There’s a new article at Nature News where they report on an amazing new paleoclimatology breakthrough with temperature reconstructions using clamshells. The Nature article reports on a new paper in PNAS from William Patterson at the University of Saskachewan. Here’s a short excerpt:
The study used 26 shells obtained from sediment cores taken from an Icelandic bay. Because clams typically live from two to nine years, isotope ratios in each of these shells provided a two-to-nine-year window onto the environmental conditions in which they lived.
Patterson’s team used a robotic sampling device to shave thin slices from each layer of the shells’ growth bands. These were then fed into a mass spectrometer, which measured the isotopes in each layer. From those, the scientists could calculate the conditions under which each layer formed.
Unlike counting tree rings which have varying widths due to all sorts of external influences such as rainfall, sunlight, temperatures, available nutrients, and available CO2, this method looks at the levels of different oxygen isotopes in their shells that vary with the temperature of the water in which they live. One simple linear relationship.
The data resolution from isotope counts is incredible.
“What we’re getting to here is palaeoweather,” Patterson says. “We can reconstruct temperatures on a sub-weekly resolution, using these techniques. For larger clams we could do daily.”
The reconstruction is shown below. We see familiar features the little ice age, the medieval warm period and the downturn which led to the extinction of Norse settlements on Greenland.
And the feature of this reconstruction to surely stick in the craw of many who think we are living in unprecedented times of warmth is the “Roman Warm Period”. Have a look:
From Nature: Shellfish could supplant tree-ring climate data
Temperature records gleaned from clamshells reveal accuracy of Norse sagas.
Richard A. Lovett
Oxygen isotopes in clamshells may provide the most detailed record yet of global climate change, according to a team of scientists who studied a haul of ancient Icelandic molluscs.
Most measures of palaeoclimate provide data on only average annual temperatures, says William Patterson, an isotope chemist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and lead author of the study1. But molluscs grow continually, and the levels of different oxygen isotopes in their shells vary with the temperature of the water in which they live. The colder the water, the higher the proportion of the heavy oxygen isotope, oxygen-18.
The study used 26 shells obtained from sediment cores taken from an Icelandic bay. Because clams typically live from two to nine years, isotope ratios in each of these shells provided a two-to-nine-year window onto the environmental conditions in which they lived.
Patterson’s team used a robotic sampling device to shave thin slices from each layer of the shells’ growth bands. These were then fed into a mass spectrometer, which measured the isotopes in each layer. From those, the scientists could calculate the conditions under which each layer formed.
“What we’re getting to here is palaeoweather,” Patterson says. “We can reconstruct temperatures on a sub-weekly resolution, using these techniques. For larger clams we could do daily.”
It’s an important step in palaeoclimatic studies, he says, because it allows scientists to determine not only changes in average annual temperatures, but also how these changes affected individual summers and winters.
“We often make the mistake of saying that mean annual temperature is higher or lower at some period of time,” Patterson says. “But that is relatively meaningless in terms of the changes in seasonality.”
For example, in early Norse Iceland — part of the 2,000-year era spanned by the study — farmers were dependent on dairy farming and agriculture. “For a dairy culture, summer is by far the most important,” he says. “A one-degree decrease in summer temperatures in Iceland results in a 15% decrease in agricultural yield. If that happens two years in a row, your family’s wiped out.”
Technically, the molluscs record water temperatures, not air temperatures. But the two are closely linked — specially close to the shore, where most people lived. “So, when the water temperatures are up, air temperatures are up. When water temperatures are down, air temperatures are down,” Patterson says.
Read the complete article at Nature News
Phil. (10:54:35) :
Leif, the clamshells were sampled from sediment cores, the 26 reported were selected from the core in regions of forminifera δO18 extrema. Dating was apparently by C14.
Or by sedimentation rate supported by C14? As long as all clams come from the same general location the 14C uncertainties are smaller. The issue was about using clams from all over the world, so from many different environments and their ages would be very uncertain.
Phil. (10:54:35) :
Dating was apparently by C14.
It doesn’t say that anywhere. If I missed it show me where.
Now, there is a statement in the paper [which I have read] that is a bit troubling:
“bivalves were selected from cores at stratigraphic intervals from notable warm and cold periods, as evidenced by the chemistry and sedimentology of cores.”
So there is some selection going on. Apparently they use ‘chemistry and sedimentology’ as temperature indicators too. I wonder how?
“”” Technically, the molluscs record water temperatures, not air temperatures. But the two are closely linked — specially close to the shore, where most people lived. “So, when the water temperatures are up, air temperatures are up. When water temperatures are down, air temperatures are down,” Patterson says. “””
Well according to John Christy et al; technically the water temperature and the air temperature are not closely linked. They showed in Jan 2001 that they are not correlated. Why the hell would they be, with ocean currents of a few knots, and wind speeds of tens to hundreds of km per hr. Air over Hawaiian waters today, may be over California next week; how would the two ever establish equilibrium.
So last time I checked, clams are agressive diggers. How energetically they dig, depends on how determined their predators are to get at them.
So who’s to say just what layer of sedimentary muck those living clams were in when they grew their shells, compared to where the dead empty shells ended up.
Well for me, I’ll take the New Zealand Green Shelled Mussels any day over any Icelandic clam, any day, whether ancient or modern.
But it is interesting to see the lengths they can go to, to try and establish knowledge of the growth cirumstances of something that lived eons ago, about which we know nothing of their metabolic processes, or how they lived.
But I’m eager to learn about their techniques anyway; I still say “It’s the water; silly !”
RockyRoad (07:53:38) : “Not to be overly critical and take this as a friendly suggestion, but why are there a lot of people commenting before they’ve read the paper? That seems a bit strange to me. C’mon, folks… READ!”
Fair enough, but … as soon as I saw sample size 26 and short lifespans, I lost interest in reading the whole paper. I did read enough to confirm those stats, and yes the paper could be showing the way to greater things, but of itself it surely cannot deliver much of relevance to global climate.
Derek H (08:07:31) puts it well : “[…] the science behind this appears to be much stronger than for tree ring data but they really need to broaden the data collected and verify the technique that worked in an Icelandic bay works equally well across the world and establish the air/water temperature correlation before it becomes a good tool for assessing GLOBAL climate conditions.
[…] what I was reacting to was the immediate reaction I saw of “see, this proves the AGW proponents are wrong”. It proves nothing of the sort — what it DOES prove is that there may be a better way to extract paleoclimate information than tree rings and a broader study using this technique may therefore prove the AGW proponents are wrong.”
There have been a lot of good posts on this thread. It’s no big deal skipping the jokes.
For those who are interested in the approach of micromilling molluscs to determine sea temperatures I suggest you read up on some of the work of Bernd Schone in Mainz. The bio-increments group have been working on long lived Arctica islandica in the North Sea and have even published data on daily growth increments. I think they now have a 500 year record of North Sea temperatures. Heres a URL to a short news item article:
http://www.physorg.com/news134892774.html
sHx (02:22:16) :
There are two other interesting bits in the paper. The first one is that it doesn’t shy away from declaring “reconstructed water temperatures for the Roman Warm Period in Iceland are higher than any temperatures recorded in modern times.” While the current debate is whether the MWP was warmer than the modern times, the new paper claims that the Roman period was even warmer than both the Medieval and the modern era. The second, temperature reconstruction from clamshells extend only to late 18th Century. Why they did not extend the study to the 19th and 20th Centuries and/or whether there will be a fresh paper covering the modern period are questions that perhaps ought to be asked to the authors of the paper.
The paper quotes a max measured water temperature in the region since 1938 as 11ºC, only about 3 or 4 shells from the Roman period exceed that value (from their main core, 2266). Other samples from another core (341) which seems generally warmer also reach that value but no data is given for present day temperatures there (it’s more sheltered).
The other finding is that the MWP was a rather erratic period as far as T was concerned: “Unlike the Roman Warm Period, however, this interval featured more variability in minimum annual temperatures that had ranges that were more than twice as large as the maximum temperature variability.”
“”” Leif Svalgaard (07:53:10) :
Wondering Aloud (06:12:50) :
What controls the formation of O18? I don’t remember. I think it is unlikley that it is some perfect proxy for temp.
The fundamental process is that when water evaporates, the lighter isotopes 16O evaporates more than the heavier 18O, and conversely when rain precipitates, so there will be fractionation depending on temperature because temperature controls the equilibrium between vapor and condensed phases. “””
Well in all the papers I ahve read on Oxygen isotope based temperature proxies, this is the first thing I have ever seen on the theory behind the proxy.
So now I am even more confused.
Evaporation, as I understand it is controlled entirely by the temperature of the water (surface), as to whether a molecule evaporates or not.
Precipitation on the other hand can easily take place thousands of km away, from where the evaporation occurred, and the condensation into a water droplet, and or subequently an ice crystal, would seem to depend entirely on the conditions in whatever altitude atmospheric layer, that droplet or ice crystal forms, and the resulting precipitation might never again for geological time scales, ever end up in the same body of water, from which the evaporation occurred.
So what am I missing; just WHAT TEMPERATURE is it that is being enshrined forever in some water/ice/clamshell sample.
Is there some definitive text that describes in detail exactly how oxygen isotope thermometry is to be carried out, and the governing theory behind it ?
Leif Svalgaard (11:56:31) :
Phil. (10:54:35) :
Dating was apparently by C14.
It doesn’t say that anywhere. If I missed it show me where.
Bottom rhs of fig 3.
George E. Smith (12:31:42) :
Is there some definitive text that describes in detail exactly how oxygen isotope thermometry is to be carried out, and the governing theory behind it ?
Yes and no. This is such standard method that many things are just stated in modern papers. But here are some pointers:
http://www.coloradocollege.edu/DEPT/GY/Fricke__Wing_AJS2004.pdf
http://web.viu.ca/earle/geol-412/oxygen%20Isotope%20fractionation.pdf
http://ethomas.web.wesleyan.edu/ees123/isotope.htm
The operative concept is “Rayleigh Fractionation”.
Craig and Gordon laid the foundations back in 1965.
Here is some on that:
http://iahs.info/conferences/CR2006/2006-Pisa.pdf
http://www.plantphysiol.org/cgi/content/full/120/4/1165
George E. Smith (12:31:42) :
Precipitation on the other hand can easily take place thousands of km away, from where the evaporation occurred, and the condensation into a water droplet, and or subequently an ice crystal, would seem to depend entirely on the conditions in whatever altitude atmospheric layer, that droplet or ice crystal forms, and the resulting precipitation might never again for geological time scales, ever end up in the same body of water, from which the evaporation occurred.
So what am I missing; just WHAT TEMPERATURE is it that is being enshrined forever in some water/ice/clamshell sample.
It is the water temperature which controls the precipitation of the COOO18, the paper states that the water O18 levels aren’t as important in this location: “The influence of variable δ18O(H2O) values on δ18O(CaCO3) is much less significant than that of temperature.” (bottom page 1 and page 2)
Charles:
Took out my reference to Elvis in “Do the Clam”.
Pity!
Max
Reply: Wasn’t me. lot’s of moderators. ~ ctm
Phil. (12:35:29) :
Bottom rhs of fig 3.
Thanks for spotting this.
You can also see that most of the dates are interpolated [not 14C], so my suspicion “Or by sedimentation rate supported by C14?” seems on the mark. Note the rather large uncertainties [and those are 1 sigma] of typically a century. This is probably not a problem within the same core, but the dating problem can become severe when widely scattered cores are used. I wonder why they only selected a few clams. I would have analyzed all I could find.
Leif Svalgaard (13:21:28) :
Phil. (12:35:29) :
You can also see that most of the dates are interpolated [not 14C], so my suspicion “Or by sedimentation rate supported by C14?” seems on the mark.
In fact, of the 26 clams, 21 have an interpolated age and only 5 a 14C calibrated age [and none of those were in the oldest half of the data].
Freshwater clams might be a better proxy for climate than marine ones. They are found in lakes and rivers and would generally live in an environment more subject to weather than marine clams. They are not as robust, but temperate climate ones should have well-defined growth laminae.
A larger body of data spread out temporally and geographically using this technique, as well as evidence of repeatability is required, but it does show promise. I suppose comparison with evidence from the sagas helped substantiate the results.
If Anthony will let me I’ll post an article on oxygen isotope thermometry. There is huge confusion in this thread. Leif is talking about isotopes in the water cycle which have very little to do with the Patterson article.
The carbonate isotope thermometer is based on the equilibrium partitioning of 18-O between calcium carbonate and water. To measure the temperature one needs to know both the 18-oxygen content of the calcium carbonate and of the water. The Patterson article assumes the 18-oxygen composition of the water to be +0.1 per mille and that it varies only by a small amount. So by measuring the carbonate he can define the partitioning.
I am not so sure that the water composition can be assumed to be near constant. The Icelandic waters he describes lie in the field of North Atlantic surface waters that I describe in one of my papers. These waters vary more rapidly with salinity than Patterson describes. Thus there could be a significant isotope variation that is controlled by water isotope composition variations and not by temperature.
Paul Dennis (14:21:21) :
The Patterson article assumes the 18-oxygen composition of the water to be +0.1 per mille
And isn’t that determined by the water cycle?
I agree that an expert article on this would be useful. On the other hand one gets the impression that people are not looking to know, but rather for confirmation of belief [and the chance to make poor jokes].
Leif,
The surface and near surface waters of the North Atlantic are controlled by mixing between high latitude fresh water run off and a seawater end member (in this case sub polar mode water). Thus one gets a linear mixing line when 18-O is plotted versus salinity. The gradient is about 0.6 per mille change in 18-O versus a 1 per mille change in salinity.
If evaporation/precipitation processes dominate the gradient is much lower.
There is no clear relationship between sea water isotope composition and temperature. However, if we start to look at the freshwater cycle in the atmosphere then we begin to see a strong temperature signal.
I agree with you about the jokes, confirmation bias etc.
Bruce M. Albert, Ph.D., PDRA
Sir,
Perhaps you and or Paul Dennis could do a guest paper for us interested lay people here at WUWT. It is a very good way to bring this information into the spot light since many papers are behind pay walls and it is difficult for the non-scientist or even scientist to be aware of all of the different advances going on.
Thank you.
Leif Svalgaard, and Phil
Thanks for the info and the links Leif. Yes I know some of these things are so ingrained in the specific dicipline, that writers often don’t think to provide at least a reference that would be usable as a ticket to get on board.
I’m still totally confused by it; but then maybe I won’t be, after researching your links.
Thanks again Leif and Phil.
George
Leif Svalgaard (13:21:28) :
Phil. (12:35:29) :
“Bottom rhs of fig 3.”
Thanks for spotting this.
You can also see that most of the dates are interpolated [not 14C], so my suspicion “Or by sedimentation rate supported by C14?” seems on the mark. Note the rather large uncertainties [and those are 1 sigma] of typically a century. This is probably not a problem within the same core, but the dating problem can become severe when widely scattered cores are used. I wonder why they only selected a few clams. I would have analyzed all I could find.
Leif Svalgaard (13:30:09) :
In fact, of the 26 clams, 21 have an interpolated age and only 5 a 14C calibrated age [and none of those were in the oldest half of the data].
According to the supplementary info. about half were calibrated.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/03/02/0902522107.full.pdf+html
Paul Dennis (14:21:21) :
I am not so sure that the water composition can be assumed to be near constant.
The assumption was at least based on local measurements.
“A constant water value of 0.1‰ was assumed, on the basis of measured values of shelf-bottom water in this region”
Forgive me for not reading all 265 responses, but I really enjoyed the humor of the first 100 or so. Humor is a life-saver, because otherwise this @ur momisugly#$&@ur momisugly situation drives you mad.
I agree with the many who posted that this is old news. We have known for years and years that the attempt to erase the MWP was, at the very least, the goofs of young and rash scientists. We have patiently explained, using all sorts of old studies, old history, and old geology, that what happened happened. After ten years or so it gets very old, and it gets harder and harder to remain even-tempered.
It was erasing the MWP that originally alerted me to the fact that “something stunk in Denmark,” (Hamlet.) I had spent over forty years wondering and pondering and studying the exploits of Vikings, as a hobby, and as a consequence of my hobby I think I accidentally had more knowledge about the MWP in my little finger than Mann has in his wildest dreams. To erase the MWP was so ridiculous that I started posting on various blogs the evidence the MWP existed, and learned first-hand about the furious back-lash one received when they simply spoke of what scientific studies had stated.
The attempt to erase the MWP has thrown wrenches and red-herrings into the scientific process, and things which are difficult enough to examine and understand when science is at its best are made ten times more difficult. This is extremely annoying, because it makes progress all the more difficult as well.
For example, think how hard it is to measure the sea-level when the land itself is rising or settling, due to isostatic processes. Clams might be helpful in a different way, to understand these subtle processes, if the depth at which the clams lived was known.
This does not matter in places like Hudson Bay or Sweden, where the land is rising at a steady rate, but there are other places where the land may be right at the balancing point, and might have risen during the MWP and sunk in the LIA. For example, Greenland.
My study of Vikings alerted me to this possibility, because way back in the 1700’s a visiting European reported the shoreline by the Viking settlements was sinking. Likely it was due to more LIA ice in the nearby glaciers, but I wondered if some Viking docks or perhaps even ships might be submerged just off shore, down ten feet or so. I was filled with the urge to go scuba dive (in a heated wet suit, of course,) and perhaps do a bit of looting and come away with a genuine Viking sword. (More recent studies showed southern Greenland was rising, but I was unwilling to wait for the stuff to reappear.)
Of course, I can’t just come out and admit I’m after a sword. I’ll have to pretend I’m after clams. And what’s more, I’ll have to make it look like what I discover proves Global Warming exists. I’ll have to devise some headline such as, “Unprecedented Sea Rise Drowns Viking Shipyards!”
Nor would it be a lie to state I was after clams. I figure the grant to fund the trip would amount to around a million clams or so.
(In case you don’t believe I’ve been working on the subject of isostatic responses for years, check out the final comments in the Accuweather post from November 11, 2007.)
http://global-warming.accuweather.com/2007/11/greenland_floating_upwards_1.html#comments
This is from a “popular” type article and quotes some very old research from when O18 – O16 started to be used for temperature identification. It might answer some of the questions as to why the authors of the study think they have some correlation to air temperatures. Perhaps Dr. Bruce M. Albert, Paul Dennis, or Dr. Leif Svalgaard can tell us if the theories underlying the described technique remain true.
“In his book, Imbrie says that he and his assistant
…. developed a multiple-factor method for climatic analysis that took into account abundance variations in all 25 species of planktonic forams. In many respects, their approach was a computerized extension of the technique used by Wolfgang Schott in 1935. At a meeting held in Paris in 1969, Imbrie announced the results that he had obtained when he studied a Caribbean core with this multiple-factor technique. Whereas Emiliani’s research indicated that surface water temperatures in the Caribbean had dropped by almost 11Deg F. during the last ice age, Imbrie’s multiple factor method showed a drop of only 3.5Deg F. When the core was analyzed for oxygen-isotope ratios, the zones that Ericson had identified as cold were shown to be warm by both the isotope and multiple-factor methods. Imbrie said:202
Apparently, some environmental factor other than surface water temperature (but often correlated with it) caused Globorotalia menardii to appear and disappear cyclically in deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
At the Paris meeting Imbrie talked after the lecture with a British geophysicist named Nicholas Shackleton. They
realized that their independent work on the problem had led them to the same answer: Changing ratios of oxygen isotopes in marine fossils are caused primarily by fluctuations in the size of ice sheets, not by variations in sea temperatures. Their tentative conclusion was based on the fact that because O-18 is heavier than O-16, water molecules containing O-18 do not evaporate as readily; therefore, water rising from the oceans in the form of vapor and subsequently falling as precipitation contains a smaller proportion of O-18 than do the oceans themselves. If water deficient in O-18 were to be locked up on land in the ice sheets, the proportion of the heavy isotopes in sea water would rise, and this increase would be reflected in the ratios of the oxygen isotopes present in forams and other marine organisms….”
http://corior.blogspot.com/2006/02/part-15-ice-ages-confirmed.html
I would still like to see some discussion of long-term trends that correlate inshore water temperatures with air temperatures. I know that temperatures vary seasonally, but how close are the linkages annually? Most of the studies I could find through a Google search related to lake water temperatures: big as they are, the Great Lakes’ hydrography is substantially different from marine hydrography (as there are no salinity issues creating complicating factors in seasonal overturn, currents etc).
Without paying I cannot view the following article, which seems to support the clam study in terms of linkages between air and water temperatures, but what I cannot tell from the abstract is if the authors were interested in long-term temperature trends.
“Water-Air Temperature Relationship along Coastal North Carolina, U. S. A., by James M. McCloy and Robert Dolan” © 1973 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography.
Abstract
Simultaneous measurements of air and water temperature, wind speed and direction, tidal oscillations, and sea-state conditions (as a mixing factor) were analysed to explain variation in inshore water temperatures. Analysis of the time-series indicates that tidal oscillations, on-and-offshore winds, and differences in wave action play only minor roles in the explanation of either short-term or seasonal variations in inshore water temperatures.
The link for this article is:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/520651
Or this:
Inshore surface sea temperatures at Townsville
R Kenny
Abstract
Detailed inshore surface sea temperatures have not previously been available for the tropical Queensland coast. Recordings were made in Cleveland Bay (19º 15’S., 146º 50’E.) for four separate 1 year periods. A total of 212 readings is available. The maximum monthly mean temperature is 31.2º C in January and the minimum monthly mean is 21.8º C in July. The relationship between sea and air temperatures is discussed. The present data are compared with other available information.
Australian Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research 25(1) 1 – 5 (1974) doi:10.1071/MF9740001
http://www.publish.csiro.au/paper/MF9740001.htm
Caribbean Journal of Science, Vol. 41, No. 3, 392-413, 2005
Copyright 2005 College of Arts and Sciences
University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez
¨
Please forgive the formatting issues with the following, which can be viewed as a PDF at http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&lr=&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENCA359&q=correlation+between+inshore+air+and+water+temperatures&start=10&sa=N
Water Temperature Variation and the Meteorological and
Hydrographic Environment of Bocas del Toro, Panama
KARL W. KAUFMANN AND RICARDO C. THOMPSON
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, PO Box 2072, Balboa, Republic of Panama
Corresponding author: kaufmank@si.edu
ABSTRACT.—Bahía Almirante is a shallow lagoon on the Caribbean coast of western Panama almost entirely surrounded by land. Rainfall is most intense during the night and least intense in the late afternoon, a pattern common in tropical coastal areas.Water temperatures are often elevated in the inshore waters relative to surface temperatures immediately offshore, at times exceeding 30°C. Analysis of solar radiation, wind speed, humidity and air temperature indicate that variations in solar radiation and wind speed were
responsible for much of the observed excursions from the offshore temperatures. Environmentally stressful temperatures can result from a month or two of clear skies, and an equal period of cloudy skies can bring the
temperatures down again rapidly. Shallow water has the most extreme daily and annual ranges in temperature, but water up to 20 m shows a similar range in temperatures over periods of several years. Salinity at the
surface is usually 30 to 34 ppt, but can drop to as low as 20 ppt after heavy rain. Historical records of monthly rainfall explain only 9.6% of the variation in monthly water temperature changes.There appears to be a thermal gradient in the bay and adjacent areas across three sites with for which we have 4 to 6 years of hourly temperature data. The innermost site, closest to the mainland, had the highest mean temperature and the highest range in temperature. The two sites on the seaward side of the bay had less extreme temperatures.
The following article abstract seems to indicate problems for the linkage between air and sea surface temperatures:
Title : Inshore Sea Surface Temperature and Salinity Conditions at Agate Beach, Yaquina Bay and Whale Cove, Oregon, in 1970.
Descriptive Note : Technical rept. Jan-Oct 70,
Corporate Author : OREGON STATE UNIV CORVALLIS DEPT OF OCEANOGRAPHY
Personal Author(s) : Gonor,Jefferson J. ; Thum,Alan B. ; Elvin,David W.
Report Date : NOV 1970
Pagination or Media Count : 30
Abstract : Daily temperature and salinity conditions measured in the surf at Agate Beach, Oregon, are given and summarized by 15 day periods, with the range, mean and standard deviation of each period indicated. Conditions in 1970 are briefly compared to those observed in 1968 and 1969, and temperature measurements at this station summarized for 15 day periods is figured for the period 1967-1970. Water and near surface air temperatures at a station 3 miles inside Yaquina Bay measured at the daily four tidal extremes are tabulated. A system for continuously recording temperature from a thermistor chain installed in the intertidal is described. The design and construction of thermistor pressure cases, thermistor shielding, and a dual range Wheatstone Bridge are described and figured. Data recorded from intertidal thermistor chain installed at Whale Cove, Oregon, at the four daily tidal extremes are given. These data are compared to those from Agate Beach, 10 miles away, and it is concluded that there is poor correlation between the two locations due to hydrographic and topographic differences. (Author)
I am not going to keep going but do have a few observations to make at this point regarding this search.
1) more recent work regarding surface temperatures and air temperatures seems to come from lake studies
2) research linking nearshore or inshore sea surface temperatures with air temperatures seems to have been popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s – when there was limited oceanographic interest, I would hazard to guess – in long term temperature trends.
3) insolation and cloud cover, as I recall from other threads at WUWT, and see again in one of the above abstracts, have a profound effect on water temperatures independent from air temperatures.
For me this disconnect between the marine and atmospheric temperatures is the most serious problem for this paper. I would be happy to be convinced otherwise if someone could point me to a paper that shows close linkages.
Another opportunity to add to this research on clams with seabed cores and wood eating clams by piggybacking on to an undersea gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea ?
From
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,682506,00.html#ref=nlint
Engineers surveying the Baltic Sea for Nordstream’ gas pipeline project have discovered several historic shipwrecks on the seabed, including an ancient Viking longboat and several ships from the 16th to 18th centuries.
Engineers building a pipeline under the Baltic Sea have discovered a number of old shipwrecks on the seabed near the Swedish island of Gotland, including a 1,000-year-old Viking longboat.
The vessels were discovered during a survey of the seabed being conducted by Nord Stream, a consortium building a 1,200 kilometer (746 mile) pipeline to pump Russian gas from the port of Vyborg in Russia to Greifswald on the German Baltic coast.
How about clams from mid-Atlantic ridge vents? Are they really tasty?
I thought that Photoshopped picture was with actual mid-Atlantic clams.
Icelandic clams might be good, especially if steamed in melted Himalayan
glacier. Siberian yew and Canadian hockey sticks make great firewood.
Find me some butter and a pot!