What would NSIDC and our media make of a photo like this if released by the NAVY today? Would we see headlines like “NORTH POLE NOW OPEN WATER”? Or maybe “Global warming melts North Pole”? Perhaps we would. sensationalism is all the rage these days. If it melts it makes headlines.
Some additional captures from the newsreel below show that the ice was pretty thin then, thin enough to assign deckhands to chip it off after surfacing.The newsreel is interesting, here is the transcript.
1958 Newsreel: USS Skate, Nuclear Sub, Is First to Surface at North Pole
ED HERLIHY, reporting:
USS Skate heads north on another epic cruise into the strange underseas realm first opened up by our nuclear submarines. Last year, the Skate and her sister-sub Nautilus both cruised under the Arctic ice to the Pole. Then, conditions were most favorable. The Skate’s job is to see if it can be done when the Arctic winter is at its worst, with high winds pushing the floes into motion and the ice as thick as twenty-five feet.
Ten times she is able to surface. Once, at the North Pole, where crewmen performed a mission of sentiment, scattering the ashes of polar explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins. In 1931, he was the first to attempt a submarine cruise to the Pole. Now, the Skate’s twelve-day three thousand mile voyage under the ice, shown in Defense Department films, demonstrates that missile-carrying nuclear subs could lurk under the Polar Ice Cap, safe from attack, to emerge at will, and fire off H-bomb missiles to any target on Earth.
A powerful, retaliatory weapon for America’s defense.
For example, one crew member aboard the USS Skate which surfaced at the North Pole in 1959 and numerous other locations during Arctic cruises in 1958 and 1959 said:
“the Skate found open water both in the summer and following winter. We surfaced near the North Pole in the winter through thin ice less than 2 feet thick. The ice moves from Alaska to Iceland and the wind and tides causes open water as the ice breaks up. The Ice at the polar ice cap is an average of 6-8 feet thick, but with the wind and tides the ice will crack and open into large polynyas (areas of open water), these areas will refreeze over with thin ice. We had sonar equipment that would find these open or thin areas to come up through, thus limiting any damage to the submarine. The ice would also close in and cover these areas crushing together making large ice ridges both above and below the water. We came up through a very large opening in 1958 that was 1/2 mile long and 200 yards wide. The wind came up and closed the opening within 2 hours. On both trips we were able to find open water. We were not able to surface through ice thicker than 3 feet.”
– Hester, James E., Personal email communication, December 2000
Here are some screencaps from the newsreel:
It was that way again in 1962:
And of course then there’s this famous photo:
But contrast that to 1999, just 12 years later, lots of ice:
But in 1993, it’s back to thin ice again:
The point illustrated here: the North Pole is not static, ice varies significantly. The Arctic is not static either. Variance is the norm.
There’s quite an interesting read at John Daly’s website, including a description of “the Gore Box”. Everybody should have one of those.
h/t to WUWT commenters Stephen Skinner, Crosspatch, and Glenn.
See the Skate image archive at NAVSOURCE
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Gee – Global warming must have been bad in the 1950’s, so many poor Polar Bears must have starved and drowned…
If only the Catlin team had been alive and active back then – they could have found plenty of thin ice…
I love John Daly, God rest his soul. His was one of the first websites I ever found some years ago that refuted this nonsense.
Bleeding is so last week. If it’s green, it leads.
Great images.
Without images like these it would be easy for the Catlin explorers and others to say that open water at the pole is unusual.
I have saved these images to show my friends.
Whatever happened to the days when we were treated to new vistas minus the agenda?
Subs at the North Pole (wasn’t so bad, was it?), Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Pioneer, Voyager.
When Science delivered without the attendant sermon.
What happened?
If it weren’t for the Rovers operating on Mars, we’d be S.O.L., and right now, Sol is out to lunch. So appears to be Earth Science.
Sure do miss NASA and JPL.
If only the Catlin team had been alive and active back then – they could have found plenty of thin ice…
They ARE skating on thin ice, if the ARE there.
Looking over the media blitz, it would be par for their agenda for monkeybusiness to be afoot.
Nice pictures. I wonder how Dr.Serreze of the NSIDC and other global warmists would attempt to explain this variability. They’ll probably fall back on the old “it’s the weather” excuse.
Climate change: It’s natural.
That photo wasn’t “released by the NAVY today” – I have had it on my Arctic regional summary page for months: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/RS_Arctic.htm
REPLY: I discussed “what if”?…not that it was- Anthony
Looks like 1st year ice those subs were breaking through.
Am I seeing that right?
Does Flanagan have an opinion on the above pictures?
So much open water at the North Pole in 1959?
How do you explain it?
This inquiring mind would like to be informed.
Oh dear me. How ever will Al Gore handle this?
I know! He’ll say the skeptics made it all up. These were photoshopped or even shot in a Hollywood Special Effects studio. That’s how he’ll do it.
Everybody knows that the North Pole has never melted ever before. Everybody knows that Santa Claus lives at the North Pole in a big castle filled with merry little elves.
And Catlin is getting ready for their third resupply flight. Now according to their website, there were only three resupplies planned. 43 days and 540+ km to the pole? I don’t think so. Not unless they’ve had a change of plan in the number of resupplies.
Well, it just goes to show how much warming human activity has caused. Where are the pictures of submarines at the north pole before the industrial revolution? Eh? Where are they? There are none. Not a single one. My case is proved.
Only since mankind has pursued its wicked desires for warm homes, clean water and plentiful food have submarines been able to surface at the north pole.
And just look at the dates of these pictures – 1958, 1959, 1962, 1987, 1993 and 1999. More than 200 years of savage attack on mother nature’s fridge had already occurred, it’s hardly surprising the ice was thin enough for these dreadful machines to wreak their havoc.
And what about the damage they did to the fragile, naturally balanced ice sheets as the submarines (designed, you might note in a distinctly phallic shape) thrust upwards and breached the delicate hymen that was all between natures virtue and man’s disgusting lusts? How long do you think it took for the broken ice to heal from this savage act of macho oppression?
All the efforts of those who really care about mother nature have been dedicated to trying to ease her pain yet nothing, nothing I say again, can restore the wounds created by such brutal aggression to the intimate soul of her being.
You seek to make a cheap point about the thickness of the ice having been less in the past than it is now? How dare you? What an affront to those who have dedicated their lives to profiting from carbon credits, ahem, sorry, I meant protecting mother nature’s virtue.
You should be ashamed of yourself Mr Watts.
I need to take a cold shower now.
The faithful will probably say that those photos weren’t right at the pole, or that the pole had shifted to the equator, or that aliens made those photos in photoshop or something.
Robert Bateman — Looks like 1st year ice those subs were breaking through.
Although on the surface the claim that multi-year ice is thicker sounds logical, is this really true? What seems logical may not be, e.g. thinking the earth must be closer to the sun is when we get summer sounds logical yet isn’t true. One would think that ice compacts and thickness in any area is as much a factor of local currents (or lack thereof) and such as much as anything else.
The faithful will most likely ignore it.
If evidence doesn’t fit the dominant narrative/paradigm – throw it out.
Leon Brozyna (22:28:27) :
Oh dear me. How ever will Al Gore handle this?
I know! He’ll say the skeptics made it all up. These were photoshopped or even shot in a Hollywood Special Effects studio. That’s how he’ll do it.
No way he can wriggle his way out of that one.
Those pictures, I remember seeing them in Time or Life magazine 50 years ago. They may even have made the Huntley-Brinkley report, or a Walter Cronkite blurb.
I remember when it happened.
Billboard it. Spread it all over the place.
Front page it.
Bumper sticker it.
Run it all over the Internet.
Make buttons for it.
Make a moniker out of it:
Remember the Skate.
Make Al Gore eat it.
Isn’t there a record of a Chinese fleet finding the Arctic relatively ice free around 1276? Curse those medieval SUV’s!
The biggest problem I have with all the modelers is that they ignore the empirical evidence that is right there in historical records, be they written records of wheat and flax shipments from Greenland to Europe during the Medieval Warm Period or photographic evidence of surfacing subs and earlier Arctic Explorations.
All their proxies and calculated anomalies might give them a metric to plug into a model, but ignoring the written and photographic records of people who “were there” demonstrates the modeler’s all-consuming arrogance…and ignorance.
Nice pictures! It’s been a long time since I’ve seen them.
More inconvenient truths me thinks.
Interesting.
It was only a few weeks ago that I listened to a friend of mine talk about being on a boat when it surfaced through the ice relatively close to the pole. That would have been in the mid to late 70s. He was on a fast attack sub. I was on a boomer (missile sub). Though we crossed the Arctic Circle, we never went under the ice while I was on board, to my knowledge.
I think WUWT just did a preemptive strike on the thicker multi-year
ice excuse!
Sorry Anthony – missed the “if”
Mike Goad
Very interesting, is there any chance that your friend have some pictures with dates? It would be SUPER!
K.R. Frank
And no run away positive feedbacks or worldwide flooding occurred each time the ice was that thin.
Bill Sticker (22:55:30) :
Isn’t there a record of a Chinese fleet finding the Arctic relatively ice free around 1276? Curse those medieval SUV’s!
You are referring to Gavin Menzies’ book “1421: The Year China Discovered America”. There are no actual records of a Chinese expedition to the pole, but Menzies makes an interesting circumstantial case for it. Unfortunately, a lot of the evidence he presents was also used by Erich von Daniken in “Chariots of the Gods”. Oddly enough, the evidence exists…. it just doesn’t speak for itself.
Amen to that brother!