From Ohio State, alarming news about ice, sediments, proxy algae, and other worrisome stuff. It has a familiar ring to it, plus some luck.
ARCTIC ICE AT LOW POINT COMPARED TO RECENT GEOLOGIC HISTORY
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Less ice covers the Arctic today than at any time in recent geologic history.
That’s the conclusion of an international group of researchers, who have compiled the first comprehensive history of Arctic ice.
For decades, scientists have strived to collect sediment cores from the difficult-to-access Arctic Ocean floor, to discover what the Arctic was like in the past. Their most recent goal: to bring a long-term perspective to the ice loss we see today.
Now, in an upcoming issue of Quarternary Science Reviews, a team led by Ohio State University has re-examined the data from past and ongoing studies — nearly 300 in all — and combined them to form a big-picture view of the pole’s climate history stretching back millions of years.
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Leonid Polyak
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“The ice loss that we see today — the ice loss that started in the early 20th Century and sped up during the last 30 years — appears to be unmatched over at least the last few thousand years,” said Leonid Polyak, a research scientist at Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University. Polyak is lead author of the paper and a preceding report that he and his coauthors prepared for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.
Satellites can provide detailed measures of how much ice is covering the pole right now, but sediment cores are like fossils of the ocean’s history, he explained.
“Sediment cores are essentially a record of sediments that settled at the sea floor, layer by layer, and they record the conditions of the ocean system during the time they settled. When we look carefully at various chemical and biological components of the sediment, and how the sediment is distributed — then, with certain skills and luck, we can reconstruct the conditions at the time the sediment was deposited.”
For example, scientists can search for a biochemical marker that is tied to certain species of algae that live only in ice. If that marker is present in the sediment, then that location was likely covered in ice at the time. Scientists call such markers “proxies” for the thing they actually want to measure — in this case, the geographic extent of the ice in the past.
While knowing the loss of surface area of the ice is important, Polyak says that this work can’t yet reveal an even more important fact: how the total volume of ice — thickness as well as surface area — has changed over time.
“When we look carefully at various chemical and biological components of the seafloor sediment, and how the sediment is distributed — then, with certain skills and luck, we can reconstruct the conditions at the time the sediment was deposited.”
“Underneath the surface, the ice can be thick or thin. The newest satellite techniques and field observations allow us to see that the volume of ice is shrinking much faster than its area today. The picture is very troubling. We are losing ice very fast,” he said.
“Maybe sometime down the road we’ll develop proxies for the ice thickness. Right now, just looking at ice extent is very difficult.”
To review and combine the data from hundreds of studies, he and his cohorts had to combine information on many different proxies as well as modern observations. They searched for patterns in the proxy data that fit together like pieces of a puzzle.
Their conclusion: the current extent of Arctic ice is at its lowest point for at least the last few thousand years.
As scientists pull more sediment cores from the Arctic, Polyak and his collaborators want to understand more details of the past ice extent and to push this knowledge further back in time.
During the summer of 2011, they hope to draw cores from beneath the Chukchi Sea, just north of the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia. The currents emanating from the northern Pacific Ocean bring heat that may play an important role in melting the ice across the Arctic, so Polyak expects that the history of this location will prove very important. He hopes to drill cores that date back thousands of years at the Chukchi Sea margin, providing a detailed history of interaction between oceanic currents and ice.
“Later on in this cruise, when we venture into the more central Arctic Ocean, we will aim at harvesting cores that go back even farther,” he said. “If we could go as far back as a million years, that would be perfect.”
Polyak’s coauthors on the report hailed from Penn State University, University of Colorado, University of Massachusetts, the U.S. Geological Survey, Old Dominion University, the Geological Survey of Canada, University of Copenhagen, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Stockholm University, McGill University, James Madison University, and the British Antarctic Survey.
This research was funded by the US Geological Survey and the National Science Foundation.
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Contact: Leonid Polyak, (614) 292-2602; Polyak.1@osu.edu
Written by Pam Frost Gorder, (614) 292-9475; Gorder.1@osu.edu
If they can prove that the Arctic is more ice free than ever before, does this mean that all the history of traversing the north west passage was reconstructed from proxy data found in polar bear gizzards?
I note that the data is available online here:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geosamples/index.jsp
Choose Byrd Polar Research Center and the Ship, Healy, and you get a set of links to all the data which are extensive. They include the GPS and bathymetry data along with ice core data apparently, although I have only taken a cursory glance. The GPS data is in the form of Shape files (.shp). Some of the data is in .mb41 files which appear to be a database file.
What sort of proxy do these people substitute for climate alarmist grey matter? BS?
“Later on in this cruise, when we venture into the more central Arctic Ocean…”
Aha!
These are the guys who’ve been breaking up the Ice. They are the cause!
Penn State – carving hockey sticks out of tree rings. I want to go back to the Eemian and see what happened in the end. I read somewhere there was a global warming spike, but who knows what to believe these days.
Leonid Polyak pops up in the Climategate email, apparently after requesting and receiving some data back in 2002 from Keith Briffa of CRU:
http://www.au.agwscam.com/cru/emails.php?eid=281&filename=1036591086.txt
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=278&filename=1034341705.txt
Seemingly innocent exchanges, though it is amusing that Briffa apologized for a 2 day delay in getting Polyak data, and then spent years stonewalling McIntyre on releasing the Yamal series. It’s also interesting that all these guys seem to know each other…
Leonid Polyak also appears as Convener of this “Conference on Abrupt Climate Change”:
http://www.agu.org/meetings/chapman/2009/ccall/
For those of you who have read Micheal Crichton’s book State of Fear, you may remember that NERF hosted a big conference, by the same name, and likely with a similar purpose.
Nothing conclusive, but certainly interesting…
How do you compensate for the ocean currents when you are pulling sediments from the sea floor? Aren’t they studying the sediment that settled after being kicked up elsewhere, perhaps the Pacific or some other ocean?
Dave F @ur momisugly June 2, 2010 at 10:16 pm
I was thinking along the same lines. How long does it take a dead algae to sink 5,000 or ten thousand feet to the bottom of the ocean and how far laterally has it moved via currents from horz. coordinates where it died? I suppose it may not matter because the assessment can be made relative to other layers in the same core, but that would require you assume the currents never vary.
Do the currents vary enough that it would mess up the whole analysis on that basis? How do you assess what amount of variance is significant?
Oh, same o same o, their imagination is slipping lately, let me take a jab at something different for a change….
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The use of ice breakers has increased dramatically in the last 30 years as we see less ice than over the last many thousands of years and has accelerated rapidly during the last three decades. It’s much worse that we thought. Ice breakers began in the early 20th century and have advanced at a alarming rate. Whole fleets have been put in use for commercial and military use and more are on the way, even nuclear powered ice breakers are on order as this is being written.
Why this concerns our team is that sheet ice is very resistant to action of the winds and currents unlike the defenseless chunkenized and broken ice. Polar bears have no place to go but to cling onto these fleeting fragments as portrayed by Mr. Gore’s cohorts who photographed and documented it here and has been published worldwide in leading scientific journals.
This fragmentation of the polar cap allows ice to move freely and to be quickly swept out to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by the winds and currents without deterrence to merely melt in the warmer waters. It’s truly a travesty, and something must happen before all of the ice at the north pole disappears completely this year, or two, maybe.
We call on Congress and governments of the world….
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Sounds peculiarly familiar. Well, that’s a beginning… story developing…
/sarc off
So ice ages and interglacials are no longer relevant. Given past interglacial sea level rises it looks like we may have a long way to go yet. But then warmer atmosphere = more humidity = more precipitation and snow in the northern regions for increased albedo around the arctic and increased cloud albedo around the tropics. Who knows what is going to happen?
Proxies are pretty useless unless the methodology and the proxies themselves can be validated.
It’s notable that Michael Mann (Penn State) helped pioneer the use of bad proxies.
To paraphrase “The ice loss that we see today — the ice loss that started in the early 20th Century and sped up during the last 30 years — appears to be unmatched over at least the last few thousand years,”
The ice is at its lowest since the last Ice Age. Is that news?
They should have just got Madame Zenda to read some tea leaves. Results would have been just as meaningful.
As a geologist I can understand how historic temperatures can be determined from examining ocean floor sediments – but historic ice thicknesses?!?
And to do this you apparently need “certain skills and luck”.
And someone is funding this?
I could not see any comments from our regular alarmists, so even they must be embarrassed by this.
Does anyone know where I might obtain the data on ice breakers in service from 1900 to date and preferably by the day? That will ensure there are enough data points to guarantee statistical significance in extrapolating projections into the future. I am beginning to feel that this data will inversely correlate correctly to a very high degree and, of coarse, would want to back it up with publically available data if this developing story is to go anywhere.
How about a title, “It’s not the CO2 Stupid, It’s the Ice Breakers!” 🙂
Oh, and the research grant…
/sarc off
I call bogus on the use of the polar region for sediment cores.
The reason: Because of the several oceanic currents which carry material from distant places and deposit it there.
As a result of just that alone, any pretend quantification of ice thickness is without validity.
It would be quite one thing were the polar region to freeze solid right down to the sea bed, but such hasn’t happened that we know of.
Leonid Polyak is also signer 219 of 320;
http://www.openletterfromscientists.com/list-of-signers.html
of this open letter sent to federal agencies on March 13, 2010;
http://www.openletterfromscientists.com/index.html
that begins:
“Many in the popular press and other media, as well as some in the halls of Congress, are seizing on a few errors that have been found in the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in an attempt to discredit the entire report. None of the handful of mis-statements (out of hundreds and hundreds of unchallenged statements) remotely undermines the conclusion that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”
Other signatories of the letter include:
170. Michael Mann, Pennsylvania State University
288. Kevin E Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research
309. Tom Wigley, National Center for Atmospheric Research
Letter Authors: Stephen H. Schneider, Stanford University
Leonid Polyak seems to have some Warmist credentials…
You would think wouldn’t you that they would ask themselves why the sea ice is less today than when the Danes were able to farm in Greenland.
I have never been wooed by the intrinsic brilliance of people who go into science for a living, mostly it’s because they don’t want to leave school, but now I am ashamed to say that I’m astonished at the level of stupidity of some of these guys doing climate science.
I love how they state:
“The ice loss that we see today — the ice loss that started in the early 20th Century and sped up during the last 30 years — appears to be unmatched over at least the last few thousand years,”
And then go on….
“…Right now, just looking at ice extent is very difficult.”
Say again? Conclusions need to be based on science, rather than dogma. What did we do to deserve this never-ending scientific tragedy?
A meta-analysis and they got the data and methods from those studies from the nearly 300 authors? AFAIK, climate science data and methods are very hard to come by. I wonder who was so generous with their closely guarded proxy data, especially the methods used to extract temperature or, in this instance, the ice extent? Maybe Steve McIntyre should be auditing this and the underlying studies, since the data’s so readily available.
Interesting that this team has re-examined the data from past and ongoing studies.
Doesn’t that require the data to be published and accessible for others to review? I thought that wasn’t standard practice in climatology these days (Yes, you, Mr Jones).
Well, sometimes it is the EXTENT of the ice and sometimes it is the AGE of the ice and then it might be the VOLUME of the ice or whether or not it is ROTTEN….
What next? Whether it is the wrong colour or smells bad?
They are really milking this Arctic ice thing – obviously desperate funding might sink? freeze? evaporate? melt?
If they want to do something useful for the environment, these guys would be better picking up some litter….
geronimo says:
June 3, 2010 at 12:13 am
You would think wouldn’t you that they would ask themselves why the sea ice is less today than when the Danes were able to farm in Greenland.
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That should be the other way around: There was less ice in the time of the Norse.
That had to have been, because the western settlement up the coast of Greenland is now under permafrost.
“with a little skill & luck”? [snip] is that all about? Yes Mr & Mrs Smith, with a “little skill & luck” this steel framed building you & all your family will live in, for which you are paying a hefty fee, should stand up! No, it doesn’t quite stack for me.
A few problems, a) define a “few thousand years”, is that 1,000? 2,000? 5,000? 10,000? What? Using any of those time frames you can bet your bottom dollar on them being right! (Probably).
b) This paper would be more interseting if they had rationalised the issue that over the last 600,000 years the previous interglacials were warmer than today by several degrees C. By implication, there would have been a liklihood of less Arctic ice during those times than today. (NOAA ice core data central Greenland, from a guest post on this site some months ago now).
OK, so if we take this evidence with the Greenland ice core evidence of warmer times, then what does this mean? It might suggest that ice extent is not a function of temperature but dependent on something else – prevailing winds perhaps?
And here is an indicator of how we all get caught up in the confusion of the spin: When I look back at the article, I was surprised to find that no where does it say that the loss of sea ice is an indicator of warming.
The statements made in this release just get sucked into the controversy, and both sides affect its controversial status. Kevin Cave (above) is right when he points to the overwhelming presumption that an ice-free Arctic will be catastrophic. In another context it would not be. In fact, in the 1950s an ice free Arctic was widely considered both the historical norm, and a desirable state. And scientist (especially those in chilly Russia) were even trying to work out how to bring it on. This attitude was in a large part extinguished by the beat-up of a scare not of the ill effects of warming but that an ice-free Arctic would bring on the next Ice Age.
And the spin we are in on this issue gets even giddier when Mike Hulme opens a review of Singer’s book called Unstoppable Global Warming by saying “Climate change is happening.” We all know he is not intending to agree with Singer because he is a founding director of the Tyndall centre for Climate Change – and we know what sort of climate change that is.
Perhaps right now the key to inhibiting the propagation of the AGW nonsense is to find ways to slow down the spin…sometime we do that, but I wonder if at other time we only serve to speed it up.
Just The Facts says:
June 3, 2010 at 12:02 am
Leonid Polyak is also signer 219 of 320; [–snip rest–]
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Well, what were you expecting? Birds of a feather alight together.