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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Umm, by such methods, couldn’t the most they hope for is to describe the changes of the spring max extent over time?
This is SSDD(same ****, different day).
Total waste of funding and time to create whatever outcome they want.
In previous inter-glacials sea levels were 3 to 20 m higher than today and we are now 10,000 years into a longer than average inter-glacial. I realise that melting sea ice does not increase sea levels but on past form a lot more ice will melt before the next ice age.
Pretzels with fudge, just another day at the AGW trough. This is just dressed up to appear real. Does the world explode if the arctic is ice free?
AGW-Alarmists, It’s like watching grants for daily scare stories, who can make their story the scariest, and who will finally hit on the scary winner. Sheesh … science needs to take a break, before they lose every once of credibility with the public they have left.
Aren’t they scared of finding oil? That would be poetic justice.
The Kelly and Lowell 2009 paper in QSR seems to contradict noted trends in the Watts cited study out of Ohio, this (at length from p. 2104, vol. 28) in reference to terrestrial glaciation in Greenland…
As can be seen from the data discussed above, there were
significant changes in local glacier extents in Greenland during
latest Pleistocene and Holocene time. In most cases, these local
glacier fluctuations reflect changes in paleoclimate. In general, local
glaciers were smaller than at present or nonexistent during earlyto-
mid Holocene time and grew to their maximum Holocene
extents during Historical time. This pattern of local glacier change is
consistent with borehole temperature data from the GRIP ice core
(Dahl-Jensen et al., 1998) (Fig. 6) and was likely influenced by
precession-driven summer insolation which peaked in the
Northern Hemisphere at 10–12 ka and decreased throughout the
Holocene. In some locations in Greenland, there is evidence for
millennial-scale fluctuations of local glaciers. For example, local
glaciers near Tasiilaq (Hasholt, 2000; Knudsen et al., 2008) and in
the Scoresby Sund region (Lowell et al., 2008) experienced recession
and advance approximately during the MedievalWarm Period
(w800–1170 AD) and Little Ice Age (w1300–1850 AD), respectively.
This late Holocene millennial-scale change is consistent with
borehole temperature data from the GRIP ice core (Dahl-Jensen
et al., 1998) (Fig. 6), but cannot be attributed to insolation driven by
longer-term orbital changes.
The last sentence is important, as it implies that secular time-scale solar variation MIGHT be at work. You will note also that the Middle Holocene situation is an ice minimum.
Bruce M. ALbert, Ph.D., Leverhulme PDRA U. Durham, UK and U. Texas Austin (USA) Research Fellow, D. Geography and Environment
Yet another paper published before completion? One of the bad outcomes of IPCC deadlines is that we see many Work in Progress papers rather than fully considered, completed work papers.
Question from Antarctica. If the bottom of the Vostok core, 700,000 years ago, is now just above basement, does that mean that there was a quite small thickness of Antarctic Ice then? Or did a huge thickness of ice that was once below the bottom point of drilling get squeezed sideways over those 700,000 years, so we conclude that we have a dynamic Antarctic ice thickness? If so, how do we create a datum that shows how thick it was at a nominated time? These so-called proxies can be so loose as to be incredible.
Perhaps an interesting article in GRL: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2010/2010GL042652.shtml
ElectroMagnetic ice thickness survey with aircraft.
Here is an article referencing the above:
http://www.klimaatgek.nl/cms/
Scroll down to 15-5-2010
It’s in Dutch unfortunately.
Leonid Polyak should be ashamed for producing this bilge. “Certain skills and luck”? Scientific fraud looks more likely. “Patterns in the proxy data that fit together like pieces of a puzzle”? He “found” what he was being paid to “find”. Quelle suprise.
Since so little is actually known about it, and temperatures aren’t cooperating, it seems that Arctic Ice may be the Warmists’ Last Hurrah.
Slow down there. I think you are all exaggerating the difficulty of using proxies. Calibration is actually very straightforward when you know in advance what the data will be required to confirm over the full time period of interest! It’s a totally reliable methodology!
By the way, what is meant by the expression: sarc off?
[sarc off = sarcasm off; end of sarcastic comment. ~dbs]
..after a winning weekend in Vegas the giddy Mr. Polyak thought he would try his hand at the science table..
-craps-
It might be interesting to see the text of the grant that funded this work to see if it was predicated on reaching this conclusion. Once we consider something to be a ‘settled’ issue, it becomes very difficult to see the built-in bias our statements may have on that point. I am not sure it is appropriate to use public funding on work specifically intended to *prove* that we do have a dangerous Global Warming global warming problem or to prove that one political party provides better government than the other.
Just the facts: “It’s also interesting that all these guys seem to know each other… Nothing conclusive, but certainly interesting…”
And worth keeping on file. I can personally attest to the close relationships among climate scientists, being acquainted with at least two of them. I am pretty sure these two have known each other for many years, at least back to their university days as young radicals, and possibly even longer.
Since then, when they are not meeting in person, they have exchanged a voluminous correspondence, initially by letter and more latterly by the electronic email. So in that sense they are pretty typical of climate scientists the world over, as we all discovered to our dismay last November.
Frankly, I am very curious as to the nature of this long-term relationship. One wonders how much help they have been giving each other on the quiet; help that they have conveniently “forgotten” to record in their notebooks to evade a climate audit.
What I have discovered to my cost is the ruthless nature of the climate crowd. Just a few weeks ago at a party one of these so-called scientists, who I suspect had drunk a little too much of the kool-aid, was boasting of his skill with “tipping points”, while looking at me in a meaningful way.
This seemingly casual remark was clearly intended to intimidate. It worked, at least on me, and after that party I kept a profile lower than the Arctic ice. Unfortunately, these scientists know where I live, and their reach is long. Ask my wife.
Right now, though, I am enjoying some welcome breathing space. I hear my two acquaintances are travelling to attend a “conference”, where they will probably meet other like-minded “scientists”.
Just one more piece of the puzzle.
I can extrapolate better than they can. They can translate extrapolation into superstitution better than I can.
This story is loading with subjective remarks , which by themselves have nothing to do with an objective description of reality . This is appearing to be a study made of studies with the only purpose to find a justification of the agw alarmist stories .
Gaily they are omitting the period when the vikings grew wheat in greenland …….
Apparently the alarmists are running out of arguments and under strong pressure to create the state of fear for their own purposes . Search and thou shalt find , but is this also true for a demonic description of reality ?
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,”
Is the resolution that good to accurately compare losses, especially the faster loss over 30 years.
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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.”
___________________________________________________________________________
Not only farm but explore the area:
“…A stone inscribed with runes has been found telling that in 1333, three Greenlanders wintered on the island of Kingigtorssuaq just below 73 degrees north. There is also evidence of voyages to the Canadian arctic. Two cairns have been discovered in Jones Sound above 76 degrees North and two more have been found on Washington Irving Island at 79 degrees north….” http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/vikings/Greenland.html
Washington Irving Island is at the entrance to Dobbin Bay, eastern Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada. Ellesmere Island is well within the arctic circle and not that far from the north pole (about 600 miles)
An interesting description of Norse habitation of North America plus a Norse map of the arctic area, north pole islands and all: http://www.heritage.nf.ca/exploration/norse.html
Norse Map: http://www.heritage.nf.ca/exploration/vmap.html
Here are the Greenland temperatures from Ice Core data. The temperature at that time was 2C warmer than today. http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png
geronimo says:
June 3, 2010 at 12:13 am
“…..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.”
_________________________________________________________________________
Not stupid just greedy. Al Gore and Maurice Strong (father of Global Warming) were engaged in a scheme (Molten Metal Inc) to fleece the American public while Gore held the office of VP. Al Gore hyped the company on the first US earth day and Maurice Strong made a killing before the company went belly up.
As a chemist I want to know why the heck they built a full size facility, funded by taxpayer grants BEFORE doing the pilot plant work???? Pilot plants are the first step in scale up from lab bench to full size plants. I have seen skipping this step cause some bad accidents (equipment blown up)
The story: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/04/us/panel-to-quiz-clinton-s-96-campaign-chief-on-stock-gift.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all%5D
Lawsuits: http://securities.stanford.edu/1008/AxlervMoltenMeta/001.html
House Committee Investigation: http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20040830154236-07181.pdf
Follow the money: google Maurice Strong and David Rockefeller, his mentor.
The problem with trying to compare any old proxy with present actual measured data is they are not the same. The older the proxy, the less accurate the time resolution. The proxy, thus, is an average over a longer period of time. Also, physical averaging occurs over time. A 100 year average is not comparable to a one year average. I f there were no change in climate, at least half of the one year averages would be greater than the 100 year average. When you go back a million years, the time resolution is around 10,000 years. It takes a lot of statistical skill to compensate for this bias in the analysis.
I did this calculation once and it is lost on my hard disc somewhere, but I calculated the total heat generated by humans and compared it to the absorption by the sun and concluded that it was insignificant. Does anyone have that calculation? It is 3 or 4 computers back for me so I will have a bit of trouble finding it and i don’t want to do the crunching again.
PW
I don’t know how this jives with anecdotal evidence of say, ships on the NW passage 100 years ago … or kayakers reaching so far north in the 19th century. Or how they reconcile this with the Holocene maximum ….
– seems to be a bizarre claim.
Caleb says:
June 3, 2010 at 1:05 am
“How much stimulous money has been spent on so-called Climate reserch?”
Here’s your answer…
Final Stimulus Bill Provides $21.5 Billion for Federal R&D…
And remember that this was taxpayer-funded “stimulus” ca$h- over and above the normal annual federal appropriations!! Meanwhile, my friends were being laid off in 2009 as the economy tanked and the unemployment rate shot to 10%.
As long as tons of our money keeps flowing to the AGW crowd, they will continue to publish reports like this one. After all, it’s what they’re paid to do…
I feel compelled to defend my fellow Ohio State alum, Dr. Polyak. This loss of Arctic sea ice is certainly alarming. I think the Earth will not be completely “healed” of the affliction of global warming until it has been safely returned to a full-blown ice age. Truthfully, I won’t be able to rest comfortably until Ohio–and the biggest part of the Northern Hemisphere–is once again glaciated in pure, clean ice. That reminds me….I need to turn off the lights in the kitchen….
This has to be one of the biggest stinking crocks passing for science to come by in a while. So many good issues raised above.
Volume is everything, NOT cover.
“Frank K. says:
June 3, 2010 at 5:45 am
Caleb says:
June 3, 2010 at 1:05 am
“How much stimulous money has been spent on so-called Climate reserch?”
Here’s your answer…
Final Stimulus Bill Provides $21.5 Billion for Federal R&D…
And remember that this was taxpayer-funded “stimulus” ca$h- over and above the normal annual federal appropriations!! Meanwhile, my friends were being laid off in 2009 as the economy tanked and the unemployment rate shot to 10%.
As long as tons of our money keeps flowing to the AGW crowd, they will continue to publish reports like this one. After all, it’s what they’re paid to do…”
This is scary! If there is seriously reduced economic activity, there will be seriously reduced tax revenue. Where do these people think all the money comes from? Oh yeah, that’s right. It’s plucked right out of the air we breathe, and our wallets, just to be sure.