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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“All that is missing is an apology from the apologist here.
But has not the 30 percent decrease happened since 1979?” -Gerald Machnee
“Comparison of sea-ice draft data acquired on submarine cruises between 1993 and 1997 with similar data acquired between 1958 and 1976 indicates that the mean ice draft at the end of the melt season has decreased by about 1.3 m in most of the deep water portion of the Arctic Ocean, from 3.1 m in 1958–1976 to 1.8 m in the 1990s.” – http://psc.apl.washington.edu/thinning/Rothrock_Thinn.pdf
Since this paper provides data from the US Navy subs, not just anecdotal pictures, could it be added to the original post for all to see? The timeframe of the study is comparable to that of the original post. The anecdotal evidence of showing the subs in polynyas might mislead readers to think that all the ice in the region was of the same thickness, where in reality, these spots were specifically sought so as not to damage the subs. Thanks.
JLKrueger (05:40:41) :
The NSIDC has been down now for at least 30 hours. [snip – baseless accusation]
I’m convinced that most of the world, including scientists of all fields, get their conception of the North Pole from Hollywood.
Remember the film ‘Ice Station Zebra’? The ice was portrayed as several feet thick, a uniform plain of white stretching as far as the eye can see. There was no gaps or open water, no ridges, just a vast expanse of ice and snow drifts.
People believe the Arctic ice cap to be a stable mass of ice, as if it just sits there, unmoving, forever. The believe it only melts around the edges and don’t understand how the ice drifts and flows from Alaska towards Greenland and Iceland.
AGW alarmists play upon this ignorance. Scientists who know better but do not correct the misreporting of the popular media are doing no favor to their profession.
When ever you read an article about the terrible melting of the Ice Caps … just send the March 17, 1959 picture to the blog … and the writer.
The more we circulate it, the more impact it will have.
[Reply: Better yet, send the link to the whole article to them. ~ dbstealey, mod.]
Re NSIDC being down –the Doomsday Code must have tripped.
If current_val not < lt_trend then go shut_down.
😉
I think I saw an HC show about this, where they were looking for evidence of chinese ships on the US west coast. Which is fine, except they were relying on dowsing to find them. They didn’t find anything…
From what I understand, given these photos – the “tipping point” theory is falsified. Can someone tell me how the tipping point theory can stand up to this evidence?
Probably the best short video of a US sub breaking through the polar ice is on the Stargate SG1 straight to DVD movie, Continuum, with a special feature of how they shot the sub breaking through the ice on cue.
There IS some merit to the “cherry picking” claim by the warmists over the US subs at the North Pole, because those “Polynyas” perhaps were used in preference to more icy areas nearby. The “ice free North Pole” claim is to have vast stretches of the polar region ice free (less than 15% ?) and we’ll know that when we see it. I don’t think anyone can make the claim that vast stretches of the North Pole have been ice free yet, BUT at the same token, I don’t think that event will happen anytime soon, either.
Furthermore, we all can guess that the “ice free North Pole” is rhetoric more than it is practical, due to the angle of incidence at 90deg anyway. It would take one hell of a stormy season to push that much ice out of the polar region in order to get that much free ice area so as to really make all that much difference in the direct solar forcing of the Arctic ocean.
Something I’ve not seen as yet when reading these Arctic ice threads — We’ve all seen the animated ice graphics, of how the ice flows past the eastern coast of Greenland, out into the Atlantic Ocean. The river of ice flowing always seems the same from year to year, covering approximately the same area, but I would hazard a guess that perhaps when the Arctic is very stormy, and the ice is really pushed toward and around the east coast of Greenland, the speed (and thus area/volume) of ice physically pushed out of the Arctic is perhaps markedly different from year to year. Perhaps significantly so. Has this ever been quantified?
I fear that revisionism is alive and well today. In George Orwell’s 1984, Winston was employed by the Ministry of Truth to revise history to ensure that Big Brother’s predictions remain accurate. Today, inconvenient truths like the submarine photos, will be ignored or twisted by the AGW revisionists to ensure that current doctrine is maintained and “accurate”.
The NSIDC has been down now for at least 30 hours. [snip – baseless accusation]
Big opportunities for beach resorts developers, surrounded by the most transparent water ever seen, Artic Sea ´s palm trees , white sand beaches, etc.,etc. They are a few buyers already here!
George Carlin has a message with more clarity than Algore and his acolytes. George’s language is interspersed with vulgarity but is basic common sense applied to Nature and the planet Earth.
—————————————————————
George Carlin on Global Warming
First I’d like to echo the admiration expressed for John Daly. One of the pioneer sceptics who relentlessly posed credible comon sense questions to the AGW community; many of which have yet to be answerred in kind. He is missed.
Second a question: what’s the funny little bump in the ASMR-E Sea Ice Extent graph that occurs frequently around June 1?
There have been doubts expressed about the validity of the submarine photo.
http://web.archive.org/web/20031203174202/http://www.trump.net.au/~greenhou/reply.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20060218082437/http://www.trump.net.au/~greenhou/home.html
REPLY: Perhaps the NAVY can help, even if we throw out that photo, there are others listed that support the same idea. – Anthony
This is another reason why the military makes it their business to know so much more about Arctic ice than the civilian sector: Open leads and polynyas are critical strategic resources.
He who knows the whereabouts and behavior of opportunities to surface through the ice – or equivalently, to move men & equipment across the surface unimpeded – holds a decisive ‘comman and control’ advantage over the competition.
To function as a global power today (and for decades now) it is vital to know where openings are in the ice, on a near real-time, continuous basis.
It’s not just a matter of scientific interest to know how, when & where openings occur in the Arctic icecap, but a matter of security at the highest level.
It is no accident or mere indulgence, that among the first & most important missions of nuclear submarines, was to demonstrate their value in understanding how to exploit the Arctic realm. These pictures that have been released were as much for the benefit of the Soviets etc, as they were for the curious publics in America & Britain.
Great collection of pics, WUWT – thanks!
There’s an awful lot of light in the “17 March 1959” north pole picture, given that the sun is still about 1.5o below the horizon and hasn’t yet risen at the north pole on March 17.
So, with the scarcity of ice during the times these pictures were taken, does any one know of pictures of places like the Maldives that were taken during the same times so we can see how they were affected?
There are two easily-accessible references, which describe the surfacing of the USS Skate at the North Pole on the 17th March 1959 (the first submarine to do so):
*
Calvert, J.F., 1959. Up through the ice of the North Pole, The National Geographic Magazine, Vol. CXVI, No. 1, July 1959, pp. 1-41.
*
Calvert, J., 1996. Surface at The Pole, Bluejacket Books (originally printed by McGraw-Hill, 1960).
and which say:
* That the sun was still below the horizon and it was quite dark (it did not appear until 19 March):
The sun was still just below the horizon and a very heavy overcast made for late twilight darkness
* That the weather was terrible:
*
the wind ….. was roaring around us at about 30 knots, blowing the snow until one could see no more than a quarter of a mile
*
The swirling snow loomed around the red torches
*
in the 26-below-zero cold….. The wind blew snow into our noses and mouths, and it was difficult to talk or even breathe
*
The wind and bitter cold made it physically difficult to hold and read the prayer book
*
the gale was increasing and the temperature dropping
*
Both sides of the lead were piled with the heaviest and ruggedest hummocks I had yet seen in the Arctic. It was a wild and forbidding scene
Enduser (07:04:56),
The GISS chart (the fig. 4 you mentioned) shows total solar forcing at .2 w/m2. That is quite a difference from your calculation. Do you know why?
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! for posting those old Navy pictures. I’m 61 years old and remember seeing some of those pictures in news magazines in the past. I have some good friends my same age who are absolutely convinced that the polar ice is melting, that the polar bears are going extinct and that Manhattan Island, the Maldives and Florida will soon be inundated. They have completely bought the media hype, and no amount of contradictory evidence can get them to change their minds. These pictures are the best visual evidence of the AGW hoax I have seen. Believe me, I will be forwarding these pictures to quite a few people.
Models are great at forecasting the past – something I learned from modeling population and energy usage. Biggest factor in modeling was the outlier, data that doesn’t fit – or in my case – when the biggest manufacturer shut down.
Seems to me that an accurate summer ice at the pole model would include temperature. Extreme cold dries out the atmosphere. As the earth is inclined about 22 degrees toward the sun, photons [fancy word for energy] striking the ice would cause it to sublimate more – sort of like evaporation – and thin the ice. The ice would thin from the top down.
Sublimation is no mystery. But it is counterintuitive to some.
When the ice ages covered the earth [relatively speaking], the most ice free zones were directly in front of the floe [sp] . The air was desiccated and vast drifts of wind blown soil built up – leaving hills hundreds of feet thick – Loess. Again – counterintuitive – but shows how a model builder using certain presumptions, can model the wrong thing. Desiccation is not a mystery.
Iceberg calving from glaciers. Hopefully every grade school student has learned that the proportion of ice below the sea’s surface is huge in an iceberg. Glacier Iceberg calving is merely the force of gravity breaking ice that is not supported enough by the strength of frozen freshwater in its bulk while flowing into saltwater that tends to melt away the bottom of the birthing berg. The modeling has to take into account snow fall versus temperatures and the specific ocean bed conditions at the glacier front. Does the modeler then confuse the long-term snowfall conditions with the formation of sea ice at the North Pole? The two are counter-intuitively not related.
That photo is obviously faked, just like the moon landing.
Final sentence in ksspyder comment should more plainly say – the interplay between snowfall over decades of time on glaciers and the formation of sea ice is not intuitive.
ak, you must look at the dates of the submarine data. The initial measure was taken in October, and subsequent measure taken in September,etc. It will show the ice to be thinner, of course, due to seasonal variation. Most people don’t realize that an area the size of the U.S. melts and freezes every year. TonyB mentioned the Hudson’s Bay records ( they go back almost 400 years) , which indicate a cyclical variation in ice extent and thickness. These are accurate records for their lives and livelihood depended on good data. This leads me to believe that we are well within naturally occurring variations of the polar ice. We live on a planet where water can exist in all three states at any given time. With a climate that is as complex as earths ( think of all the variables), there is going to be fluctuation in ice extent, thickness, movement due to winds, water temperature, salinity. The list goes on. You have to ignore a great deal of paleoclimate evidence to say that we are “outside” this natural variation.
They have more control over those who live in fear.