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.
Given that there is now ice around the bathtub “ring”, count me out. I like my tub time warm and bubbly.
Off topic…
I just wanted to draw attentions to NSIDC Sep 24 update .
They talk about the “higher-than-average retention of first-year sea ice” and have a nice graphic of it.
What’s the proper way to bring attention to a new topic?
Thanks.
Love this site…great information.
Speaking of quackery:
Gore urges civil disobedience to stop coal plants
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmental crusader Al Gore urged young people on Wednesday to engage in civil disobedience to stop the construction of coal plants without the ability to store carbon.
The former U.S. vice president, whose climate change documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” won an Academy Award, told a philanthropic meeting in New York City that “the world has lost ground to the climate crisis.”
“If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration,” Gore told the Clinton Global Initiative gathering to loud applause. … [more]
http://www.reuters.com:80/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE48N7AA20080924?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews&rpc=22&sp=true
Gore is calling for civil disobedience? Maybe he should lead the charge. Why leave it to the young people? Maybe those young people should protest against 100′ houseboats too.
“…it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration…”
Brilliant.
All new electrical power plants must come in pairs – one to produce electricity for people to use, and one to produce electricity for “carbon capture and sequestration.”
Where i live oranges were once dumped into the harbour to investigate currents. Cheap and biodegradeable i suppose
OT, but now Gore is suggesting civil disobedience against coal plants.
Click here for the latest Goreism.
oops. I should have read the postings first….
OT: NOAA head steps down. No mention of why. At the bottom of the page, NOAA still claims to understand the Earth’s environment. http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/20080923_vadm.html
alexjc38: I’ll have to add an icebergs-and-duckies design to my list of desired desktop images, along with the icons from the preceding hammering-weather-patterns article.
From the bottom of the NOAA page:
Hmm-m
From:
Are the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets in Danger of Collapse?
http://www.scienceandpolicy.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=396&Itemid=77
“Flow is mainly by a process called creep, essentially the movement of atoms from one crystal to another.”
“The flow of material in a solid crystalline state is known as creep, and there are three laws of creep relevant to the flow of ice:
1. Creep is proportional to temperature.
2. Creep is proportional to stress (essentially proportional to the weight of overlying ice)
3. There is a minimum stress, called the yield stress, below which creep does not operate.
All these laws have significant effects on glacier movement. Alpine glaciers differ significantly from the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica, and care is needed to transfer knowledge of one kind of glacier to the other. Incidentally, the physics of ice as described here was worked out over 60 years ago by people such as Perutz (1940)”
Verse 2:
Rubber Duckie you’ve got class,
You’ve got feathers on you butt.
Rubber Duckie I’m awfully fond of you.
Boop, boop, boop-boopie do.
(It doesn’t rhyme, but my granddaughters love it.)
Civil Disobedience? Gore? Hansen? Young People?
– this is surely the actions of some desperate men!
I mean, it shows that they feel they’ve failed to convince the adult population through the proper-channels, and are now having to resort to appealing to the idealistic, easily persuaded, easily manipulated minds of the young….
– and the Civil Disobedience angle is just designed to appeal the young, green-types who like nothing better than protesting against the Big State or Big Business etc
“labelled [sic]”
It is only in the US version of English that “labelled” is spelt
“labeled”. As the article referenced was from “The Sydney Morning Herald” where “labelled” is spelt “labelled”, the “[sic]” was unnecessary.
Anthony
In contrast to the monumental struggle you have to get any form of balance into discussions around climate science and being an expatriot Australian in the US, I thought I would share this bit of trivia … I see (assume maybe) you have “labelled” tagged with a [sic]. “Labelled” is the correct spelling of labeled in Australian English. So in the country of publication that would be correct.
Reference: The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary.
English English has the same spelling – “Labelled”.
Regards
JE
P.S. Great website/blog!
Bill Hunter:”Hey, that’s the way hockey skates work! ”
Skates also need a certain temperature range of the ice to work properly. Too cold and there is no melting and the blades stick. Too warm and the ice becomes too soft to support the blades on the layer of water. I wonder if this applies to glaciers too? Too warm underneath and instead of sliding along( or whatever the techincal term is) the ice becomes soft and mushy so it just sits there and melts.
Smokey (09:15:29) :
Note the bext-to-last quoted paragraph:
One “football.” Not much, but infinitely better than nothing.
Adams:
Don’t you understand, Mr Adams?? The U.S. is the center of the universe.
[i keed!]
Perhaps the Western Climate Initiative: http://www.westernclimateinitiative.org/ could use a few of the dubber rucks before all the ice quacks up.
John Egan,
“I see (assume maybe) you have “labelled” tagged with a [sic]. “Labelled” is the correct spelling of labeled in Australian English. So in the country of publication that would be correct.”
Ah, Australia and the US… two friendly countries seperated by a common language!
ducks = rubber
rubber = polymer
polymer = PET
PET = Polyethylene Glycol Terephthalate
PET + nH2O = n (ethylene glycol) + n(Terephthalic Acid)
Ethylene glycol = antifreeze
antifreeze = No ICE
No ice= No bears
No bears = More ducks
More ducks = Less ice
“Mr Behar said he hoped a fisherman or hunter might find a duck or the probe but so far nothing had turned up.”
Perhaps they are frozen in the glacier? I am kust asking.
Salmon Glacier in Alaska each year builds up water under the tongue until it lifts the ice and floods the entire valley sending icebergs all the way to the ocean some 20 miles away. There is a depression there that the ice has carved out stopping the glacier from advancing and allows the water to build up under it.
Neilo (19:25:53) :
‘seperated’! In Australia we spell that word as ‘Separated’. So you are correct; We ARE seperated (ahum! Separated) by a common language.
So rubber duckies, made in China (largest CO2 emitter), are being used to see the results of too much CO2…