a political drama on British tv some years ago now, when some adverse or potentially dodgy/risky/controversial remark was made about the “leader”, the lead character would say (barely concealing the sarcasm,) ” you might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment!” Leaving one in no doubt of the lead character’s opinion.
Are they certified to be environmental friendly?
Well, coupled with the Nike event, at least they got some interesting data from the toy spill:
http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/ducks.html
If there’s a 2% recovery rate from the standard open water release, it doesn’t bode well for the limited number of ducks in this trial.
[Hansen is not connected to this project, nor would he likely ever be. Thus let’s leave speculation like this out of the discussion please. – Anthony]
Kermitt the frog was last seen heading north to save some rubber ducks from freezing to death.
P.S. any contributins to help Kermitt to pay for his trip can be sent to>>…..
They have to keep pushing this theme at least until the next US elections in November. Then once they get their people elected, global cooling will show how “successful” their policies are.
Couldn’t they just put a few GPS devices in crush proof containers? Then they could track them in real time. Also, those ducks better be biodegradable, just like the real thing. There’s already too much rubber duckie pollution.
With the sun being higher in the sky, would there be any change in tidal forces that would impact flow? All that ice would be subject to the same tidal forces as anything else and when the pull of the sun is the most, I would think it could act to lift considerable weight off the bottom of the glacier causing a reduction in friction and allowing it to slide.
Let me guess; this is like that question; “Why is it that there is more matter than anti-matter ?” To which one would answer. “Well what dummy would call the surviving species Anti-matter ?”
Why are electrons negative charge instead of positive charge ? if electrons were positive charge, the the direction of electron flow and the direction of current flow would be the same, instead of being opposite like it is now.
Well we could rename the Juy-September quarter as Winter, and that would fix that NASA problem.
Water acting as a lubricant would certainly be my thought.
Here in Scotland in the Cairgorm mountains in one of the north facing winter climbing corries there is a well known feature – ‘The Great Slab’. This is a fairly featureless slabby area below the main cliffs but well above the corrie floor. It is about 400 ft. high and 800 ft. wide, lies at the relatively gentle angle of about 25 – 30 degrees and almost invariably produces a significant snow/ice avalanche in the late spring/ early summer ( and at other times in winter in heavy thaw conditions).
The generally held belief is that the avalanching is the result of melt water running down the slab and releasing the snow/ice lying on the slab.
(Re Drew Latta’s comment, it would be interesting to know whether or not the glacier is lying on bedrock. I am assuming that it is.)
I have urged my fellow moose to not emigrate to Greenland without adequately educating themselves of the dangers involved in eating or stepping on floating or crushed yellow rubber.
All they need now would be some towels, a sponge, some soap (and maybe a loofah) to have the makings of the perfect Arctic bathtime.
I like this story; it could have come straight from the pages of Douglas Adams.
Maybe we are aboard the Golgafrincham B Ark after all… :o)