From EurekAlert
International Greenland ice coring effort sets new drilling record in 2009
Ancient ice cores expected to help scientists assess risks of abrupt climate change in future
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  IMAGE: Atmospheric gases trapped in ancient ice recovered during the international North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling, or NEEM, project are expected to help scientists better assess the risks of abrupt climate…
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A new international research effort on the Greenland ice sheet with the University of Colorado at Boulder as the lead U.S. institution set a record for single-season deep ice-core drilling this summer, recovering more than a mile of ice core that is expected to help scientists better assess the risks of abrupt climate change in the future.
The project, known as the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling, or NEEM, is being undertaken by 14 nations and is led by the University of Copenhagen. The goal is to retrieve ice from the last interglacial episode known as the Eemian Period that ended about 120,000 years ago. The period was warmer than today, with less ice in Greenland and 15-foot higher sea levels than present — conditions similar to those Earth faces as it warms in the coming century and beyond, said CU-Boulder Professor Jim White, who is leading the U.S. research contingent.
While three previous Greenland ice cores drilled in the past 20 years covered the last ice age and the period of warming to the present, the deeper ice layers representing the warm Eemian and the period of transition to the ice age were compressed and folded, making them difficult to interpret, said White. Radar measurements taken through the ice sheet from above the NEEM site indicate the Eemian ice layers below are thicker, more intact and likely contain more accurate, specific information, he said.
“Every time we drill a new ice core, we learn a lot more about how Earth’s climate functions,” said White, “The Eemian period is the best analog we have for future warming on Earth.”
Annual ice layers formed over millennia in Greenland by compressed snow reveal information on past temperatures and precipitation levels and the contents of ancient atmospheres, said White, who directs CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. Ice cores exhumed during previous drilling efforts revealed abrupt temperature spikes of more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit in just 50 years in the Northern Hemisphere.
The NEEM team reached a depth of 5,767 feet in early August, where ice layers date to 38,500 years ago during a cold glacial period preceding the present interglacial, or warm period. The team hopes to hit bedrock at 8,350 feet at the end of next summer, reaching ice deposited during the warm Eemian period that lasted from roughly 130,000 to 120,000 years ago before the planet began to cool and ice up once again.
The NEEM project began in 2008 with the construction of a state-of-the-art facility, including a large dome, the drilling rig for extracting 3-inch-diameter ice cores, drilling trenches, laboratories and living quarters. The official drilling started in June of this year. The United States is leading the laboratory analysis of atmospheric gases trapped in bubbles within the NEEM ice cores, including greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane, said White.
The NEEM project is led by the University of Copenhagen’s Centre of Ice and Climate directed by Professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen. The United States and Denmark are the two leading partners in the project. The U.S. effort is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs.
“Evidence from ancient ice cores tell us that when greenhouse gases increase in the atmosphere, the climate warms,” said White. “And when the climate warms, ice sheets melt and sea levels rise. If we see comparable rises in sea level in the future like we have seen in the ice-core record, we can pretty much say good-bye to American coastal cities like Miami, Houston, Norfolk, New Orleans and Oakland.”
Increased warming on Earth also has a host of other potentially deleterious effects, including changes in ecosystems, wildlife extinctions, the growing spread of disease, potentially catastrophic heat waves and increases in severe weather events, according to scientists.
While ice cores pinpoint abrupt climate change events as Earth has passed in and out of glacial periods, the warming trend during the present interglacial period is caused primarily by human activities like fossil fuel burning, White said. “What makes this warming trend fundamentally different from past warming events is that this one is driven by human activity and involves human responsibility, morals and ethics.”
Other nations involved in the project include the United States, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Other CU-Boulder participants in the NEEM effort include INSTAAR postdoctoral researcher Vasilii Petrenko and Environmental Studies Program doctoral student Tyler Jones. Other U.S. institutions collaborating in the international NEEM effort include Oregon State University, Penn State, the University of California, San Diego and Dartmouth College.
For more information on the NEEM project, including images and video, visit http://www.neem.ku.dk.
Are we to accept the statement by White that “when the Co2 goes up the temperature goes up and let it go unchallenged?
“Evidence from ancient ice cores tell us that when greenhouse gases increase in the atmosphere, the climate warms,”
I assume that these past CO2 increases were caused by the exhausts of visiting alien spaceships, every 100,000 years or so. Perhaps these ice cores should be studied for traces of little green men !
What will they do if the data obtained disproves the AGW – CO2 link (again)?
This is what Prof. Zbigniew Jaworowski said about previous ice core studies:
“Improper manipulation of data, and arbitrary rejection of readings that do not fit the pre-conceived idea on man-made global warming is common in many glaciological studies of greenhouse gases. In peer reviewed publications I exposed this misuse of science [3, 9]. Unfortunately, such misuse is not limited to individual publications, but also appears in documents of national and international organizations.”
(Source: http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/)
Why should the new study be any different? Why waste money on the new study at all? We already know what the findings will be. We already know the data presented will fit the pre-conceived findings. Prof. Jaworski shows how they do it.
Jaworski’s work has made me very skeptical of ice core studies. I encourage WUWT readers to review his work, starting with the link above. Does anyone know how ice core researchers have responded to Jaworski’s criticisms? He seems to have ripped their methodology to shreds, but I am open to their counter-arguments.
I think we all just can’t imagine to be so morally debased as to arrive to conclusions before research has been actually made. Is it so big the fear or the money?
Like Merlin said in the 1980 John Boorman film Excalibur, “It is the doom of Men than they forget.”
The “problem” espoused by Prof White is one which would happen with or without fossil-fuel burning. As shorelines have deepened over the centuries, we kept building further and further out. It is our ultimate lack of hindsight and foresight that we didn’t expect the seas to return. If the good professor expected “sea levels” to remain static, he’s simply not very bright.
TonyB (12:39:23)
It doesn’t appear to be complicated at all. Looking at
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/vostok/co2.txt
the ice that is 4050 years old contains CO2 gas that is an average of 1700 years old. Looking further down, ice that is 61790 years old contains CO2 that is about 4000 years younger.
The simplest explanation is that CO2 diffuses through the ice for 1000’s of years until finally frozen into place. To back up the theory, at 160k years the CO2 is still about 4k years younger than the ice. This doesn’t address the problems of measurement once the cores have been extracted.
Chad Woodburn (12:46:23) :
Professor Jim White is quoted in this article as saying, “If we see comparable rises in sea level in the future like we have seen in the ice-core record, we can pretty much say good-bye to American coastal cities … .”
Such a scary scenario is something mankind has surely never faced before. Too bad no one has ever come up with an idea of putting some kind of embankment of dirt and rocks and other materials along the coastline to keep out the sea. I know it is a far-fetched idea, but I propose making such an embankment and calling it a “Dirt Is Keeping Everything-dry” or “DIKE” for short.
—————————————–
Surely our great leaders have though of this and 100% of Cap and Trade money will go into an escrow account to pay for this type of mitigation ?? I mean, where else would it go ??
A scientific matter involves morals and ethics???
No, a religion does.
1. If Greenland was ice free during that period how come ice exists for that period?
2. Where did he get the 15 feet higher sea levels from when there is no proxy indicating it? If they are gauging this from computer models then it is wrong. Land formations and coastlines were different back then, nobody knows how different and certainly no computer model has even estimated data. Water usage by lifeforms was also very different.
When they hit bedrock, won’t that be a period when there was no ice on Greenland? I wonder what melted/prevented ice buildup before the ice started to accumulate? — John M Reynolds
It’s sad to see a professor doing this.
He should report what they have actually found – instead of speculating about stuff that may or may not be true but is not supported either way by this research.
I would be fascinated to hear more about their findings and their methodology. How do they measure the gases ? How do they know if the gases are the same as they were all that time ago ? How do they date a layer ? How do they decide the air temperature in that region in the past ? What are their error bars like ?
Instead we have to listen to some boilerplate stuff cut’n’pasted from the Book of Gore.
It’s also sad that they have already reached their conclusion before they finished the work. Maybe they could just abort the mission if they have already found enough evidence. This would save money and reduce their own carbon emissions as well.
Yep, I smell rats, a lot of rats.
I believe they said less Greenland ice, not ice-free.
You can see ancient shorelines in the geologic record pretty clearly. When an ancient harbor settlement is now 200 feet from the shore, you know something has changed. And in other places those types of settlements are underwater. So it’s a crap shoot either way.
“While ice cores pinpoint abrupt climate change events as Earth has passed in and out of glacial periods, the warming trend during the present interglacial period is caused primarily by human activities like fossil fuel burning, White said. “What makes this warming trend fundamentally different from past warming events is that this one is driven by human activity and involves human responsibility, morals and ethics.”
The current interglacial period, the Holocene, is about 10,000 years old. According to Vostok ice core data about 8 degrees C of the warming occurred occurred between 17,000 years ago and 10,000 years ago. Certainly mankind could not have had any significant effect that long ago. The temperature rise which the IPCC blames on man has occurred during the last 100 years and is only 0.7 C. So how is it that “the warming trend during the present interglacial period is caused primarily by human activities”? I think that statement is very misleading, or am I missing something?
data source from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok-ice-core-petit.png
Jack Green
According to Douglas Adams the answer to the ultimate question is 42. But what is the question? Thats what we really need to know.
This is OT (and bad news): the Mount Wilson observatory is at risk from the wildfires raging in SoCal:
http://www.mtwilson.edu/fire.php
Here’s a link to the tower cam at the observatory. Lots of smoke in the air:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~obs/images/towercam.jpg
OK , This is probably a stupid question , but how do we know that co2 contained in precipitation is an accurate measure of atmospheric co2 ? I haven’t seen this discussed anywhere .
measure should read measurement , sorry .
“”” eugene r wynsen md (13:30:49) :
Are we to accept the statement by White that “when the Co2 goes up the temperature goes up and let it go unchallenged? “””
Well it’s true, so we should accept that.
It’s also true that when it is hot and humid at night there are high clouds in the sky.
The trick is to see which is the cause and which is the effect.
If you are a climatologist, the high clouds cause the humid warming at night, and the higher the clouds, the more warming there is. The more CO2 there is the more warming there is.
One day we’ll get it sorted out; and people will discover that the warming produces the CO2 increase, and it also causes the high clouds at night; not the other way round.
Does it seem silly to you that the higher and colder and less dense the clouds get, with a diminishing amount of water vapor (with height); the more surface warming and humidity you get.
Next time you wake up at night and the temperature has risen since sunset, from high clouds; please give me a call and wake me up so I can experience that phenomenon.
Every time I look it cools down after sunset; clouds or no clouds.
George
“When they hit bedrock, won’t that be a period when there was no ice on Greenland?”
No. Ice melts at the earth/ice interface due to geothermal heat. While the surface temperature might be quite cold, it is some 6000-7000 feet more or less from the base of the ice to the surface over most locations on the interior of Greenland.
White – “What makes this warming trend fundamentally different from past warming events is that this one is driven by human activity and involves human responsibility, morals and ethics.”
Again a crucial scientific project has a head who is an activist. Scientific objectivity is incompatible with prejudice and prejudgement.
Uncover the evidence Prof White and present it honestly, freely and impartially and spare us your moralistic, opinionated sermon on the present warming trend, which the evidence indicates is not “fundamentally different” from the past.
Just to agree with others above that when we hear an alleged scientist start to presuppose the existence and significance of what he is also dedicated to “proving” via his “science”, it can’t be a good thing for the conduct of actual science – a fact which real scientists already recognize to be a very serious impediment to their conduct of scientific inquiry right from its very start. And even hyping a particular expectation in order to acquire funding would itself also seem to imply a built-in bias which would only continue throughout the work.
But, hey, “we all have agendas”, and ~ “it’s for the protection of Nature”, so I guess it’s ethically ok!
Let’s start with the present sea level.
During this interglacial, the sea level has been higher than now for most of the past 6,000 years. The average sea level during this period is around a meter higher than now with maximums hitting slightly higher than three meters higher than now. Not unlike the Eemian Interglacial, the early part of this interglacial was warmer than the later part. The Eemian had sea levels reaching nearly five meters higher than now.
The report said the Eemian lasted from about 130k to 120kybp. I believe the warm part of the Eemian (with sea levels higher than now) persisted to around 105kybp.
So, if the Eemian reached five meters higher than now naturally and the Holocene Interglacial reached three meters higher than now, why are we so enamored and fear full of a 0.7 meter rise in sea level from now?
We actually have all the data from the Eem-time from the DYE 3 drilling… do they try to confirm themself or what?
It was 5-6 degrees warmer in Grenland on that time a the Ice cap was intact far away South of DYE 3 (according to the drilling data)….but we don’t no much about the edge melting.
KInd regards
Svend