In the “Steig et al – falsified” thread, since we have been discussing geothermal activity along the Antarctic peninsula, I thought I’d pass along these images that show other parts of the planet where geothermal heat seems capable of melting ice and making it all the way to the surface. Lake Baikal is quite deep, over 5000′ feet in places, so this demonstrates that even in deep water, the melting of ice from that geothermal heat is a real possibility. Hat tip to WUWT commenter “Mark” – Anthony
By Betsy Mason, Wired News
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station noticed two mysterious dark circles in the ice of Russia’s Lake Baikal in April. Though the cause is more likely aqueous than alien, some aspects of the odd blemishes defy explanation.
The two circles are the focal points for ice break-up and may be caused by upwelling of warmer water in the lake. The dark color of the circles is due to thinning of the ice, which usually hangs around into June.
Upwelling wouldn’t be strange in some relatively shallow areas of the lake where hydrothermal activity has been detected, such as where the circle near the center of the lake (pictured below) is located.
Circles have been seen in that area before in 1985 and 1994, though they weren’t nearly as pronounced. But the location of the circle near the southern tip of the lake (pictured above) where water is relatively deep and cold is puzzling.
The lake itself is an oddity. It is the largest by volume and the deepest (5370 feet at its deepest point), as well as one of the oldest at around 25 million years. The photo above was taken by an astronaut from the ISS.
The photo below was taken by NASA’s MODIS satellite imager.
Facinating! This kind of stuff is why I am a frequent visitor of this.
klausb (17:48:39) :For more on latest quakes, here:
http://www.iris.edu/seismon/last30days_Central_Asia.html
Nice. Like the long interval too. Unfortunately, while the presentation is a wonderful global map, the duration from the USGS is only 1 week:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/
Does show the 7.x in Honduras right now (being a live chart, it will change day to day…)
Definitely a bit of action around the ring of fire…
And a whole lot a shaken going on in California
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsus/
novoburgo (05:45:51) :
Ah, thank you, one thing I did not think to check!
Here’s a patchwork theory, built on several people’s links and comments above.
Wiki maps show the rings lie over two very deep stretches of lake.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Karte_baikal2.png
In both cases, it’s over a mile from the surface to the top layers of sediment, which form piles an additional four miles down to the fault zones at the “bottom”. In the case of the southern ring, there is an active volcano. (I’ve lost the link to this, but no matter). Earthquakes from these faults which underlie the lake, regularly jar the area, and, along with certain gasses measured nearby prove that active volcanism is under way at the lakes’ “floor”.
But even if there were columns of warm water rising from these sources, wouldn’t they merely melt holes, rather than doughnut shapes, in the ice?
As Ellie notes above, major rivers empty into the lake near both rings – the Irkutsk at the south end, the Bargusin near the northern ring.
Wiki points out that despite its extreme depth, Baikal’s waters are extremely well-mixed. Lakes Tanganyika and Black Sea, by contrast have formed stratifications of temps. This vertical mixing could be the result of inflowing cold water from snow run-off mixing with upwelling from thermal causes.
As Ellie’s postings note, ring formations are not uncommonly observed in rivers where back-eddies are formed. Partly due to contours of the river’s bottom, these currents can move counter to the river’s flow. But was anyone else curious about the mist hovering over the exposed water in her video link?
http://s0006.photobucket.com/albums/0006/pbhomepage/?action=view¤t=StrangeIceCircle.flv
By themselves, currents of ice water wouldn’t cut through thick layers of river or lake ice. However, given a steady flow of warm water from, say, hot springs (under the river), or a column of hot water welling up from beneath Lake Bikal, an underwater vortex might be formed with “thermal scouring” effects. I picture something like an inverted tornado, which might well have the ability to thin the ice from beneath.
This may yet prove to be only part of the story, as others have pointed out chemical and salinity issues in the lake, a paper mill which pumped high levels of chlorine into the lake. Perhaps these have ability to chemically affect the freezing point of the ice, or its absorption of solar through the ice.
My 2 cents.
Bill P see my comment above. A hydro-electric dam at Irkutsk uses the water emptying from Baikal.
novoburgo. Thanks. I missed your earlier comment. Also, I called it the Irkursk River. The river is the Angara. It flows out of Baikal, through Irkursk.
Bill P:
I checked out the Wikipedia site on Lake Baikal, since scientific studies show that the lake is permanently stratified below 250-300m. Your quote is accurate but the Wikipedia site is wrong. First it is correct that Lake Baikal is well oxygenaged to the bottom. However, this is due to the sinking of cold water to great depths, not due to complete mixing. This mechanism of replenishing the O2 is described in the following paper. O2 depletion is very slow due to the extreme depth, cold water and very low productivity of the lake.
Deep Ventilation of Lake Baikal Waters Due to Spring Thermal Bars
M. N. Shimaraev, N. G. Granin and A. A. Zhdanov
Limnology and Oceanography, Vol. 38, No. 5 (Jul., 1993), pp. 1068-1072
Published by: American Society of Limnology and Oceanography
Jupiter’s moon Europa is a large scale example of this phenomenon.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/europa.jpg
Hi guys,
Thought I’d crosspost from RealClimate as I have a feeling my comments will be “[Edited]” or banned. My comments there are actually inline with the dicussion here concerning the Steig et al paper.
My comments there can be found on Steig’s rebuttal article concerning RyanO’s conclusions posted here.
RC thread:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/06/on-overfitting/
My comments:
“Doc_Navy Says:
1 June 2009 at 11:54 AM
Previewed comment:
Eric…
1. I think that the two Jeff’s and RyanO have done an excellent job, Maybe you guys aught to try working together instead of tossing professional slurs at your critics.
2. That said, I find this quote from your article very interesting:
“The irony here is that our study was largely focused on regional climate change that may well be largely due to natural variability, as we clearly state in the paper. This seems to have escaped much of the blogosphere, however.”
Umm, MAYBE you might want to have a talk with your Co-Author Dr. Mann, considering he jumped the shark with a press release right after the Nature publication. Now as far as I know he didn’t come right out and SAY the warming was anthropogenic in nature, but if you look at his quotes… that’s what is implied.
Then of course there’s the ubiquitous Al Gore, who ran screaming to Congress in April waving your paper in everyone’s face as proof positive that Mankind was absolutely wrecking the planet.
Finally, I guess I’m not so sure why you (and Gavin) seem so shocked that there’s as much looking into the results of your paper as there has been. Bro, You pulled non-existant data out of THIN AIR, then used it to turn 40 YEARS of actual HARD data showing cooling, upside down. And you used Dr MANN’S methods to do it. C’mon… think for a sec. What if it was say… R Pielke Sr. who suddenly did the same thing.. only in reverse and on the Northern Hemisphere??? You trying to tell me that Mann, Schmidt, Schneider, and yourself wouldn’t be ALL OVER HIM, crawling up every computation, looking for any mistake (no matter how innocent), and holding anything found up to the world to show how wrong he was??
Please.
Doc”
Crosspost from RC:
“Doc_Navy Says:
1 June 2009 at 12:30 PM
Previewed comment:
PS.
Your “Dummies guide to the Hockey Stick Controversy” needs updating.
Doc”
Doc_Navy (10:14:03) – So Al Gore waved a paper in circles and made rings in Lake Baikal?
@AMoose- Haha, well if you ask me… that’s about the same scientific technique “The Team” did to make the LIA and MWP disappear with their Hockey stick, and Steig & Co. did to pixie dust 40 years of cooling on the Antarctic Continent into 50 years of warming.
Actually, Mr. Gore is a bigger hand waver than just about anyone I’ve seen (Except maybe Dr. Hansen).
*Frantically waves hands*
/Al Gore Impression on
“Look over here! Look over here! I invented the internet. The World is coming to an end and it’s YOUR fault! Buy my carbon offsets and free yourself from guilt over wrecking the Earth!!! Vote for me..errr… The World is coming to an END!!”
Doc
Other possibilites:
1. Commie plot redux — the cracks in the ice look suspiciously like Lenin riding a horse.
2. Alien mothership landing site.
They remind me of impact craters on Europa. Except for their perennial nature, and assumed volcanic provenance, makes one wonder about Europa. ..
I can’t believe that the Neutrino Telescope has not yet been mentioned?
http://nuastro-zeuthen.desy.de/e13/e45/index_eng.html
Quote:
The underwater neutrino telescope NT-200 is located in the Siberian lake Baikal at a depth of approximately 1 km. Deployment and maintenance of the Baikal detector is carried out during the winter months, when the lake is covered with a thick ice sheet. From the ice surface, the optical sensors can easily be lowered into the water underneath. Once deployed, the optical sensors take data over the whole year and the data taken are permanently transmitted to the shore over electrical cables.
The BAIKAL experiment played a pioneering role in neutrino astronomy: During spring 1993, scientists from Russian institutes and from DESY were the first to install an underwater telescope which took data not only for some hours, but for a whole year. At that time, the detector comprised only three strings carrying 36 optical sensors in total. Since 1998 the Baikal collaboration takes data with the NT-200 telescope which consists of 192 optical sensors deployed on eight strings.
OK, they say it is methane:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090601/sc_livescience/mysteryofgianticecirclesresolved
So yes, geothermal could do it too.
But experts say they can explain the mystery, and it’s not aliens – methane gas rising from the lake floor represents the likely culprit.
Methane emissions can create a rising mass of warm water that begins swirling in a circular pattern because of the Coriolis force, or the phenomenon caused by the Earth’s rotation that also helps create cyclones.
“Once the water mass reaches the underside of the ice on the surface of the lake, the warm water melts the ice in a ring shape,” said Marianne Moore, a marine ecologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts who has spent much time studying Lake Baikal with Russian researchers. The lake is the largest (by volume) and deepest fresh water lake on Earth.
…..
Tectonic activity deep in the Earth may be the trigger for such methane gas release, according to the Russian government.
+ the usual alarmist blurb.
An excellent website.
I have never seen any reference to heat “escaping” from the earth’s magma and core.
Can this be estimated?
Is it constant?
Could this be adding or subtracting to the earth total heat?
And thus could it be part of the mechanisn for global warming / cooling?
I got home from Lake Baikal last summer, checked the USGS earthquake hazard maps and discovered there had been a magnitude 4 quake the last night we were on the lake cruise. It was in the general vecinity of the southern circle. Also, that is not far from the outlet of the lake – the Angara River. That would help explain break-up of the ice. The northern circle is close to the deepest point in the lake. The lake occupies a rift valley that extends on to a large lake in Mongolia – the whole area is on one of the micro-plates and is moving east. (bedrock is about 20,000 feet down, depth given is to the sediments) The Angara Plate – not sure they have the southern edge figured out. And the latest issue of SCIENCE (June 12) has an article about Baikal – they’ve found methane hydrates there – something previously found only in the oceans. This is an exceedingly interesting and beautiful area.