From the Australian: SEA water under an East Antarctic ice shelf showed no sign of higher temperatures despite fears of a thaw linked to global warming that could bring higher world ocean levels, first tests showed yesterday.
Sensors lowered through three holes drilled in the Fimbul Ice Shelf showed the sea water is still around freezing and not at higher temperatures widely blamed for the break-up of 10 shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula, the most northerly part of the frozen continent in West Antarctica.
“The water under the ice shelf is very close to the freezing point,” Ole Anders Noest of the Norwegian Polar Institute wrote after drilling through the Fimbul, which is between 250m and 400m thick.
“This situation seems to be stable, suggesting that the melting under the ice shelf does not increase,” he wrote of the first drilling cores.
The findings, a rare bit of good news after worrying signs in recent years of polar warming, adds a small bit to a puzzle about how Antarctica is responding to climate change, blamed largely on human use of fossil fuels.
Antarctica holds enough water to raise world sea levels by 57m if it ever all melted, so even tiny changes are a risk for low-lying coasts or cities from Beijing to New York.
The Institute said the water under the Fimbul was about -2.05C. Salty water freezes at a slightly lower temperature than fresh water.
And it was slightly icier than estimates in a regional model for Antarctica, head of the Norwegian Polar Institute’s Center for Ice, Climate and Ecosystems, Nalan Koc, said.
“The important thing is that we are now in a position to monitor the water beneath the ice shelf.
“If there is a warming in future we can tell.”
She said data collected could go into a new report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due in 2013-14.
The last IPCC report, in 2007, did not include computer models for sea temperature around the Fimbul Ice Shelf.
========
From the expedition web site: http://fimbul.npolar.no/en/news/current/Nye_data.html
We observed a roughly 50 meter deep layer of water with temperatures very close to the freezing point, about -2.05 degrees, just beneath the ice shelf. The highest observed temperature was about -1.83 degrees close to the bottom. The temperatures are very similar to temperature data collected by elephant seals in 2008 and by British Antarctic Survey using an autosub below the ice shelf in 2005.
We collected three profiles from the underside of the ice to the seabed at 653 meters below sealevel. No trace of the relatively warm deep water that upwells over the continental slope was found. It will be exciting to see if this is the situation all year round, says Ole Anders Nøst.
For more on how the drilling was done, see this PDF of the method and equipment here
More on the project here
h/t to Michael In Sydney
Richard Henry Lee (15:46:51) :
Maybe they had to burn oil to heat the water to melt the ice.
They had unexpected problems with ice buildup on the panels of the solar water heater. Forgot to take into account the extra humidity from melting the ice while drilling.
🙂
The link provided above is interesting http://fimbul.npolar.no/en/Project_descriptions/Project_description.html . It says that 10% of Antarctica is ice shelves and so it is reasonable to study the stability of the surrounding water in terms of density and temperature, after all the ice sheets are being supported by this water. What I do not like is alarmist talk about ice shelves ‘collapsing’. It just sounds shrill, but may attract more grant money than the term ‘calving’.
This is where good, balanced journalism is essential in this post Climategate era to take the alarmism out of reporting and possibly save a few careers as well.
Robinson,
Artic ice is floating in the water so the melt does not effect sea level rise. Antartic ice is contained on the Antartic continent, its melting therefore would increase sea level rise.
Hope this helps.
Can they now drill holes large enough to drop a remote sub in to monitor the ice from underneath, instead of trying to pilot one inwards from under the edge of ice shelf?
Sea water, because of its salt content, freezes around -2 Centigrade, if there is no current. Diving in winter in the St. Lawrence River in Eastern Canada, one can record -2.5C water temperatures – quite interesting 🙂
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2010/01/09/the-ozone-hole-did-it.aspx
now they come out of the woodwork:
It was the Ozone & CFC’s which warmed the planet : Maybe depending on the value of data from the CRU.
Robinson:
As I understand it: Arctic ice is floating ice, which displaces water by close to the same volume. When the ice melts, the volume is relatively unchanged which means sea-levels don’t, either.
“omnologos (15:40:01) :
“collected by elephant seals”?”
I read that too!
” The temperatures are very similar to temperature data
collected by elephant seals in 2008
and by British Antarctic Survey using an autosub below the ice shelf in 2005.”
Maybe I’m missing something. The water just below the ice is around freezing – isn’t that what you’d expect? If the water was warmer, there wouldn’t be any ice, if it was colder it would actually *be* ice.
This is approaching high comedy.
Note to AGW studies: If reality and theory diverge you should abondon theory, not reality.
“She said data collected could go into a new report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due in 2013-14”
No, sorry Ms Noest, this will not survive peer review by the team.
Mark F (16:35:04) :
Top comment to the DailyMail article:
The Mail should have kept this information confidential. There are a lot of careers dependent on Global warming – poliiticians, academics, the Met Office. How will the Government be able to raise all those taxes if Global warming is false, not to mention Al Gore’s bank account? Didn’t Phil Jones, from the University of East Anglia, tell us that “the science is settled”?
– Kerry Livermore, London , England, 11/1/2010 20:11
Spot on! …… LOL
SEA RISE CLAIMS IN COPENHAHEN BOGUS – so says Britain’s Met Office
CLIMATE science faces a major new controversy after Britain’s Met Office denounced research from the Copenhagen summit that suggested global warming could raise sea levels by more than 1.8m by 2100.
The studies, led by Stefan Rahmstorf, professor of ocean physics at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, have caused growing concern among other experts. They say his methods are flawed and that the real increase in sea levels by 2100 is likely to be far lower than he predicts.
Jason Lowe, a leading Met Office climate researcher, said: “We think such a big rise by 2100 is actually incredibly unlikely. The mathematical approach used to calculate the rise is completely unsatisfactory.”
The new controversy dates back to January 2007 when Science magazine published a research paper by Professor Rahmstorf linking the 17cm rise in sea levels from 1881 to 2001 with a 0.6C rise in global temperature over the same period.
Professor Rahmstorf then parted company from colleagues by extrapolating the findings to 2100. Based on the 17cm increase that occurred from 1881 to 2001, Professor Rahmstorf calculated that a predicted 5C increase in global temperature would raise sea levels by up to 188cm.
Critic Simon Holgate, a sea-level expert at the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, Merseyside, has written to Science magazine, attacking Professor Rahmstorf’s work as “simplistic”.
“Rahmstorf’s real skill seems to be in publishing extreme papers just before big conferences like Copenhagen, when they are guaranteed attention,” Dr Holgate said.
Most of the 1881-2001 sea-level rise came from melting glaciers that will be gone by 2050, leaving the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets as contributors. But contributions of these sheets to date has been negligible and researchers say there is no evidence to show that will change in the way Professor Rahmstorf suggests.
Professor Rahmstorf said he accepted many of the criticisms. “I hope my critics are right because a rise of the kind my work predicts would be catastrophic,” he said.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/sea-level-theory-cuts-no-ice/story-e6frg6so-1225817853987
Oops, I meant to say Ms Koc, not Noest.
George E. Smith (15:16:24) :
“Well if the ice and the water are in contact, wouldn’t you expect the water to be right at the freezing point. Or what is it that I don’t understand about phase diagrams ? Evidently those “Scientists” don’t understand it either.”
If were water directly contacting the ice, I would agree. However, this article says they took readings at various depths. Sea water in particular seems very good at forming thermoclines, I suppose due to currents and tides, so their measurements seem valid to me.
In the meantime, Ars Technica, a bastion of AGW propaganda, has an explanation for the unusually cold weather in the northern hemisphere and a picture showing how Greenland is abnormally warm.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/01/why-the-us-and-much-of-europe-are-shivering-in-the-cold.ars
Sea ice is ice that is floating above the sea and is not land based. All of the sea ice in both the artic and antartic can melt without raising the level of the oceans. Only if the land based ice in anartica begins to melt will ocean levels be affected. Conversely, if temperatures in anartica continue to fall as they have been doing, the land based ice will probably continue to grow and we could see ocean levels fall. I believe I recently saw research that said the rate of increase in sea levels was deminishing. Maybe we are headed into a cooling phase and sea levels will begin to fall. Wonder how the AGW crowd will spin that?
Slightly OT:
Temp trend 1895 to present is .1F per decade.
http://sppiblog.org/news/climate-summary-december-2009
Oh, so all of these places have contingencies in place, right? Since ocean levels WILL change regardless of what humans do. What? You mean they didn’t study history and are doomed to repeat it? Sucks for them.
Bill the AGW crowd will “spin that out” simply by fudging the data as they have been doing all along. They don’t get paid millions of research funds to do nothing. Hopefully one day soon all this will be revealed as to what most of the climate research is up to these days – fraud on a large scale.
Another couple dozen years of such research and they’ll suddenly discover stress fractures have something to do with ice shelves breaking up.
So, in these hard economic times, isn’t it comforting to know that scarce dollars are being spent so wisely?
omnologos (15:40:01) :
“collected by elephant seals”
Yes, and these are not your run of the mill elephant seals. They were highly trained to in the art of correct temperature device siting. Not wanting to look foolish like NOAA and their US surface stations they took extra precautions to train the seals to avoid air conditioners and barbecues.
Mapou (18:38:41) : .. Ars Technica, a bastion of AGW propaganda, has an explanation for the unusually cold weather in the northern hemisphere and a picture showing how Greenland is abnormally warm.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/01/why-the-us-and-much-of-europe-are-shivering-in-the-cold.ars
I wonder how NOAA got those anomalies for December? The arctic temperatures for December above the 80 th parallel dont seem much higher in Dec 09 as in Dec 08, for example. And was Dec 08 very cold in Europe and America? Dont think so.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
@ur momisugly omnologos (15:40:01) :
“collected by elephant seals”?
Yes, they can be used similar to the Argos diving/reporting buoys. They are deep divers and, unlike Argos, they go under the ice in search of prey, but with transmitters epoxied to the top of their heads.
See: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14506-elephant-seals-deployed-to-monitor-antarctic-seas.html
Great to see “The Two Keiths” mentioned!
The hot water drill is powered by avtur, the same fuel used in the Twin Otter that takes it to the site.
I’m not sure that anyone at BAS (other than, possibly, the awful dis-information department) has ever said that Antarctica is melting. They may have pointed out that various ice shelves have broken up recently but the “global warming” explanation has been wrongly inferred by media idiots, not the glaciologists involved (The Two Keiths).