Guest post by Steven Goddard
From the Catlin web site today – a first hand description of what motivates the explorers, and what they are learning about Arctic warming.
Thursday, 02 Apr 2009 10:04
“Men wanted for Hazardous Journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.”
Thousands of men (and three women) replied to Ernest Shackleton’s advertisement, which (the story goes) was placed in a London newspaper in 1913, ahead of his Antarctic expedition aboard the Endurance.
Polar expeditions have moved on in terms of technology and equipment, but the motivation and commitment to research that fuelled Shackleton and his team seem not to have altered.
“There’s a cocktail of motivational forces at work”, commented Expedition Leader Pen Hadow from the team tent, huddled over the sat-phone at the end of another long, cold day. “You can sum it up by saying we feel a commitment to represent the Arctic Ocean as an eco-system and the three of us have the skills that allow us to gather the information that will enable people to be better informed about the state of the region and its future“.
But given temperatures of -40 degrees centigrade with a wind chill factor in the minus seventies, does the motivation that fuelled the team from their warm UK base in the planning stages, diminish?
Photographer Martin Hartley who’s been crawling into a frozen sleeping back that becomes a wet sponge overnight for longer than he cares to remember, remarks “I’m getting extremely frustrated with the stupidly cold temperatures that are making my life a misery, day after day. All I can think about, 24 hours a day, is getting a new sleeping bag on the next re-supply”.
But Hadow says he’s speaking for all three team members, himself, Hartley and Ann Daniels, when he concludes, “We’ve absolutely no regrets about being here. Given that it’s so awful, our commitment to the research and our motivation is in fact what keeps us going”.
With a team currently preparing the next re-supply, Hartley should get his new sleeping bag within the next few days.
What I find interesting is the use of the word “But” and “stupidly cold” highlighted in red above. It appears that what they are experiencing on the ground is not what they were expecting to find.
“The team covered a staggering 16.7km today, the biggest distance achieved to date. By covering so much distance since the last resupply (134.5km in 13 days), the team have observed the ice they are crossing is getting significantly older and thicker“
So it is extremely cold and they are finding old, thick ice. That does not sound like the sub-tropical Arctic as portrayed by The Guardian.
Flashback to February, 2008 OSLO, Feb. 29 (Xinhua) — The polar cap in the Arctic may well disappear this summer due to the global warming, Dr. Olav Orheim, head of the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, said on Friday.
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Pen Hadow led the countdown to a global switch off that did not register on Power Company gauges! Big deal!
THe whole expedition is a waste of money/time/effort as they can’t seem to do anything but hype up the negative side of them being there!
Next time do some proper cold weather survival research to avoid looking like total amateurs.
I have a feeling this is all a setup so Big Al can swoop in at the last second in a helicopter (that is leaking fuel), lower a rope, and rescue them.
He’ll fire off a couple of rockets from his shoulder-mounted rocket launcher on approach to scare off the Mean Polar Bears (no animal will actually be harmed) even though he has a shoulder wound from a cool fight he had in some exotic bar a few hours earlier.
Of course, the ice will have a giant advancing crack in it that is headed right for the expedition that destroys their campsite seconds after they have vacated.
B.A. and The Face Man will be waiting back at headquarters for the mandatory closing sequence where everybody has a good laugh about the whole thing.
(I apologize to everyone in advance for this, but it practically wrote itself. I couldn’t stop)
Andrew
Interesting deconstruction of Gore’s stranded Polar bears: click
Photographic evidence that the pole has shifted.
Smokey (11:49:32) :
yeah, how inconvenient for him!!!
2007 and 2008 were both years of low minimum Arctic sea ice.
Nasa admits it was wrong about the cause, wind and sea currents moved the sea ice out of the Arctic.
2007 is when the PDO switched from it’s warm phase to it’s cold phase. Did this cause the switch in wind direction?
It looks like the Atlantic has switched to it’s cool phase a few years early.
What concerns me is that 2009 will give us another low minimum.
The more open sea water that is exposed to sub freezing temperatures the more cooling of the world’s oceans.
Thicker multi-year sea ice restricts the flow of ocean heat thus contributing to more warming.
I have a goofy question… why are we still seeing an ocean algae bloom in the artic ice pictures.. is that for real or do they put the info over a stock picture.. If it is for real, anyone know why there has been an algae bloom all winter? Is that unusual for the area?
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.bandw.000.png
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.bandw.001.png
Like a hundred years ago Amundsen figured out how to travel in relative comfort in these conditions. A hundred years later this is a giant step backwards. Has global warming fried their brains?
These people would die if they attempted John Rea or Amundsen’s feats.
DJKP (08:01:16) :
> Someone please remind me again why we cant get these measurements via satellite?
Let me turn your question around:
What satellite-based sensing system can be used to measure Ice Cap thickness?
If your answer is radar, then I would suggest that any satellite-based radar would have such a wide beam that it would be impossible to distinguish between the reflections off the top of the ice and those at the bottom. The ground based radar Catlin is dragging along has a much easier time (when it’s not being hauled over a pressure ridge!) because all it sees is the bottom.
The drilling they do help provide a double-check and also helps deals with the highly textured ice bottom. At least, I assume it’s highly textured.
[snip – none of that here, we want them to come home safe – Anthony]
John H: “I fail to see how their measurements will have any use whatsoever. It doesn’t appear they are going over a previously measured pattern.”
Here is how the ice moves, also during the winters:
http://nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaiceminimum/images/20070822_oldice.gif
The idea may be that several years of data at a route approximately at the same longitude and latitude positions meanwhile the ice (in the agw saga) shrinks year by year was thought to be helpful in this modern (post modern?) “mobilize-concern-for” political science?
Anyone think that maybe the whole thing is a scam and when they get back they will write a book along the lines of “How We Tricked the Geeenies and Proved the Arctic Isn’t Melting”.
Perry Debell (11:34:56) :
Perry, many thanks for the heads up on that. I did not know the RN had a vessel named Caldwell. Reading that she was scrapped in ’44 made me shiver a bit.
Our branch of the Caldwells has been in the States for several generations. By tradition we were told our ancestors were from a village in Scotland named Cold Well. I have never actually checked on it since we cannot trace our family back far enough to find who actually immigrated or when.
I do know that I’ve always liked the sound of bagpipes. 🙂
perhaps the objective is to show how easy it is to travel this journey today compered to years past, or not to be able to complete the journey at all, because of thin or broken ice. So maybe they shall return as skeptics?
“Stupidly cold temperatures?” Must have been a slip of the tongue! Seems they are having a hard time reconciling what they feel with what they believe.
“The team covered a staggering 16.7km today, the biggest distance achieved to date. By covering so much distance since the last resupply (134.5km in 13 days), the team have observed the ice they are crossing is getting significantly older and thicker“
I think “staggering” around would be a good description of their condition soon… duh… it’s supposed to be cold in the Arctic.
One more thing… the Google World photo of the Arctic in Catlin’s website showing their progress is dead wrong… the actual ice pack is way larger. That photo must have been taken during last summer.
Ideologues fall on their own swords regularly. This is no different. Maybe, just maybe, some of them will come back with a fresh perspective on what the concept of rational thought means and why blindly following any ideology can lead to disaster.
Mark
Hmmm lets see or we could express the situation as:
On February 28 this years maximum Arctic sea ice extent, reached 95.25% of the 1979-2000 average maximum, due to record re-freeze rates this winter. The Arctic sea ice extent appears to be recovering quickly from its recent record lows and is more resilient that many expected.
Which sounds like the more dire way of expressing the situation?
Larry
Love the word “stupidly” cold…..the word should actually relate to the person saying it.
From a previous article we understand that the locals can’t believe that anyone would wish to map the breaking up of the sea ice before May.
Aron (11:19:54) sez: “There was yet another example of alarmism over the last month whose predictions failed to materialise. Conficker was supposed to hijack millions of computers on April the 1st and start swallowing up loads of bandwidth and messing around with computers. Nothing noticeable happened.”
Right. I, for one, had absogrutebly no probblmx whxtsoxvxr witx Cxnfxckxr. A fnurger exmpl of algarmisk z[pins]as iero glazhm vwjkloh prgi eowfiep…
Hang on, isn’t there some kind of disconnect going on here with the Catlin survey?
A while back they were saying how awful everything was and detailing the tribulations they were going through. By now Martin’s “frostbite” must have turned into a really serious situation. But they are still soldiering on and Pen Hadow gave an upbeat report to the BBC Radio 4 science programme this afternoon.
This whole thing ‘smells’ to me.
DJKP (08:01:16) said :
Someone please remind me again why we cant get these measurements via satellite?
Because they are in all likelihood being funded for doing what they are doing. Just as the funding sources of many “scientists” continues to depend on their pushing this human-induced global warming scare. If they could find a way to receive funding for debunking the whole idea, they’d be on that in a second and their entire viewpoint would do a quick 180.
I’m glad to see that their technology is robust enough, so
it may be held together by rubber bands and tape!
http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/technology
I think next time; they should test and calibrate it by dragging
it up the temple steps of Kukulkan, Chichen Itza.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Chichen-Itza_El_Castillo.jpg
John Egan @08:45:52
You provide a classic example of an alarmist scientific statement. By using this “xth warmest in Y years” approach makes it always seem desperately hot.
But “10th warmest could also be described, given the data set, as the MOST COLD”. What description serves the propaganda best?
“1998 was the warmest year in the US since 1935” …. but 1934 was warmer.
Eve @09:05:56
I was doing work connected to Enviroment Canada, or whatever it was called at the time, on satellite image processing. The government project manager actually said to us that the main focus now (this was almost 20 years ago) was “climate change”.
This is the teat that provides the milk for a thousand buureaucratic “scientists”. They knew what htey were doing. They are being self-serving and, basically, lacking in a little integrity. These were not stupid people.