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 )
*******
Was 2007 Arctic ice really a historic minimum?
*******
Prb’ly, at least since the 1930’s. Ooooowwwww, scary!
In the late 1960’s a number of the US Navy’s Fast Attack Boats did maping runs under the polar ice cap. I think it was 1968 or 1969 that the Queen Fish surfaced at the North Pole for a photo op and to visit Santa Clause – at least that was their story and they are sticking to it – wink wink.
Both the US and Soviet Navy designed their nuclear submarines to be able to break through the ice cap. The US Navy has lots of data about the polar ice cap I wonder how much of it has been declassified….
It would be interesting to know what the polar ice cover was a thousand years ago. Some time after 1100AD the resident Dorset People were replaced by the Thule People. The Dorset were adapted to thick ice cover, the Thule to more open water. Was there any connection betweeen the virtual dissapearance of the Dorset and the arrival of the Vikings.
While the Fram was the first modern european boat through the Northwest Passage I suspect the vikings checked out Alaska.
The is ample documented history of Northwest passage crossings presented here. All easily verifiable. Roald Amundsen’s crossing in 1907 was actually in “fishing vessel”. Unfortified I believe.
The first well documented crossing of the Northeastern passage was actually made by a Fin, Adolf Erik Nordenskiold, he went W-E in 1878.
There is controversial and anecdotal evidence that the Chinese made both passages in the 15th century and even completed circumnavigation of Greenland. See Gavin Menzies for voluminous but controversial & debatable detail.
It was in ’46 or ’47 that US ships went down the passage and founded Resolute. They intended to put Resolute farther west and were stopped by the high ice levels. A few years before there had been very little ice.
Lucy Skywalker (00:44:01) :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage
“The first recorded succesful passage was that of João Martins, in 1588, 265 years pryor to the Mac-clure trip, a portuguese explorer en route to the Philipines, both discovering the passage and the Bering Straight.[8]
OK but:
Dalton Minimum – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
27 Feb 2009 … The Dalton Minimum was a period of low solar activity, named for the English meteorologist John Dalton, lasting from about 1790 to 1830. …
and
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/scienceques2005/20051128.htm
What was the “Little Ice Age?”
The Little Ice Age was a period from 1300 to 1850 A.D. when the Northern Hemisphere experienced colder than normal temperatures.
Some scientists say that a major volcanic eruption in 1258 A.D. and another in 1600 A.D. helped cool temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere. The coldest period of the Little Ice Age is attributed to lower than normal solar energy.
From 1410 to the 1720s the cooling had a strong effect on some areas. During that time, access to Greenland was largely cut off by ice. At the same time, canals in Holland routinely froze solid, glaciers advanced in the Alps, and sea-ice increased so much that no open water was present in any direction around Iceland in 1695.
And of course there is the “graph” here which puts the end of the LIA at 1900!!!!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/17/beryllium-10-and-climate/#more-6286
SOMETHING DOES NOT ADD UP!
Does this mean there was no LIA? or that the LIA did not affect the arctic? perhaps a line of volcanoes under the NW passage?
anon (01:25:07) :
I keep getting that link you gave to University of Illinois data at
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/SEAICE/timeseries.1870-2007
thrown in my face, every time I express doubt that current ice levels are that much less than levels were in the past.
Does anyone know how they arrived at their ice-levels for pre-satellite years?
Were they just making “educated guesses?”
I still have my doubts, for the ice-levels the University of Illinois data shows are not that much lower on years when men fought their way through the Northwest Passage than they are on other years. For example, Amundsen spent 2 years locked into the ice before making the passage in 1905, yet the University of Illinois data shows 1904 as having less summer-ice than 1905.
I would like to know how the individuals at the University of Illinois filled in the huge gaps in our knowledge of pre-satellite conditions, and came up with this chart. It lists ice-coverage for spring, summer, fall and winter, practically down to the square mile.
Alarmists whip this data out and slap it on the table with deep conviction, as if it supplies some sort of irrefutable proof. I find all my arguments come to the same end. All I want to know is: who came up with this data, and how. What if it turns out to be the work of an undergraduate, fooling about with a computer over a weekend?
I apologize in advance for even suggesting such a thing, if the data turns out to be the work of many scientists working long hours, but the fact of the matter is: I currently just don’t know.
Here’s a 1998 news release announcing that data was being released and analyzed (thanks largely to Al Gore’s efforts)
The IPCC cites the submarine track data from 1987-1997 as showing that the average arctic ice thickness has decreased by about 1 meter.
Caleb (09:07:50) : “Does anyone know how they arrived at their ice-levels for pre-satellite years?”
From the documentation:
_________________________________________________________________
These data are a compilation of data from many sources integrated into a single gridded product by John Walsh and Bill Chapman, University of Illinois. The sources of data for each grid cell have changed over the years from infrequent land/sea observations, to observationally derived charts, to satellite data for the most recent decades. Temporal and spatial gaps within observed data are filled with a climatology or other statistically derived data.
Please note that large portions of the pre-1953, and almost all of the pre-1900 data is either climatology or interpolated data and the user is cautioned to use this data with care
_____________________________________
Sources are also listed.
Caleb wrote:
Well, it only took me a moment to find this link.
If you visit that page, you’ll see that they say: “Please feel free to contact us with any questions you may have regarding this data.”
Go there, it includes a link for contacting them.
The 46th/72nd Recon Squadron VLR, flying out of Ladd Field, AK, 1946 thru 1951, photomapped all of Alaska and much of the Arctic. They mapped the positions of three magnetic poles and discovered three (or more?) floating ice islands , T1, T2, and T3. They also created grid navigation techniques and refined them to a useful technique.
Much of their work was classified, but I suspect that if declassified it might show at least some of the ice extent for several years.
The Kee Bird was probably their most famous aircraft, thanks to the PBS special maybe 20 years ago about trying to fly that B29 ‘Dreamboat’ out of the crash site about 250 miles north of Thule, Greenland.
Maybe someone here knows how to get at this stuff.
Big Mc
Diving to a sub’s test depth isn’t the trick. It’s surfacing again!
Controversy Leif:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2226570/posts
OT New kids on the block (Blog):
1. Consensus Watch:
http://planetmoron.typepad.com/planet_moron/2009/04/consensus-watch-492009.html
2. Moreno’s ClimateDepot.com
A clearinghouse for climate issues!
From NSIDC at
http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice.html
While the pre-satellite records are not as reliable, their trends are in good general agreement with the satellite record and indicate that Arctic sea ice extent has been declining since at least the early 1950s
As the graph makes clear, it’s impossible that 1946 Arctic sea ice extent was anywhere near 2007 levels.
http://nsidc.org/sotc/images/mean_anomaly_1953-2008.gif
Clarification:
As the graph makes clear, it’s impossible that 1946 Arctic sea ice extent was anywhere near as low as 2007 levels.
What is sure is that the number of neurons of some has decreased directly proportional to the increase of greenhouse gases….or was it because of some white stuffed they inhaled…I just can´t remember 🙂
While recognising arctic sea ice thickness and extent attracts the media centre stage, the status of the land locked Greenland ice sheet is perhaps of more pertinence in terms of future sea levels. Although widely reported at the time, the recovery of a Lockheed P-38 fighter from a SE greenland glacier in 1992, 50 years after a forced crash landing, may be new to some readers. Story summarised at
http://p38assn.org/glacier-girl-recovery.htm
The significance to me is that it was effectively ‘mined’ out of the ice from a depth of 268 feet, that thickness presumably representing steady accretion of ice during the latter half of the C20th when northern hemisphere warming peaked. Of course this does not amount to a scientific assessment, and says little about sub-glacial melt, etc. but at least to me suggests that at the air interface, accretion exceeds ablation.
Incidentally, that aircraft crew survived, but a tragically large number perished in unrecorded and unresearched losses on the vital A/C supply missions from the US and Canada over the war years via the polar route.
RE: Deep Climate (14:18:24) :
**Clarification:
As the graph makes clear, it’s impossible that 1946 Arctic sea ice extent was anywhere near as low as 2007 levels.**
I do not see 1946 on that graph, so it is not clear to me. Satellites have been used for 30 years. The 1953 to 1979 source is not explained. If this is the same chart that was referenced in a discussion at CA, there is a lot of infilling of missing data. There was also a statement to use with caution. You cannot extrapolate backwards to the 1930’s and 1940’s.
steptoe fan (22:38:55) :
http://sailorsforthesea.org/ata/index.html
I’d be far more inclined to give a thumb up to the Ocean Watch adventure were it to decline to do science. At this point the only “science” they are claiming to do is recognize a decrease in alkalinity. As the reason for this is largely unknown, and it has yet to be shown to have any serious effect on species – it’s not ready for prime time.
But documenting the free floating oil on the sea, the trash in the water, the effects of urban runoff – are reasonable goals requiring the same consciousness raising. This would be a mission to promote stewardship. No science need be done outside measuring ocean content of real pollutants. If, before they start out, they reject ties to discredited “Climate” – and focus on the real problem of pollution – they will avoid the scrutiny of scientists skeptical that man-made CO2 is the reason for the Earth’s climate.
I see no reason to be skeptical of ocean stewardship. And in fact laud the effort.
Doubtville
You need to read much more carefully the stated goals of this ” mission ” .
You also need to study the site and read the types of ” scientists ” who will be joining the mission at various points.
Or, perhaps someone has already been doing some site maintenance ( editing ) ?
Doubtville:
I am loath to fill comments sections with lengthy posts, but I have for the sake of keeping this ” venture ” honest, placed a cut and paste of their mission here, to serve as an accurate record of what was written, in part, in the beginning. I have omitted parts of the complete sections only to save space – not because they speak counter to what is posted here. I encourage any / all readers to go to the site itself, now, and read all sections.
Project Description
The ocean is changing: seawater pH is falling, endangering coral reefs; warming waters are causing sea level to rise, imperiling low-lying areas; and Arctic sea ice is shrinking, threatening local wildlife. Changes in the marine environment affect not only inhabitants of the sea, but also have great ramifications for coastal communities and even inland populations.
These changes are heavily influenced by human activity, and consequently, we can each play an important role in improving the health of our oceans. We need to mobilize the citizens of the Americas to take action to protect our fragile oceans: our life on land is dependent on the health of our seas.
Our mission is to build awareness throughout the Americas so that citizens understand the precipitous changes that are occurring at the poles and along our coasts and what they can do to mitigate these changes.
Environmental/Scientific Goals:
* To build public awareness about the fragile nature of the ocean environment surrounding the Americas and what individuals can do to help,
* 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,
* To build awareness about ocean acidification and its impact on marine life,
* To mobilize sailors, boaters, school children, and all who love the oceans to engage in grassroots, community, regional and federal actions to protect the health of our ocean home at both the local and the global level.
* To promote the work of the SfS-supported film A Sea Change by collecting data relevant to ocean acidification during the expedition and helping individuals who follow the ATA expedition to understand why and how pH levels are changing and how this affects marine life.
Expedition Themes
* Environmental impacts of global climate change with particular focus on sea level rise, ocean acidification, and changing weather patterns.
* The rate of change in ocean CO2 concentration, water and air temperature, salinity, . . .
The Plan
Led by renowned sailor Mark Schrader, the expedition will depart from Seattle in May 2009 and will visit 31 ports in 11 countries over the course of 13 months. After completing 25,000 of sailing in a clockwise circumnavigation of the Americas, the vessel will return to Seattle in June, 2010.
The steel-hulled, 64-foot sailing vessel Ocean Watch will have a full time crew of four including a journalist and a documentary filmmaker. Throughout the expedition, a Pacific Science Center educator will be on board to facilitate education activities. In addition, ocean and atmospheric scientists will join different legs of the expedition to conduct research on board Ocean Watch.
John McMillin (04:24:42) wrote:
“My father … 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.”
Maybe a FOAI request would shake it loose. Or maybe you could contact a reporter at the AP or NYT or Washington Times and try to get them to do the research to back up the little scoop you’re offering him/her.
Caleb wrote:
“Alarmists whip this [Univ. of Illinois] data out and slap it on the table with deep conviction, as if it supplies some sort of irrefutable proof.”
If that U of I data doesn’t allow for the Norton Sound’s voyage, but it made it, that would put a ding in it.
Britannic no-see-um (15:18:21) wrote:
“While recognising arctic sea ice thickness and extent attracts the media centre stage, the status of the land locked Greenland ice sheet is perhaps of more pertinence in terms of future sea levels.”
See section 3.1 (pages 34-35), “Temperature,” 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, “The upper part of Figure 11a shows the “warming” pattern during the last half of the last century, from about 1950 to about 2000 (Hansen et al., 2005). One can see that the most prominent change occurred in Siberia, Alaska, and Canada. Thus, in the continental Arctic, the warming rate was several times greater than the global average of 0.6°C/100 years or 0.3°C/50 years. There is no doubt that such a prominent change contributed statistically to the global average change in Figure 1a. On the other hand, contrary to the general trend of warming, note that cooling was in progress in Greenland over the same time period.
It is of great interest to ask if GCMs can reproduce this …, since the IPCC seems to claim to be able to reproduce the 0.6°C/100 years rise caused by the greenhouse effect of CO2. The IPCC arctic group (consisting of 14 sub-groups headed by V. Kattsov) “hindcasted” geographic distribution of the temperature change during the last half of the last century. To “hindcast” means to ask whether a model can reproduce results that match the known observations of the past; if a model can do this at least qualitatively, we can be much more confident about the present GCMs and their prediction of future conditions. Their results are compiled by Bill Chapman, of the University of Illinois, and are shown in the right side of Figure 11b.
“The left side of the figure is taken from the ACIA Report (2004), which shows the trend similar to that shown in the upper part of Figure 11a, namely the prominent warming in the continental Arctic and cooling in Greenland. ….
“It was a great surprise to find significant differences between the two diagrams in Figure 11b. If both were reasonably accurate, they should at least look alike. Ideally, the pattern of change modeled by the GCMs should be identical or very similar to the pattern seen in the measured data. … However, as can be seen in Figure 11b, there was no resemblance at all between the two, even qualitatively.”
This puts another ding in the U of I results (as being indicative of global warming).
Caleb (09:07:50) :
anon (01:25:07) :
I keep getting that link you gave to University of Illinois data at
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/SEAICE/timeseries.1870-2007
thrown in my face, every time I express doubt that current ice levels are that much less than levels were in the past.
Does anyone know how they arrived at their ice-levels for pre-satellite years?
If you actually read what it says at that site you’d find out.