Since we have been on the subject of Arctic expeditions this week, I thought I’d share this short essay sent to me by WUWT reader “thoughtful”. It has some interesting perspectives from a NAVY expedition called “Operation Nanook” which is supported by the newspaper clipping from the Berkshire County Eagle (Pittsfield, MA) of October 16th, 1946. It was one of those rare times when a Northwest Passage appears to have been possible – Anthony
Looking at timelines of arctic exploration, we find that virtually nobody went there during the 30s and early 40s, despite that correlating with the warmest temperatures on record (great Depression, WW II, go figure). Attached is an account of an arctic naval expedition (Operation Nanook) that took place the summer of 1946, just after WWII. Vinther, et al (1) reports the merged JJA monthly temps were in the 7.3 to 7.4 deg C range in Greenland between 1931 and 1950. In the 1990s, it was a full degree C lower. The “norm” for Thule in JJA runs somewhere around 4 – 5 deg C (1961 to current data).
Here’s another account from the same expedition: “On 4 July 1946, Atule headed for the frozen north as a member of Operation “Nanook.” The purpose of this mission was to assist in the establishment of advanced weather stations in the Arctic regions and to aid in the planning and execution of more extensive naval operations in polar and sub-polar regions. In company with USS Norton Sound (AV-11), USCGC Northwind (WAG-282), USS Alcona (AK-157), USS Beltrami (AK-162), and USS Whitewood (AN-63), Atule was to transport supplies and passengers, conduct reconnaissance of proposed weather station sites, train personnel, and collect data on Arctic conditions.
Atule rendezvoused with Northwind and Whitewood off the southwestern coast of Greenland on 11 July 1946 and put into Melville Bight, Baffin Bay, on 20 July, while a PBM reconnoitered Thule Harbor and the approaches to the harbor. Following engine trouble the PBM had made an emergency landing; and Atule was dispatched to recover the plane, becoming the first ship of the operation to enter the harbor. Atule then conducted tests and exercises in Smith South-Kane Basin with Whitewood. During one such exercise, she reached latitude 79 degrees 11 minutes north in the Kane Basin, setting a record for the United States Navy. On 29 July, Atule departed Thule, having completed all of her scheduled projects, stopped at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and reached New London late in August to resume her former duties.”
It would be fascinating to visit the naval archives and see ships logs from this expedition. One wonders what the sea ice extent was then. I do note that the Kane Basin was at least partially iced over on August 10, 2007 — the nearest data I’ve got to July for the recent 2007 minimum (and probably represents less ice than July).
Reference
(1) Extending Greenland temperature records into the late eighteenth
century B. M. Vinther,1 K. K. Andersen,1 P. D. Jones,2 K. R. Briffa,2 and J. Cappelen3
Received 24 October 2005; revised 11 January 2006; accepted 28 February 2006; published 6 June 2006.
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 111, D11105, doi: 10.1029/2005JD006810, 2006 )
There are pre-satellite sea ice reconstructions which have appeared in the literature for both the north and the south. Here’s one for the Arctic… http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/Blog%20and%20Wiki%20format%2C%20Arctic%20Seasonal%20Sea%20Ice%20Extent%2C%201870-2007%20ver%203.jpg
using data from http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/SEAICE/timeseries.1870-2007 (the University of Illinois.
John Wright (23:10:57) :
Talking about the NE Passage, Nansen’s ship, Fram did it W-to-E in 1893, I believe. They made it to the other side, then took a course due North until they got imprisoned in the ice. They hoped the drift would take them over the pole – not quite – but the ship broke free on the Western side three years later. There’s a wonderful Fram museum at Oslo. Well worth the visit. The Norwegians were the real polar explorers nobody ever mentions, preferring to drool on about things like the Franklin and Scott fiascos – and now Catlin. Will they ever learn?
The Fram museum is located at Bygdøy just a short boat (or car/bus) trip outside Oslo city centre. It is very popular among tourists, so why it appears forgotten is unclear. Just outside the Fram museum, you can see the Gjøa vessel in open air: It is just a few km. from my location.
Gjøa:
http://www.sethwhite.org/images/fram/gjoa.jpg
http://www.paxber.us/avontuur/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/gjoa.JPG
Gjøa and the Fram museum.
http://www.norphoto.com/r/images3/oslojuni20060273kl.jpg
http://www.fram.museum.no/en/
John Hultquist:
That is the type of picture I remember seeing as a child:
http://www.john-daly.com/polar/skate.jpg
Everyone remarked at the time “What will they think of next?”.
Nobody said Jack about Global Warming.
My thoughts at the time were “What if the sub tried to come up and got stuck under there?” Omigosh. Those guys are nuts.
Regarding the Arctic ice extent near Norway, see section 2.1 (pages 27-28), “Sea Ice,” of Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu’s paper, “Two Natural Components of Recent Climate Change,” here (as a 50-Mb PDF):
http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/little_ice_age.php
He writes, “Figure 8a shows changes [since 1730, in August] of the southern edge of sea ice in the Norwegian Sea. It has been receding from about 1800 to the present at almost the same rate (Vinje, 2001), at least 100 years before the use of fossil energy began to increase rapidly in 1946. Note also large changes between 1910 and 1970, …”
The “large changes” are:
1. a steep retreat northward of the August ice-edge from roughly (by eyeball) 1917 to 1947,
2. a steep advance southward from 1947 to 1955, and
3. a steady and above average retreat northward from 1955 until 2000 (end of the chart).
I have been following the whole ice thing on various threads over the last couple of days and I am still puzzled as to why melting of the arctic ice is considered so important.
I am worried by this:
“To document the impact of global climate change on the Arctic region and its potential impact on the coastal communities of both North and South America , . . . ”
Do I assume that we are back in “melting sea ice will catastrophically raise sea levels” territory? I don’t understand how this is possible and if I’m right why anybody keeps plugging a story that is so easily disprovable, AGW or no AGW!
We talk about them all the time. But because Norway wasn’t an Imperial power projected around the world, they tend to get lost in obscurity. You’re not a hero unless you die doing something really stupid, apparently.
More on Amundsen, from Wikipedia:
The only thing we can say for certain is that 2007 is the lowest year since 1979 due to observational bias. And that’s not saying a whole lot….
Many ships have traversed the Northern Route of the NW Passage.
Henry Larsen as has been said went through the Northern Route with ease in 1944 and a couple years later the route had froze and he was unable to even enter the Northern Route of the passage from the West.(expect history to repeat-one of those inconvenient truths) Larsen wrote the book “The Big Ship”, about his many years in the Arctic. There is also a book composed of Larsen’s logs.
http://www.ucalgary.ca/arcticexpedition/larsenexpeditions
McLure was first to cross the Northern Route of the NW passage in the 1850’s.
He had to travel over ice part of the way.
http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic40-3-234.pdf
I swore I could remember seeing pictures of US subs surfacing at the North Pole when I was a kid in the late 50’s.
Not to mention the film, Ice Station Zebra…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:36e5.jpg
My father was aboard the USS Norton Sound during operation nanook. He will be 89 in August. He had previous experience doing arial photography in Greenland in 1942 (USS Bear). He says to this day that the Norton Sound and several other ships took a top secret ( to not upset the Soviets) turn West and made it through the Northwest Passage to the Bering Sea and back. If someone could get the logs declassified, there could be some very interesting infomation therein.
A lot is made by the warmers of the effect of Greenland’s ice melting (once they’re reluctantly accepted that the arctic ice doesn’t affect sea level at all), but presumably this wasn’t an issue when Greenland was actually green, in the mediaeval warm period. Does anyone know what the sea level was then?
This guy Scotty Gall crossed the southern route of the passage
http://www.kitikmeotheritage.ca/Angulalk/hudsons/scottyg/scotty.htm
Kellets storehouse visited by many explorers.
http://pwnhc.learnnet.nt.ca/exhibits/nv/kellet.htm
An Arctic timeline of discovery
http://www.south-pole.com/arctic00.htm
steptoe fan (22:38:55) :
> well, sorry, my html is a bit rusty, … is it the href tag, with the link in double quotes ?
See http://wattsupwiththat.com/resources/#comment-65319 for a guide to WordPress’s HTML scanning.
steptoe fan (22:27:11) :
> well, it looks like round two of the ” go to the pole ” for the sake of an agenda is about to begin in a month.
I was thinking a May 31 departure would still give them a lot of time waiting for the NW passage to open, but the Bermilla was at the end of the Aleutians then, so maybe not. http://awberrimilla.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html
OTOH, my never-to-be-relied-upon sense of things is that the NW passage won’t be opening this year. Not to worry, the crew of the Ocean Watch will have plenty of opportunities to watch Polar Bears dismembering seals.
Given what we’ve seen with Lewis Pugh and Pen Hadow, (do those sites have the same PR organization?) it would be nice if a skeptic sailor started a shadow blog to record the other side of the Ocean Watch story.
Well, so much for the infamous baseline of 1979-2000.
The Hudson Bay Company was all over the Canadian Arctic in the 20’s and 30’s.
http://www.kitikmeotheritage.ca/Angulalk/hudsons/hudsons.htm
The CGS Arctic could have sailed right through the Northern Route.(1908 to 1911)
“On the Arctic’s third expedition in 1910-11, Bernier took the vessel North to patrol the Davis Strait, Baffin Bay, Lancaster Sound, Barrow Strait, Viscount Melville Sound and McClure Strait. Open water in McClure Strait tempted Bernier to attempt the Northwest Passage, but because this would have exceeded his orders, he resisted. Once again the vessel wintered in the North, but this time it anchored at Admiralty Inlet. Parties on sled were dispatched across the region to explore and conduct scientific surveys. ”
http://www.ucalgary.ca/arcticexpedition/icebreakers/cgs-arctic
Yes, 2007 isn’t a record for miiiiillions of yeeears in the history of time.
Not only this century there has been less cold unfriendly ice. In the medieval times there was no pack ice along Greenland’s coasts. (And I think there is a least one note from then that the sea was almost ice free; Marco Polo??).
Also, as WUWT has blogged, scientists are confident that the Arctic sea was almost ice free, or ice free, 6000-7000 years ago, during the in history books very for humans and nature climate friendly holocene optimum.
http://www.ngu.no/en-gb/Aktuelt/2008/Less-ice-in-the-Arctic-Ocean-6000-7000-years-ago
Just one more.
NSIDC ice levels in the Rssian Arctic back to the ’30’s.
I am surprised this evidence hasn’t been purged.
http://nsidc.org/research/projects/Barry_Eurasian_Arctic.html
Slightly off-topic maybe, but it feels good as an ex-submariner to see the photo of the Atule. I always wished that we had gone under the Pole, because we submariners had various honorary awards that we could qualify for, for various special things, like diving to a sub’s test depth, etc.
Well, Shawn, it appears that recent sea ice “losses” are really no big deal at all… Hasn’t Walt ever gotten a look at those graphs?
Mike
While we are on the subject, I was a tenneger when this happened in 1969. An epic NW passage journey in its own right, it proved the route to be impractical for tankers and led to the Alaska Pipeline.
http://sunshiporg.homestead.com/manhattan.html
Map of the Canadian Arctic.
http://www.canada-maps.org/northwest-territories/images/northwest-territories-map.gif
Henry Larsen also discusses his northwest passages on film. See http://www3.nfb.ca/collection/films/fiche/?id=14192
Your “Vinther et al 2006” quotation:
http://plazamoyua.wordpress.com/files/2009/04/vinther_et_al_2006-p10.jpg