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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excuse me if this was posted already. Here is a scientific paper that compares some of the Artic warming and ice melt to what happened in the 1940’s. They say it is the same. Just mother nature and her changeable nature at work.
http://rdgs.dk/djg/pdfs/106/1/04.pdf
Walt Stone 08:17:25
In fact, the extensive loss of Arctic Sea Ice in 2007 was largely due to an unusual amount of wind driven loss.
=====================================
Robert Rust (08:12:46) :
Book burning.
However, the entire world + dog would know what happened & why.
Therefore, the agendists will try to bury and ignore the Skate & Seadragon at the North Pole in the late 50’s early 60’s.
Come up with pictures of subs poking up through the SOUTH POLE and you may have a shot at getting attention form the mainstream media.
REPLY: Actually, following Waxman’s lead, there’s probably pictures of subs poking up through the Arctic tundra. 😉 Anthony
Ian L. Mcqueen;-)
Done thanks. It seems to have been a security filter issue at my end but thanks for the tip!
AtB
Kath (08:17:56) : I fear that revisionism is alive and well today. . . . revise history to ensure that Big Brother’s predictions remain accurate”
James Hansen has done this. Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes yesterday introduced Hansen as “NASA’s top climate scientist, credited with the earliest and most accurate projections on climate change.”
I recall Hansen’s 1988 testimony before Congress in which he predicted a warmer climate by 1.2°C in twenty years. Here in 2009, the global average is only 0.17 to 0.22°C warmer than the 20th Century benchmark. He then had the audacity to publish a paper with himself as the lead author extolling the virtues of the accuracy of his 1988 projections. Looking back, none of his three scenarios came even within 50% of being accurate, yet the ya-hoos over at RealClimate.org insist Hansen was and is spot on.
Enduser (07:04:56) :
“Wow! 1.3 versus .035. that means that the sun has 1.3/.035=35 times the global warming potential as all of the permanent greenhouse gasses put together.”
Anthony/Steve:
I’ve been trying to get everyone to stop looking up at the sun for a minute and take a look where the sun gets some assistance from the earth’s interior:
http://esrc.stfx.ca/pdf/halifaxtalk.pdf:
“Canada’s geothermal database indicate that the ground heat flux has increased an average of 24 mW/m2 over the last 200years. Application of this method to the global geothermal data base allowed for a quantification of the global ground energy balance at the Earth’s surface for the past few centuries. Preliminary global ground surface temperature and surface heat
flux histories indicate that the Earth’s continents have warmed by about 0.5 K and received an additional 26 mW/m2 of energy in the last 100 years.”
Everyone appears to have dismissed the heat flux as too small. The average is small but take a look at the next link and you will see that it is quite high in certain places – particularly in the pacific where El Nino lives. Looking at the east pacific heat flux anomally (scroll down to the maps) and imagine the currents converging on the equator and gathering up this hot band into a narrow band along the equator. :
http://geophysics.ou.edu/geomechanics/notes/heatflow/global_heat_flow.htm
I think this would make a good post (and make your geological readers happy)
Enduder: quoting from the link: “…ANNUAL GROWTH RATE {upper case mine} of climate forcing by long-lived greenhouse gases (GHGs) slowed from a peak close to 0.05 W/m2 PER YEAR {upper case mine} year around 1980-85 to about 0.035”
It would help if everyone would read things carefully before responding.
News Flash!! Dateline September 25, 1957, Wednesday
U.S. Cutters Conquer Northwest Passage; 3 Coast Guard Craft First of the Nation to Make Transit CUTTERS CONQUER ARCTIC PASSAGE Canadian Ship on 2d Voyage Spar Assists Freighter
By JOHN H. FENTON Special to The New York Times.U.S. Coast Guard
September 25, 1957, Wednesday
Page 1, 811 words
BOSTON, Sept. 24–Two Coast Guard cutters were saluted in Boston Harbor today at the end of a successful mission to find a practical Northwest Passage–a route around the top of the North American Continent. …
Here is the link to the NYT article.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0814F83B5A177B93C7AB1782D85F438585F9
I have a scanned image of the page and the article if you want to add to your collection of photos above.
Here’s a little challenge: Look carefully at the photo captioned “USS Hawkbill at the North Pole, Spring 1999. (US Navy Photo)”. Do you notice anything odd?
Saw the artifacts in the Groton musuem ten years ago. Hope Winston hasn’t got there yet. Still, lots of old submariners alive who remember.
Gary Pearse (10:35:31) Very interesting, hope this will be a next post at WUWT.
jorge..
you mean like the dive planes are in a vertical position? It’d make a lot of sense to do that before surfacing through ice.
Mike86
Mike86, sharp eyes, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I’m surprised nobody noticed this other feature before now.
The North Pole is NOT the center of the Arctic Ice Pack. The majority of the Arctic Ice Pack is on the Pacific side of the pack – typically as far south as 65° latitude. That side of the pack is protected from warm water currents by the Aleutian Islands as well as the Bering Straight.
The Atlantic approach to the Arctic Ice Pack, however, is exposed to the warm water currents of the Thermohaline Circulation. Extending north and east from the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic Drift reduces ice and provides a path toward the Pole as far north as latitude 85°. Because of its proximity to the warmest edge of the ice field, ice at the North Pole is frequently thin and occasionally open.
Sorry folks, this information doesn’t contradict evidence of retreating polar sea ice or Global Warming. Perhaps you should research your subjects more thoroughly.
Guardian on the attack. All skeptics and cynics are part of a conspiracy paid for by vested interests! That’s right, all us thousands upon thousands of normal independent people are part of a misinformation campaign against…global warming????
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/apr/27/climate-change-scientific-evidence
CO2 in the Arctic accelerating faster than ever! The ice caps will evaporate faster than Waxman’s career!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/27/arctic-carbon-dioxide-levels
storky,
Please get up to speed on this. No one is questioning global warming. The planet has been warming since the glaciers retreated 11,000 years ago at the end of the last great Ice Age.
And as you can see in this chart, global sea ice extent has broken above its long term average: click
re the Hawkbill, do you mean the position of the sun? If it were the first day of spring, it would be on the horizon, but this could be in late spring. Hard to tell the scale and exactly how high in the sky the Sun is.
David Ball, The data used from the 50’s and 60’s spans July-October. The seasonal change was taken into account. Effectively, they reduced the thickness of the old ice and today, it’s still 40-50% thinner!
You can’t disagree though, that actually looking at the data collected on these trips (beautiful photos btw) is much more illuminating than just the photos themselves!
Earth Day 1970. Then and Now.
Earth Day 1970 Quotes.
Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University
We have about five more years at the outside to do something.
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist
Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist
We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist
Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day
Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….
• Life Magazine, January 1970
At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, its only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director
By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there wont be any more crude oil. Youll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy, and hell say, `I am very sorry, there isnt any.
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson
The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
http://www.reason.com/news/printer/27702.html
Ahh, and who can forget the movie “Ice Station Zebra”
Jason Calley (11:31:48) : “re the Hawkbill, do you mean the position of the sun? If it were the first day of spring, it would be on the horizon, but this could be in late spring. Hard to tell the scale and exactly how high in the sky the Sun is.”
You’re getting closer, Jason Calley. And you don’t need to know the date.
Hi,
Anyone looking for old images of USS Skate in Arctic waters go to my post:
“50 Years Ago, USS Skate (SSN-578) Was the First Which Surfaced at North Pole”
http://p2o2.blogspot.com/2009/03/50-yeras-ago-uss-skate-ssn-578-was.html
Regards
I basically do not wish harm to any human being, but I cannot banish from my mind the concept of ultimate environmental justice: Al Gore being eaten by a polar bear.