The farcical account of the Catlin Crew continues. You don’t even have to dig deep anymore to find as many holes in their stories as they say they are drilling. In addition to what Steve points out, our own “Charles the moderator” provided the video framegrab below, notice anything interesting? You can watch the Quicktime video showing how they do “drilling and measurement” on the Catlin website developer, Indigopapa.tv, is here .
In case you don’t see it, the answer for the clip above is at the end of the article. – Anthony
Guest post by Steven Goddard
Wednesday, 15 Apr 2009 12:39
The Catlin Arctic Survey has now released its first set of ice and snow thickness measurements, showing the floating sea ice cover it has travelled over in the early stage is predominantly new ice, with an average thickness of 1.77m. The findings were obtained by manual drilling and are currently being analysed by science partners.
Finding ‘First Year Ice’ in this part of the Ocean was not what the Ice Team had expected at this stage of a route chosen, in conjunction with science advisors, to begin in an area where there would be multi-year ice. It suggests that the older, thicker ice has either moved to a different part of the ocean or has melted. This First Year Ice will only have formed since September 2008 and, being thinner, is less likely to survive the annual summer thaw. It points to an ever-smaller summer ice covering around the North Geographic Pole this year.
We’ve noticed that the ice is older and thicker than before
The Catlin Arctic Survey has now released its first set of ice and snow thickness measurements, showing the floating sea ice cover it has travelled over in the early stage is predominantly new ice, with an average thickness of 1.77m.
At the other end of the measurement spectrum, NASA’s IceSat has made more than 1.9 billion ice measurements already this spring – with no hypothermia or frostbite.
ANSWER: The tape measure shows a red 7F marker. That’s 7 feet for our Euro and UK visitors. Now why would they measure in feet then convert to meters?:
“…with an average thickness of 1.77m” source: April 15 Catlin blog
when you can easily buy metric tape measures with calibration certificates in Great Britain?
I could be wrong, but I watched the video several times to see if I could see evidence of perhaps printing in English units one side and Metric on the other, I did not see any and I did several frame grabs. It looks to me as if one side is blank and the other printed only in Feet and Inches. It appears to me that the tape is translucent white, perhaps a cloth or vinyl tape which would be lighter than a steel one since they have gear carrying considerations to make.
Readers feel free to double check my observation and report in comments. – Anthony
Probably flogging a dead horse by now….but anyway this from the Catlin pages on 16/4 (or 4/16 for you USA people)…:
“The drill blades make a hole of 10.2cm in diameter. Hadow says he can feel when the drill has pushed through the ice and hit the water underneath.
“It’s similar to drilling through any material in a way”, he explains. “But with ice, about ten centimeters before the blade pushes through, I can tell I’m nearly there. The ice at the base is mushy and the drill moves more freely”.
Sea level is not underneath the ice, so when the hole is drilled, icy water surges upwards, sometimes spilling over the top of the hole, before settling. Hadow waits 30 seconds for the water to level and then uses a tape measure to record the distance from the top of the water, which is usually 5 – 20cms from the surface – to the top of the ice.
More measurements are taken to assess the thickness of the ice itself”
soooo if he had any commonsense ….when the he has just broken through the bottom of the ice why not just mark the point on the drill/auger at the point where it is level with the surrounding ice on the surface, take the auger out of the hole and measure the length of the auger that was in the hole….surely that would be more accurate (and faster?) than trying to shove a flimsy tape down a rapidly freezing hole? ….as Homer may say ‘doh!”
The point of AGW science is to obfuscate.
Greg Cavanagh (22:45:12) :
According to their equiptment list, they are using a SeaCat to take the depth and temperature measurements. There is no tape mentioned.
Quoted:-The SeaCat system has been supplied by one of our Science Advisors, Professor Tim Stanton at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. It consists of an ultra light weight winch system and a high resolution Conductivity Temperature Depth sensor package (CTD) made by Sea Bird Electronics.
Greg you’re spoiling all the fun, it’s not necessary to read anything surely? All you need to do is look at a few pictures and jump to conclusions.
This will go down in history as “The Great Catlin Con”
Has anyone written to the main sponsors and asked their views about being assciated with such a fraud?
Steven Goddard (05:46:03) :
If I had to drill holes in a hypothermic state through ice at -40C after a long day hauling a 100kg sledge, I suspect that I might look for the thinnest places to drill, in order to minimize my work
Do I detect a teensy weensy bit of Cynicism above or maybe a teensy weensy bit of skepticism? Or both?
So to recap :-
1 They may be on the ice but the video may have been made last summer.
2 The realtime body monitoring was not in realtime.
3 They appear not to know how to correctly measure a dimension.
4 The thickness of the ice is already recorded elsewhere.
5 They did not appreciate how cold it would be.
In view of the above I think it is only appropriate that these brave people who are risking their lives on a daily basis to save the planet should be nominated for the nobel prize (or do I mean Oscar)
Thank you Tim Berners Lee, for without you we would be all be blind to the blindingly obvious.
alex verlinden (05:36:01) :
clearly, the tool with which Pen is drilling is provided by Mora of Sweden … http://www.moraofsweden.se
“The Mora Nova ice drill is providing answers to global warming questions.
Mora of Sweden are providing all the scientific drilling equipment for the Catlin Arctic Survey. The 5-metre long Ice Augers are a vital tool in gathering the ice-thickness measurements.”
does anyone of our Northerly situated readers has any experience with this equipment ? and if so, how long does it take to drill say 0.5m or 1.0m of ice ?
It doesn’t appear to take very long judging by this video.
ok lets see if I can get this straight.. from the audio section
http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/gallery_video.aspx?id=46
Penn talks survey techniques: every nite they set out a string 200m long strung between two ice screws. Every 4 meters they take a depth measurement, every 20 meters they take a temp, a density core and drill the ice to measure thickness and draft. It unfortunately does not say what they use but the yellow stick in the picture with audio looks like meters if Im not mistaken..
There are several stills of the ice proceedure, but the measuring device is not shown in them as far as I can see.
So lets see that adds up to 10 drilled holes every evening.. during the day they only make observation of rubble , ridge ect..
Steven Goddard (05:46:03) :
If I had to drill holes in a hypothermic state through ice at -40C after a long day hauling a 100kg sledge, I suspect that I might look for the thinnest places to drill, in order to minimize my work.
If I planned on traveling to the North Pole to haul 1 100 kg sled by hand so I could drill holes through ice in support of a hoax, I suspect my family would have me committed. ;^)
Where is the ice hole data from the great Catlin Clowns.
Average 1.77m????????? really?
How many holes?
Gps position of each hole?
Date/Time of each borehole?
Depth of each hole?
Are the holes drilled at random sites, or just at thin spots where Pen thinks it will be easier and quicker to drill?
Who chose a route that was going to take them over 1st year ice anyway?
These are pretty simple requests and given that their ice radar has (conveniently) failed – I think the rest of us would love to see ALL of their so called data?
bill (22:03:17) says:
This video is on a sub page of the idigopapa website http://dev.indigopapa.tv/clients/catlin/
As far as I can see it is not available from the customer facing pages
But it is in a publicly accessible directory, perhaps not found by the average web user but easily found by many.
Why would it be there? It’s easy enough to put a file on the server where it can’t be found. Oh, I know…the same guys that messed up the biometric data did this. /sarc off
Haing been frostbitten and hypothermic myself-I have no desire to push the envelope any farther than the sign:”No off Piste Skiing” anymore…
What I find more bizzre is that they are using so many different kinds of “rulers”. When you have to drag the weight behind you all day you want to minimize the amount that you need to drag. So, you normally bring the minimum… else they though they would regularly drop them through the holes!!! But still… why so many different makes of tape measure???
Why is there apparently water visible at the top of the hole? Have not finished coffee yet so armchair may be crooked.
Think we should all take direct action against Catlin and the other sponsors of this FRAUD.
We have ALL had enough of these global warming lies.
Catlin watch out – we are going to expose your company as being behind one of the biggest attempted lies in the history of global warming propaganda.
http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=113806&catid=339
Heavy snow for Denver and Las Vegas sees late snow as well.
BIG NEWS!
As of this morning, the IJIS website reports the ice extent at 13,649,219 km^2, thereby exceeding the previous high recorded for this data, 13,630,938 in 2003. The IJIS database only goes back to 2003 at this time of year.
I’ll be interested in the NSIDC press release in early May. My guess:
“The ice extent continued it’s inexorable decline and recorded the 7th lowest level in the recent past. The preponderance of first year ice points to a rapid melt with a high probability that the arctic ice cap will completely melt this season. The loss of ice continues to accelerate and exceed our predictions”
Have you noticed the glee of warmists when ice melts. When it doesn’t, you’ll hear about this not changing the long term trend, or that future warming is in the pipeline, or that it’s just another denialist strawman. Some even seem to get angry that it’s contradictory to their scenario. I would think any recovery of seasonal ice levels would be a reason to feel good. But that doesn’t seem to be an emotion that warmists possess.
REPLY: I’ve been watching for this to happen, thanks for the note. I’ll publish about it when April 17th data is posted, hopefully soon. – Anthony
The Catlin Expedition is scientifically worthless. These people are risking their health and their lives for nothing…
Or are they? How will this be spun? That’s how the results will be measured.
There is one more technique for mesureing the ice thickness manually not mentioned, although it would be somewhat less acurate than the rod technique mentioned.
Drill slowly, so you don’t wind up shoving a significant section of the drill through the hole when you break through the bottom, mark the drill as you would a rod when you break through and then measure the drill bit.
Phil …
thanks for the link … it sure takes much less time than I thought, which confirms what I always say when my technicians do some work: “make sure that you have the right equipment!” … 🙂
I’ve downloaded the video … I know too little about it, and a more knowledgeable person should correct me, but if you look at the file via a hexadecimal editor, it is, among others, made in 1080 HD (that is for the size of the file …), was at one time named “drilling polaris.mpeg”, was created by “adobe premiere pro 4”, and has some dates in the metadata, e.g. “2009-01-09” and “2009-01-22” …
Funny thing about people who come to England from other countries, a lot of them pick up real quick on our Imperial System. You would be surprised by just how many people convert to the idea of a mile or pounds and stone for weights.
Why is that?
The Kilometre just seems a bit too short to me to be useful.
The mile is just right for some reason.
And 14 pounds to a stone seems ridiculous, but only if you think about it. When you dont think to hard, it seems just right and untroubling.
Beer of course is always best served in pints, and petrol in gallons. Just what were they thinking when they came up with the litre?
I dont think that the imperial system is going to go down without some sort of fight.
I tried to download the movies from bill (22:03:17) says: above to see what the date of the movie file is. If it’s from 2008 or so then how can it be from the expedition out on the ice now?
James P;-)
AND so we jolly well should by jingo! How dare Johnny Foreigner make us drink our beer in demi-litres, scandallous! We’d only end up arguing the toss over whether the top 12.7mm should have froth on it or not.
Being of a certain age I like many others measure out pasta on imperial scales etc, then use a calculator to convert grams back into ounces because we like our old fashioned scales so much!
I must say from the comments raised here that I would be very surprised that a modern tape measure of whatever description would have both imperial as well as metric scales on them but they really do. It’s an aging population I suspect certainly for the UK. All this ice if it melts could add to the already calamitous 1/8″ per year sea-level rise everyone is so worried about!
However, for an expedition supposedly backed up with all the modern high tech equipment & support team I would have expected up to the mark measuring devices that don’t need dragging behind on a sledge. What should happen is that somebody at NASA should invent a rocket machine that can send up an electronic device to orbit the earth, you know like an artificial satellite, with perhaps some fancy giggery-pokery in the electronics to keep it in one place, a sort of geographically stationary thing above the surface of the earth. That special electronic device could then measure the ice thickness safely in outer space without any body risking their lives. Oh wait a minute, I seem to recall it’s already been done. Oh well, back to the computer aided design station again. HAGWE everyone.
I commented twice about the location problem on another thread here at WUWT: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/14/catlin-artic-ice-survey-bio-telemetry-status-demonstrational/ .
Once at 9:26 on 15 April, and again at 12:07.
The fact that they chose the middle of the Beaufort Gyre as their start point strongly suggests they intended to find thin ice from the start. As shown in the animation here, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/13/watching-the-2007-historic-low-sea-ice-flow-out-of-the-arctic-sea/#more-7019 ,
the Gyre is the primary area where ice is being broken up, pushing the ice pack against the Canadian coast. Since the currents in the Gyre go in a circle, this explains in part the Ice Team’s lack of progress towards the North Pole. Catlin is also trying in their report to hide that they put the team down in the middle of the Gyre, using a graphic on their report page, http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/assets/downloads/Ice_Report_14_4_09.pdf , that has annotations that suggest the Team and their measurements are traveling along 130W longitudinal meridian.
If I were planning a route to the north pole I would plan to walk over first year ice predominantly. First year ice will have a lot fewer pressure ridges than older ice.
Larry Sheldon (20:56:50) :
How big is that clip? — I have been down-loading it for quite a while.
REPLY: I think WUWT may have crashed their server. – Anthony
WUWT causes sunspots and crashed servers-Watt’s next? I’m becoming afraid to post.