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
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How much stimulous money has been spent on so-called “Climate reserch?”
How much went directly to Mann?
How much went to Ohio State Univercity?
I have read the amount is staggering, and that it has created 0.6 job. Is this true?
Judging from this study, the stimulous money saved at least one fellow from the bother of having to get a real job.
After the voter backlash next November, we should demand an audit of where every penny of the stimulous slush-fund went.
I’m surprised nobody caught this yet:
“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,”
Maybe someone should ask him about sources for the volume?
They would say that wouldn’t they?
Lets look at the 1961 (pre-AGW hysteria) take on this:
” the climatic optimum (of the current interglacial) was between about 5600 and 2500 B.C.’
” by 6000 B.C. all western Europe was occupied by a rich mixed forest of oak, alder and elm. This warm Atlantic period continued until about 2500 B.C. with gradually decreasing temperature Judging by the (fossil) flora of Spitsbergen, the Arctic Ocean was free of ice”
In : Encylopaedia Britannica, 1961 version, Author C.E.P.Brooks, Meteorological Office, UK (so it must be reliable….)
Its hard to see how there could have been NO ice in winter even then…but leaving that aside, is ice loss earlier this interglacial still accepted?
If it is, whats the issue now (apart from how do you translate a core record into physical ice area, thickness, and round the year variation) ?
DM
wayne says:
June 2, 2010 at 11:47 pm
Hi Wayne,
You can track currents positions and routes here http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shiplocations.phtml
I do not know about older dates.
Here’s a list of publications of the principal author:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=10&q=Leonid+Polyak&hl=en&as_sdt=4000
An excerpt from one, http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~wsoon/DanBotkin08-d/ArcticSeaIce_History_review_Darby_2006.pdf :
If relatively recent changes in the Arctic have been ‘profound’, and these must have been taking place without any anthropogenic gases, who is to say the current changes are not simply natural variations?
In the article’s conclusion:
Did you notice the passage “there is little doubt that these Holocene climatic variations are at least as significant as recent warming.”?
Clearly, the world has seen variations in the Arctic as significant as recent warming. The world survived, including the polar bear and seals. Also, these changes took place without any influence from mankind.
What’s the problem again?
[snip] Most of the interglacial had been warmer than today, says Greenland record and many others.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/alley2000/alley2000.gif
When this madness will end?
From the PIOMAS page at the Polar Science Center:
Long day, it’s late, brainwave supply down to reserve and near depletion.
Did I read that right, get the context correct? Polyak is talking about taking new measurements like for extent, as in right now for the current conditions, saying some day they’ll develop proxies for ice thickness that they can use for figuring current readings, as in currently there aren’t any such proxies for ice thickness? Or should I say, there aren’t any useful proxies?
Hey, let’s be fair. Whatever the authors’ track record, we should be focusing on the science. In this instance, the only real question relates to the validity of the proxies as a measure of ice cover and an appropriate definition of ‘ice cover.’ For example, are they talking about mean, median, or mode coverage per year, decade, or century? With respect to Steve Goddard, do the authors really pretend they can tell us anything about seasonal ice coverage? Unfortunately, the article doesn’t tell us – it has the look and feel of a university newsletter with a provocative title.
I have a theory that because polar bears dont smile as often as they used to and look rather sad nowadays they must be upset about dangerous global warming so I propose a mission to the Arctic with an nuclear ice breaker and perhaps a team of fifty social workers and psyschologists and crystal healers and traditional medicine men(persons) to establish a dialogue with the polar bears to ask then why they are so sad about dangerous global warming and the dissapearing ice.
I will need two million dollars in low demonination bills in an unmarked case which I will collect from the Ohio wallmart lost and found next week and I promise a full report on my progress sometime around 2050ish.
Do these people seriously believe that there was more sea ice when the Vikings colonised Greenland? It seems unlikely to me.
Certain skills and luck? What does that remind me of, hmmm let me think….it has something to do with my childhood…Jr.High journalism class?…eerrrmmm no, that was better written……oh, I remember now! “Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat! GROWR! Oops, must have been a 71/2!”
So if I get this right, again we’re supposed to be very very afraid of something that could be unprecedented if they just get more money to do more research? That about sums it up?
On a second note, excepting the 2007 ice hysteria, what’s supposed to be unprecedented about less ice 10 000 years after the last big ice age, and a couple of hundred years after the so called little ice age?
A POX on all their proxies
I guess we’ll see in September who is right about the current ice situation.
The least ice for “a few thousand years” ….. but not 8000 years?
AlanG says:
June 2, 2010 at 10:11 pm
OT: Al and Tipper Gore are separating after 40 years of marriage, after four children and three grandchildren, after just buying a $9 million house in Montecito, California, two weeks after celebrating their anniversary. I shouldn’t be delighted but I am. I wonder what the rows were about? Climategate perhaps?
Neighbors reported on numerous occasions hearing Tipper shouting “Nothing is settled, Al, nothing!”
Alan the Brit says:
June 3, 2010 at 12:48 am
[–snip–]
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).
That would be this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/
I was thinking, thats an ingenious notion, algae drifting from ice melt to the sea floor. Two thumbs up for a ‘possible/maybe’ transport mechanism, but add the term ‘proxy’ and we have a good case to doubt the result equates to cryo-temporal-statistico-climatico-mechanica-tistics.
Saying they can tell, with any certainty, what the extent of Arctic Ice cover was, before the invention of coherent thought, is a novel approach to a pitch for funding.
Lets see how this rolls, i’ve got a million lunatic fringe ideas, i’d gladly take money for, now if I can just find a popular subject to shamelessly exploit,….
“with certain skills and luck, we can reconstruct the conditions at the time the sediment was deposited.”
With certain skills (the price of the ticket), and luck, I can win the jackpot. Actually, I lack the skill but with a little funding – who knows?
Interesting qualifications: Skill & Luck.
But you don’t need skill & luck to unprecedentally beat the AGW video game, just the cheat codes.
M77 says:
June 3, 2010 at 1:05 am
The latest ice thickness techniques would be the Caitlin team in a ‘hurry up mode’, sticking holes in the thinnest, rottenest ice they can find.
I can’t wait for this one. We need a new paper to beat up on. If someone can get this when it comes out, please send to me. It’s a good bet that the A team has their mitts all over it.
Forcing the science to fit the (AGW) agenda. That’s all this paper is about. And they didn’t do a very convincing job of it, either.
I just mailed Leonid a nice bedtime read:
http://www.archive.org/stream/arcticice00zubo#page/462/mode/2up
Funny enough if i only pick all the blue M&M’s out of a packet and test them for Carbohydrate’s i can prove that its the blue M&M’s that make you gain weight, although to be a true test i would have to lose the data and you’d just have to believe me.
Now only if someone would give me a big grant so i never have to actually do any work again, just sit behind a computer and make it up as i go along, whats that you’ll only give me a grant if it gives you the results you want about blue M&M’s?