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
Graeme Rodaughan (13:49:48) :
Say CAP & TRADE Dies a lonely death in Congress. What’s to stop the EPA going ahead and regulating CO2 emissions?
Ultimately, that is what will happen. The only bright side to that will be the resulting backlash and consequent one-term wonder phenomenon that results, and then the new EPA leadership and immediate revocation of the policy… or at least, one can hope.
Alternatively, once people see their utility bills rising rapidly, particularly in the so-called “blue states” in the NE, they’ll start screaming to their respective representatives and get enough pressure to drop the nonsense.
I place higher hope in the former, but you never know. The OLF is still riding high.
Mark
Global sea ice “area” is now 436,000 km2 above average.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/iphone/images/iphone.recent.global.png
And the Arctic sea ice area is only 390,000 km2 below normal now.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/iphone/images/iphone.anomaly.arctic.png
Mark T (14:34:41) :
…
The OLF is still riding high.
Mark
Thanks Mark – What is OLF?
I’m curious about the amount of energy required for the ice thickness to have grown this past season. How much energy has the Arctic sink sucked up this season so far?
With the cooling from sun spot activity that is ongoing maybe we need to warm up the planet before we enter a new ice age? Yikes, that’s a scary thought… just when the politicians are planning on terraforming the Earth the other way! Double yikes, could we make an ice age worse by removing C02 from the atmosphere?
If they really have it backwards we could be headed for big trouble with the terrorforming that is about to get underway. This is our only planet where we can exist at this point in the known universe! Certainly the only one we can get to likely forever (unless we terraform Mars or some other body in the Sol star system).
The reason that the amount of energy to grow the ice is important is that that has to come from somewhere… out of the atmosphere…
Also the temperature graphs shown are interesting in that as the depth gets to about 3.25 meters the water temp stabilizes at just below ~2c to ~3c while it’s much colder above.
Rabe (11:58:26):
“Would someone please explain to me which physical miracle leads to the fact that older ice is more resistant to melting than some younger one? Is it also true that water, which stayed longer in the liquid phase, doesn’t freeze as fast as just melted one….”
I may be on thin ice here, but I’ll risk the following hypothesis:
When sea water freezes, the salt is forced out of the ice. However, this may not be an instant reaction, but one that takes months and years, so much that multiyear ice is significantly less saline than baby ice. As can been seen from the graphs on top of the post, the freezing point for seawater is -2C. Thus the melting point of baby ice is also close to -2C. However, older ice with less salt content, will have higher melting point, closer to fresh water at 0C. Alas, the sea temperature will have to rise more to melt older ice.
Likewise, recent meltwater from sea ice with low salinity tend to float on top of the sea water column due to lower density, hence that water will refreeze at around 0C, while well mixed sea water freezes at -2C, as shown above.
Voila, mystery solved….maybe.
May I thank Steven Goddard for this excellent blog posting.
Comment to Randall (13:55:26)
Strangely enough I was just looking at the participants list of that Conference on World Affairs in Boulder
http://www.colorado.edu/cwa/participants.html?year=2009
It surprised me how few earth scientists were on it. Maybe it shouldn’t have.
As soon as I posted my above post (14:43:42): I see that other posters have commented on the same question, so please disregard.
I like the WUWT Ice Survey. Done for much less cost and greater accuracy and geographical reach than the Catlin mess.
(OK I know terh military paid for it really, but then that is an orgaqnization which needs to know this stuiff).
Tom P (13:09:03) :
Phil.
“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.”
I don’t see where you got that figure of a reduction of 0.7 m. For buoy 2006C the 2007 and 2008 thicknesses follow a very similar profile, though 1 m thinner than 2007.
Sorry that wasn’t mine, it was part of the piece I was quoting from and I failed to mark it. I agree that the gauge shows no increase, however Goddard prefers to use the temperature/depth plot to estimate the thickness of the ice and I think that’s where the 0.7m comes from.
As I pointed out earlier I find it a rather poor argument that Goddard uses. A whole bunch of buoys were scattered across the Arctic, mostly on multiyear ice, the only ones that survived washed up on the thick multiyear ice to the N of Canada, then ignoring all the ones that didn’t survive, he concludes that the sea ice is getting thicker!
“…without sponsors, excessive CO2 emissions or hypothermia.”
Well, you could have got carpal tunnel.
I have a few questions regarding NSIDC:
1) How come when you go to their website and click to the seaice index, the default graph (to the right of the page) that comes up is of the Arctic? It should be the Antarctic as 90% of the worlds ice is located there according to Discovery Channel’s ‘Planet Earth.’ Can anybody from the Southern Hemisphere confirm what graph you people get, maybe it defaults automatically based on the location of the internet surfer? Or maybe I’ve got a preference set with a cookie…?
2) How come the ice area means are from 1979 to 2000? Why can’t they be from 1979 to 2009?
But but but but but the world is warming by many degrees per decade and the ice will all be gone and we’ll be under water within four years according to our dear Prince Charles, James Hansen and Al Gore. Unless of course we pay many taxes and turn of all the lights. Who needs electricity, winters will be warm! Look…
I only see 4 buoys with good data, and 1 with poor data on the Navy site…??? Of those 4, 2 increased ice thickness a fair bit, like a meter; one a tiny bit; and one is all over the place. It looks like a couple others melted out this winter, and a couple melted out in the fall. Not really much to go on… must be something more…?
pwl (14:43:11) :
Sorry to break it to you, but you don’t ADD energy to make ice! You have to remove it from the water. We are not talking about a freezer here.
The heat energy is extracted to the atmosphere and eventually should leak in space. This is why it is warmer when it is snowing…
H2O(l) –> H2O(s) + heat
So everyone involved will be watching the Arctic ice melt this summer to see if it surpasses 2008 melt, or not, just like we were watching 2008 melt last summer and comparing it to 2007–worth blogging about. I’ll be clicking to the colored graph at JAXA a lot, from the comfort of my home, just like Steven Goddard.
I can see from the military website that the plots of the active buoy drift tracks track the differing historical drifts of the buoys, presumably mainly wind driven? What would be even more interesting would be if they recorded sub-ice ocean current vectors as well as temperature, or do they?. It seems bottom melt is the main ice consumer and ice thickness is typically thickest toward Canada and thinning south and east.
geoff pohanka (12:58:58) :
NASA inferred that three will be less Arctic ice this Summer simply because there is more young ice.
Well, the most melting ever recorded the last 30 years of satellite observation was in 2007 so I would have to assume there was a record amount of new ice in the refreeze after that.
But 9% less ice melted in the Summer of 2008, so I would have to believe there will be more multi year ice in the Summer of 2009 than in either of the two prior Summer.
Actually you have that backwards. In 07 the max was ~13.2Mm^2 and the min ~2.9Mm^2, whereas in 08 it was 13.9 and 3.0 respectively so the melt was ~5% greater in 08. Since the max this winter was only ~14Mm^2 then the most that could be 1st year ice is ~21%, minus any outflow through the Fram.
Phil.
Thanks for the clarification.
I give Steven full credit for bringing the CRREL dataset to our attention. His analysis of it is another matter. Rather like the sea-level data that shows quite clearly that current trends are above the historical values, Steven bravely presents time series that rather undermine his underlying hypotheses.
In this case I think there might be an understandable reluctance to accuse the US Army of massaging its data, though of course it is completely consistent with the findings of other polar scientists which show growing ice loss in the Arctic.
Steven,
Is it possible to get a longer record of data for these buoys?
It would be even more informative to look at -2 C isotherm depth vs time over multiple years. Obviously, a significant part of the observed “thickening” is due to it being “winter” – I am guessing the ice thickens every winter & thins every summer, but what is the trend year to year on these min & max thicknesses?
That would be much more informative if it would be possible to pull that analysis together.
…looking forward to seeing that analysis. Hope that you can provide.
JL
An interesting editorial in The Australian newspaper
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25310829-16382,00.html
Mr Garrett’s performance shows the way “global warming” has become shorthand for whatever environmentalists want to attribute to humanity. There is no denying part of the Wilkins ice shelf has separated from Antarctica and will sooner or later melt, as icebergs always do. But this does not prove anything other than part of an enormous iceshelf, one among many, has fractured along a fault line. This is neither unique nor in itself alarming, and to argue otherwise assumes Antarctica started to change only when humanity began generating coal-fired electricity and driving petroleum-powered cars.
G
Jeff L,
“It would be even more informative to look at -2 C isotherm depth vs time over multiple years.”
CRREL have derived this data, though Steven has not presented it. The longest time series to date is from Buoy 2006C:
http://img22.imageshack.us/img22/5204/ice2006c.gif
This multiple year data is not consistent with the title of this thread.
Everybody knows that Arctic ice declined significantly prior to 2007.
The question is – what is happening now during the solar minimum and cool phase of the PDO?
Tom P (16:00:50) :
“This multiple year data is not consistent with the title of this thread.”
Indeed it’s not – Steven, what say you??
Unfortunately, this is still only a 3 year record of data from 1 buoy – not exactly a robust dataset to draw conclusions about the fate of all arctic ice – one way or the other.
Tom P,
Do you think that The Catlin Expedition is retroactively collecting data from past years?
Nice cherry picking there Tom P. Do you happen to have data for Ice extent or thickness during the MWP? The Holocene Optimum?