WUWT commenter Ray tips us to a new video from NASA “The Tour of the Cryosphere 2009”. With all the interest in sea ice right now, it seems like a good item to review.
I found one thing about it really interesting though, the zoom in of the Larsen B ice shelf saying: “After twelve thousand years, the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed in just five weeks.”. While they didn’t say directly that it was attributable to “global warming”, many others have said so. Watch how that melt pool continues through the animation of sea ice growth as refreeze occurs. That’s a hint. There’s quite a number of volcanic peaks in the area, as listed here. Here’s a ground pix from the scene. and some BAS research that found some unexpected things. More on that another time.
From NASA News
Back in 2002, NASA created a film using satellite data that took viewers on a tour of Earth’s frozen regions. This year, NASA visualizers are taking viewers on a return trip to see how things have changed over the years.
“The Tour of the Cryosphere 2009” combines satellite imagery and state-of-the-art computer animation software to create a fact-filled and visually stunning tour that shows viewers the icy reaches of Antarctica, the glacier-pocked regions along the Andes Mountains, the winter snows of the American West, the drifting expanse of polar sea ice, and the shrinking Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland.
However, viewers who saw the original will notice differences in the new version, also created by the Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The new “Tour of the Cryosphere” video can be seen and downloaded from the Scientific Visualization Studio’s Web site.
“What we did was incorporate more recent data and kept all scenes from the original that were dramatic and interesting,” said film director and editor Horace Mitchell, who began updating the animation seven months ago, with help from visualizers Alex Kekesi and Cindy Starr. “The biggest change is that the entire film is in high definition.”
Another significant difference is evident as soon as the 5-minute animation opens. At the request of Earth scientists, who thought the film could be improved by a more realistic rendering of Antarctica, the team replaced the original imagery provided by Canada’s RADARSAT with the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA). Created from more than 1,000 high-resolution Landsat 7 scenes, the LIMA dataset seamlessly shows the entire continent in unprecedented and realistic detail.
Watch the YouTube Video:
HiDef › View video (30 Mb mov)
As the updated film takes viewers northward from Antarctica, the film treats viewers to the precise locations of glaciers scattered along the Andes Mountains in South America. The locations literally pop as the film continues its grand tour toward the planet’s northern climes.
After a quick tour of snowfall in the American West and its impact on vegetation in 2002 and 2003, the film moves across Canada and Alaska to show more recent satellite data of annual snow and ice overlaying these regions. From there, viewers travel to Earth’s North Pole where they see the monthly average concentration of Arctic sea ice in 2009.
To help drive home the point that minimum sea ice levels have declined dramatically since 1979, the SVS team inserted a chart that tracks the levels of minimum ice cover, which typically occurs in September.
The animation then moves from Arctic sea ice to Greenland. More recent data now are used to show changes in the Jakobshavn glacier, which receded only slightly from 1942 to 2001. Beginning in 2002, the rate of ice loss jumped dramatically. The film shows the continued rates of recession over the past four years.
The animation shows the world in a single “shot” — uninterrupted by cuts or scene changes, a technique that conveys the interconnectedness of the cryosphere and the reason scientists gather satellite data to monitor changes in the first place.
The film gives anyone who watches it a wealth of data collected from satellite observations, showing in detail the impact that recent changes are making on the planet, he said.
“We’re trying to tell NASA’s story with Hollywood’s tools,” Mitchell said.
==================================
Here is the transcript from NASA:
“A Tour of the Cryosphere 2009” Transcript
Though cold and often remote, the icy reaches of the Arctic, Antarctic, and other frozen
places affect the lives of everyone on Earth.
We start our tour in Antarctica. Where they meet the sea, mountains of ice crack and
crumble. The resulting icebergs can float for years. Ice shelves surround half the
continent. They slow the relentless march of ice streams and glaciers like dams hold
back rivers. But the region is changing. As temperatures increase, we see a growing
number of melt ponds. As this heavy melt water forces its way into cracks, ice shelves
weaken and can ultimately collapse. After twelve thousand years, the Larsen B ice
shelf collapsed in just five weeks.
Offshore, sea ice forms when the surface of the ocean freezes, pushing salt out of the
ice. The cold salty surface water starts to sink, pumping deeper water out of the way,
powering global ocean circulation. These currents influence climate worldwide.
Most ice exists in the cold polar regions, but we see glaciers like these in the Andes all
over the world. Most are shrinking.
Here in North America, millions of people experience the cryosphere every year.
Eastward moving storms deposit snow like thick paint brushes. Mountain snow packs
store water. Snow melt provides three-quarters of the water resources used in the
American west. Substantial winter snows produced a green Colorado in 2003, but
dryer conditions the previous year limited vegetation growth and increased the risk of
fires.
In the Rocky Mountains, there are patches of frozen ground called permafrost that
never thaw. These regions are unusual in the mid-latitudes. But farther north,
permafrost is more widespread and continuous, covering nearly a fifth of the land
surface in the Northern Hemisphere.
Sea ice varies from season to season and from year to year. Data show that Arctic sea
ice has shrunk dramatically in the last few decades. The effects could be profound.
As polar ice decreases, more open water could promote greater heating. More heating
could lead to faster melting, reinforcing the cycle. If this trend continues, the Arctic
Ocean could be ice-free in the summer by the end of the century.
These changes in ice cover are not limited to oceans. Greenland’s ice sheet contains
nearly ten percent of the Earth’s glacial ice. Glaciers in western Greenland produce
most of the icebergs in the North Atlantic. After decades of stability, Greenland’s
Jakobshavn ice stream, one of the fastest flowing glaciers in the world, has changed
dramatically. The ice has thinned, and the front retreated significantly. Between 1997
and 2003, the glacier’s flow rate nearly doubled to five feet an hour.
These are just some of the cryospheric processes that NASA satellites observe from
space. Continued observation provides a critical global perspective, as our home
planet continues to change – day to day, year to year, and further into the future.
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Tom P,
You are correct, I was mistaken thinking for some reason that Popular Technology was a magazine. Maybe I was thinking of Popular Mechanics — another “right wing” source of good information.
But you’ll have to do a lot more convincing to show that out of the 160,000 glaciers on Earth, the AGW believers aren’t cherry-picking only those that are receding.
For a part of the past century, the planet’s temperature rose a fraction of a degree C. It has since largely retraced its rise and isn’t much different now than it was thirty years ago. That fraction of a degree is not going to cause the planet’s glaciers to all start melting; most of them are already well below freezing. If the world’s glaciers were all melting it would be acknowledged by skeptical scientists [the only real scientists] everywhere.
I’ll have to accept your citation [not that I doubt it], having canceled my 20+ year subscription to Science a decade ago when they started to sound like Scientific American.
I posted 41 sources on glacier growth. So that’s one down, and forty articles to go. If you can credibly contradict even half of those reports, I’ll accept that the world’s glaciers are retreating.
Otherwise, stories about glaciers disappearing is simply cherry-picked AGW spin, and it adds no more to the debate than the bogus claims of unusual sea level rise, the disappearing ozone hole, the Maldives and Vanuatu drowning from global warming, disappearing global sea ice, and all the rest of the alarmist scare stories that never pan out.
Nobody in thier right minds would pick on Mt. Shasta’s glaciers. I-5 runs right by it, and as such remains totally in the public view.
But, it must be something else, like increased rainfall.
There’s a really bad problem for AGW there, as they are constnatly screaming drought. You cannot have the glaciers growing on Mt. Shasta due to increased precipitation when the largest reservior in California is heralded as primarily rainfall watershed, yet at the same instant have a drought in that rain watershed.
The glaciers on Mt. Shasta are admitted to be growing in a declared California drought, Mt. Shasta watershed included, both the lake and the mountain are plainly visible from a major Interstate Highway, and it is a huge embarassment for AGW.
Smokey,
Do you now have doubts about the very data you first brought to our attention? Oerlman collated all the historical glacier records available, some 167 datasets. There was no cherry picking – some of the glaciers are indeed growing:
“Records of glacier length were compiled from various sources, building on a data set from an earlier study (14). It was possible to extend the set of 48 records to a set of 169 records from glaciers found at widely differing latitudes and elevations. The core of the data set comes from the files of the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Z” rich (15). Records were then included from glaciers in Patagonia (16), southern Greenland (17), Iceland (18), and Jan Mayen (19). Additional information was taken from the Satellite Image Atlas of Glaciers of the World (20) and from reports of the Swiss Academy of Sciences (21). The character of the records differs widely (Fig. 1). Some start in 1600 and have typically 10 data points until 1900 and more afterward. Other records start around 1900 but have annual resolution throughout. The longest record is that of the Untere Grindelwaldgletscher, which starts in 1534 (22).”
In comparison you now want to put against Oerlman’s full historical dataset a mixture of news reports and websites which, although I have no reason to doubt their individual accuracy, represent just a snapshot of what is indeed cherry-picked data from a fraction of the glaciers that are currently growing.
You don’t need to take my word for it – just read the (repeated) link you give to the same Fox News article:
“MOUNT SHASTA, Calif. — Global warming is shrinking glaciers all over the world, but the seven tongues of ice creeping down Mount Shasta’s flanks are a rare exception: They are the only long-established glaciers in the lower 48 states that are growing.”
“When people look at glaciers around the world, the majority of them are shrinking,” said Slawek Tulaczyk, an assistant professor of earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led a team studying Shasta’s glaciers. “These glaciers seem to be benefiting from the warming ocean.”
Check out Nova tonight. They are investigating a super volcano in N. Greenland. Hmmmm……..less than 1000 miles from the N. Pole.
Smokey (19:32:57) :
Smokey, here is the Oerlemans paper:
http://www.climate-skeptic.com/files/oerlemans_glacier_length.pdf
Note the use of first order ordinary differential equations with tunable constants. Just guess c and tau and you’re in business.
Also note the magnitude of the uncertainty and how the uncertainty was obtained.
However, I find little evidence here that…
“The global temperature profile derived from the recession of the glaciers is in very good agreement with the instrumental record.”
Maybe there are other papers.
I must, however, applaud Dr. Oerlemans for clearly documenting what equations he’s using, unlike some notorious NASA AOGCM’s which are currently being run on brand new, taxpayer-funded multiprocessing computers…
I am nowhere near to being a scientist. I am in complete awe of most of you here who can remember all of the math and understand all of the formulas. I go by observations that my grandfather taught me as far as what to look for in plants and animals and he was the one to tell me that looking at the rocks was the way to know what happened in the past.
I wish I could remember the documentary, it was several years ago, either History, Discovery or A&E, but it was about some glacier near the tip of South America that had broken off and it was captured on camera.
I distinctly remember seeing black, and I mean BLACK like charcoal, way deep inside that ice as it fell off into the water. That’s when I started looking for volcanoes and boy I am learning a lot.
But I also know that it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that when you heat up an ice cube on a slightly warm stove burner…it puddles really quite efficiently.
I would like to see a comparison of ice thickness between last year and this year. I am thinking there will be an impressive change in the Arctic Basin due to compaction from wind driven ice jamming against Canadian coastlines. Remember the sliver of thick ice from last year? Tis more than a sliver now. Multi-year ice appears to develop from two sources:
1. relatively stationary ice that adds layers every winter due to low summer melt
2. jammed and jumbled baby ice building up against coastal areas in a single year due to wind changes that blows ice into and around the Arctic basin instead of out Fram Strait.
At least they didn’t mention Mount Kilimanjaro, and they said that the arctic may be ice free by the end of the century, not 4 years as I think Al Gore said.
Smokey,
You might want to reconsider your views on Popular Mechanics. Their recent report on Climate Change Solutions: Live From World Science Fair described “what progress has been made toward thwarting global warming”, hardly a position you might identify with.
First it was Scientific American, then Science, Fox News and now even Popular Mechanics that are not really telling it how you would like it to be told. Probably best to avoid all four if you want your beliefs to remain unchallenged.
Hope this works. This is not a comparison of thickness. It is a comparison of ice concentration. But an idea of ice thickness differences can be imagined.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=09&fd=07&fy=2008&sm=09&sd=07&sy=2009
It will be interesting when buoys are back in anchored positions to measure ice thickness.
“RW (16:44:07) :”
Ouestion for you. Have you been to Hot Water Beach in New Zeland? Ok, New Zealand isn’t under ice, but the principal is the same. Water is heated by geothermal activity and is forced, hot, to the surface. In fact it is so hot you cannot enter it unless you also allow cold sea water to mix with it.
Frank K.
“However, I find little evidence here that…
“The global temperature profile derived from the recession of the glaciers is in very good agreement with the instrumental record.””
Did you look at a comparison? Here is an overlay of Oerlemans’ glacier-derived temperature (thick red line) and the HadCRUT instrumental record:
http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/1994/glaciervsinstrumental.png
I’d say that was at the least very good agreement, justifying the basis of each of these two independent datasets.
Literally? They actually blew up real glaciers? So that’s where NASA’s budget has been going!
Anthony = windsheild, RW= bug, …… 8^]
Tom P,
“They are the only long-established glaciers in the lower 48 states that are growing.”
“When people look at glaciers around the world, the majority of them are shrinking,”
Nothing like unsupported verbiage huh??
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
There are NO (none, nada, zip) comprehensive studies of glaciers worldwide. They are as sloppily covered as the land surface temperature. There are now both Kilimanjaro and Tibetan glaciers which have had detailed studies leading to the conclusion that AGW/Warming is NOT affecting their status and that precipitation is the primary driver. Other glaciers are in the process of being declared “AGW Free Zones!!” Most of the Greenland galloping glaciers have slowed back down and have been declared to be non-exceptional by glacier experts.
Tom P (20:06:11),
I always have doubts… unlike True AGW Believers.
So let’s cut to the chase, shall we?
Is it your contention that the receding glaciers identified are receding due specifically to global warming? Caused by carbon dioxide??
If so, say it.
In fact, it is precipitation — or lack of precipitation — at higher altitudes that causes glaciers to advance or retreat. In other words, weather. Any meteorologist can inform you about that.
So, to get right down to it: are you saying that an increase in CO2 is the cause of glaciers retreating? “Yes” or “No” will do.
You know…I’m one of those types that loves to look at maps. I’m something of a collector. When I read an article that says that something was found “near” a particular spot I become highly dissatisfied at the lack of an exact location.
When I followed the links to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory so that I could read the expedition reports I found exact coordinates for each entry….except for the entry regarding the discovery of the volcano.
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news/reports/2004/CORC04/05_10_04.htm
I want coordinates for this volcano.
*sigh* More digging…
RBateman,
from a lifetime California resident, we are NOT in a DROUGHT!! We ARE using more water than we have available.
Rainfall below average is not exactly the definition of a drought!!!!
We DO need to decide whether we are going to build desalination or recycled sewage plants, continuously ration water, limit growth drastically, or all of the above.
Thanks Anthony for putting that video/story up.
It’s funny how they skipped all those glaciers along the Ring of Fire that sit on top of volcanoes… those could go anytime due only to increased volcanic activity or as we have seen with Kilimanjaro due to a reduced evaporation from forests around because of increased human occupation and deforestation.
When they are only down to only two cases where glaciers or ice shelves melted or broke down (probably from natural processes), they should admit they are wrong about the whole CO2=AGW thing… give it up Al.
“We’re trying to tell NASA’s story with Hollywood’s tools,”
Shouldn’t it be instead: We’re trying to tell Hollywood’s stories with NASA’s tools?
Regarding glacial retreat, see section 2.2 (pages 28-32), “Glaciers,” of Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu’s paper, “Two Natural Components of Recent Climate Change,” here (as a 50-Mb PDF):
http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/little_ice_age.php
He writes, on p. 28: ” Figures 9a-9f show records of glaciers in Alaska, New Zealand, the European Alps, and the Himalayas, respectively, which have been receding from the time of the earliest records, about 1800. … It is clear that the retreat is not a phenomenon that began only in recent years, or after CO2 emission increase in1946.”
And on page 32: ” Altogether, long-term glacier data presented here show that glaciers advanced from about 1400 and began to retreat after 1800 (cf. Akasofu, 2008). These facts confirm that the Earth experienced the LIA.”
“MOUNT SHASTA, Calif. — Global warming is shrinking glaciers all over the world, but the seven tongues of ice creeping down Mount Shasta’s flanks are a rare exception: They are the only long-established glaciers in the lower 48 states that are growing.”
“When people look at glaciers around the world, the majority of them are shrinking,” said Slawek Tulaczyk, an assistant professor of earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led a team studying Shasta’s glaciers. “These glaciers seem to be benefiting from the warming ocean.”
And the rain watershed appears to be in the grips of low-precipitation patterns, with Mt. Shasta towering over it, in mocking silence as it’s glaciers grow in total defiance of computer models.
You cannot have it both ways.
The same moisture stream hits both the watershed and the volcano, or they miss it. There is no magical moisture stream designed for the volcano only.
Go ahead, take a drive on I-5 up there when a storm hits. It can rain so hard you can’t see where you are going. Special, eh?
rbateman (20:06:50) :
Check out Nova tonight. They are investigating a super volcano in N. Greenland. Hmmmm……..less than 1000 miles from the N. Pole.
But the N. Pole is headed to Siberia at 40 km / year average or so… Though some days it can jump around 80 km wandering round its present ‘location’.
So, any more “stable” landmark for the volcano? Name? Link?
rbateman (20:06:50) :
Check out Nova tonight. They are investigating a super volcano in N. Greenland. Hmmmm……..less than 1000 miles from the N. Pole.
But the N. Pole is headed to Siberia at 40 km / year average or so… Though some days it can jump around 80 km wandering round its present ‘location’:
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/EarthMagneticField.htm
So, any more “stable” landmark for the volcano? Name? Link?