Busted: Catlin Arctic Ice Survey "Didn't Expect" To Find First Year Ice

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.

NSIDC ice map overlaid on the Catlin Route Map

If they were looking for older ice, there were many obvious (and shorter) routes they could have chosen.  What made them choose this route, which was apparently too long to be completed and which started on first year ice?

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