Guest post by Steven Goddard
The WUWT Arctic Ice Thickness Survey has been conducted from the comfort of a warm living room over the last half hour, without sponsors, excessive CO2 emissions or hypothermia. The data is collected from the US military web site http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil. All of the active military buoys show significant thickening ice over the past six months to a year, as seen below.
Location of Catlin team relative to buoy 2008D and the North Pole
Buoy 2008B has thickened by more than half a metre since last autumn, and is more than 3 metres thick.
2008C also shows thickening by more than half a metre since last autumn, and is nearly 4 metres thick.
2008D has not been updated since early February, but showed thickening and is 3.5 metres thick. It is close to the Catlin team position.
2007J has thickened more than half a metre, and is nearly 4 metres thick.
2006C has thickened by nearly a full metre over the past year, and is more than 3 metres thick
UPDATE: The military site also has graphs which are supposed to show depth. It appears that many of these are broken, which is why I used the more reliable temperature graphs. The depth at which the ice drops below the freezing point of seawater (-2C) is of course the bottom of the ice. You can’t have water in a liquid state below it’s freezing point.
Some of the buoys have reliable depth data, and they correspond closely to the temperature data – for example 2007J which shows 400cm for both.
http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil/buoy_plots/ice2007J.gif
http://imbcrrel.usace.army.mil/buoy_plots/2007J.gif
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I’ve just posted comments on the Catlin thread regarding the build-up of rime-ice on the walls of the hand-drilled holes. Your graphs define ice temperatures beautifully, and they suggest that my concern about wall-ice build-up applies especially, to the upper metre of ice. With luck, you wouldn’t lose your instrument package in the first hole, but the loss wouldn’t be too long thereafter.
Good work, Anthony. I’m with you on the armchair research.
Well, year-over-year is certainly significant, but last six months? Surely that’s “water is wet” territory! Now, if you get Arctic ice thickening over the next six months, by all means send up a rocket! 🙂
Anthony, I’m with you regarding this global warming [snip], but wanted your opinion about this ice shelf that has broken away. Is it the Wilkens shelf?
Nice presentation, Steven.
It seems all buoys record ice thickness growth of 0.5 to 1.0 m since nov/dec 2008. But I suppose that is what you would expect during the cold winter season. For buoy 2006C there is also data from april 2008 showing an increase for the last 12 months of about 0.7 m. No indication whatsoever that ice thickness is reduced.
Although this is a fairly limited study in time and coverage, it’s certainly more significant, and dear I say robust, than what can possibly be achieved by the pathetic Catlin crew’s stunt performance.
Thanks again Steven and Anthony.
The open water encountered by the Catlin group should prove that this issue isn’t simply due to warming in the arctic – considering the open water was found at -30C or colder!
“When the Ice Worms Nest Again
(Conceivably by Robert Service; in any case, an Alaskan
tradition in the 20s and 30s. Recorded by Wilf Carter —Montana
Slim — sometime in the 1940s).
There’s a husky, dusky maiden in the Arctic
And she waits for me but it is not in vain,
For some day I’ll put my mukluks on and ask her
If she’ll wed me when the ice worms nest again.
cho: In the land of the pale blue snow,
Where it’s ninety-nine below,
And the polar bears are roaming o’er the plain,
In the shadow of the Pole
I will clasp her to my soul,
We’ll be happy when the ice worms nest again.
For our wedding feast we’ll have seal oil and blubber;
In our kayaks we will roam the bounding main;
All the walruses will look at us and rubber,
We’ll be married when the ice worms nest again.
And when the blinkin’ icebergs bound around us,
She’ll present me with a bouncing baby boy.
All the polar bears will dance a rhumba ’round us
And the walruses will click their teeth with joy.”
http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/folk-song-lyrics/When_the_Ice_Worms_Nest_Again.htm
Steven Goddard: Thanks for the post, and thanks to those who still provide truthfull data.
bsneath,
Format is day/month/year
No frostbite detected in my biometrics, but perhaps the possibility of some Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Unfortunately my CTS monitor is temporarily off line.
Stephen,
This is a valuable dataset, certainly compared to Catlin! But you’re showing plots of ice temperatures, not thickness. The ice near the bottom of has a very similar temperature to the ocean below it so the temperature profile cannot tell you the bottom ice/water boundary.
The buoys do determine the ice thickness, and 2006C has the most longest record to data:
http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil/buoy_plots/ice2006C.gif
This shows that the measured ice thickness took a 1 m hit in 2007 and the buoy nearly melted out in October 07. The lower ice boundary has not recovered in the last couple of years – this season’s profile looks very similar to last year, though the top melt refroze.
Of course all the buoys eventually melt out as the ice drifts south, most in under a year, so all the records should show an overall thinning profile. I’d look at publications from CRREL rather than individual buoy records to best determine multiannual trends.
It’s all down to man made clean air policy not man made CO2 :o)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/09/arctic_aerosols_goddard_institute/
could someone post this on newspaper sites that are reporting this caitlin thing? especially in the UK papers.
Thanks again for a top of the bill article.
It’s time for a clear message:
April 08, 2009
Climate Change
by Bob Hoye
Update on “Global Warming”
Mother Nature has been expected to be indifferent to the promotion of man-caused global warming.
The “bear market” in sunspots, and increase in volcanic activity are forcing a significant decline in global temperatures. As with data on solar activity, accumulating evidence on various factors of global cooling will be published by responsible sources.
It is fascinating that two great objectives of authoritarian political ambition – controlling the economy and the climate – are under serious assault at the same time. Natural forces are beginning to condemn the greatest intellectual blunder since the Vatican insisted that the solar system revolved around the earth.
When will the political mania to manage the economy and cure the planet fail? When the public, which can acquire common sense rather quickly, finally says a very convincing “No!”.
Are you cherry picking bouys?
[snip -off color comment]
…Now the race is on to see whether the upcoming winters will be sufficiently cold to convince the politicians that AGW is not a threat, before they pass economically destructive legislation trying to curtail it.
It’s going to be a close one…
Great work Mr. Goddard!
On a similar topic, I have been thinking about the Cryosphere Today website http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/ and its use of a 1979-2000 mean on its ice anomaly graphs. I do not have the skills, but perhaps someone else on the forum can recalculate the mean form 1979 to current date and see what happens to the anomaly line in relation the the mean. May prove to be very interesting.
Thanks
Jack,
the polar bears and seals do not “break” through the ice, the seals actually follow the large cracks in from the edge of the ice, breathing along patches of open water that are there even in -45 weather as the ice is constantly moving and fracturing. I have stood beside these cracks on the Beaufort sea as they are forming, you can hear or feel 2m+ of ice snapping and poping beneath your feet… it is a sureal experience to say the least, it’s especially if you see the same cracks day after day growing and shifting.. perhaps later tonight i can post some pictures if i can find them….
by the way – these cracks I refered to have everything to do with ice mechanics, wind loading etc and nothing to do with global warming…
Richard Sharpe,
No cherry-picking. All of the active buoys are shown. Some of the ones still shown on the map drifted into warm water and melted last summer. It is he interaction between winter freezing and polar drift which determines the state of multi-year ice.
And of course the ice gets thicker in the winter. As Dr. Meier has patiently and often explained to me, this is about long-term trends. Stay tuned.
Tom P,
Many of the ice thickness graphs are broken, which is why I am using temperature. The depth at which the temperature drops below the freezing point obviously corresponds to the bottom of the ice.
Yes it has been a long day? Please see my earliest post.
The following is a link to Antarctic Ice shelfs, I agree it is not on topic exactly, but it has the words Arctic in it and its about Ice.
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/press/press_releases/press_release.php?id=57
I am puzzled has the shelf broken off, is it about to break off, is it in danger of breaking off or is it still there just like the headlines are.
@ur momisugly jlc (07:49:39) :
THERE GOES WATTS AGAIN! TRYING TO CONFUSE US WITH FACT
I AGREE WE DONT WANT FACTS WE WANT CIRCUMSTANCIAL EVIDENCE
Have a good holiday.
Steven,
As the CRREL website seems to be playing up the 2006C data is here:
http://img22.imageshack.us/img22/5204/ice2006c.gif
It’s actually very difficult to determine how much refreeze of the top surface there has been, as the data record is sparse to non-existent.
The guys who actually run this system do not agree with your conclusions:
Perovich, D.K. and J.A. Richter-Menge, Loss of ice in the Arctic, Annual Review of Marine Science, 1, 417 – 441, 2009
The Arctic sea ice cover is in decline. The areal extent of the ice cover has been decreasing for the past few decades at an accelerating rate. Evidence also points to a decrease in sea ice thickness and a reduction in the amount of thicker perennial sea ice. A general global warming trend has made the ice cover more vulnerable to natural fluctuations in atmospheric and oceanic forcing. The observed reduction in Arctic sea ice is a consequence of both thermodynamic and dynamic processes, including such factors as preconditioning of the ice cover, overall warming trends, changes in cloud coverage, shifts in atmospheric circulation patterns, increased export of older ice out of the Arctic, advection of ocean heat from the Pacific and North Atlantic, enhanced solar heating of the ocean, and the ice-albedo feedback. The diminishing Arctic sea ice is creating social, political, economic, and ecological challenges.
http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.marine.010908.163805
Jeff:
Thanks and I know that. I too have stood on the ice and it’s scary because it’s all moving with the currents, cracks everywhere. I was just being silly with my post. Polar bears will bust through thin ice if they can smell a air pocket with baby seals and or their parent resting there. PB’s mainly ambush the seals at their breathing holes as I remember.
RE: Steven Goddard (09:12:37) :
Did you calculate in salt content to derive the freezing point?
http://www.worsleyschool.net/science/files/saltandfreezing/ofwater.html