By Steven Goddard,
The headline reads “NASA Satellites Detect Unexpected Ice Loss in East Antarctica”
ScienceDaily (Nov. 26, 2009) — Using gravity measurement data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission, a team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin has found that the East Antarctic ice sheet-home to about 90 percent of Earth’s solid fresh water and previously considered stable-may have begun to lose ice.
Better move to higher ground! NASA also reported :
In 2007, NASA generated this map (below) of Antarctica showing just how hot it is getting down there in the land of Penguins.
Now I am really worried! But wait……. There are a few minor problems.
Assume for a minute that we accept the GRACE numbers. The first problem is Antarctica contains a lot of ice : 30 × 10^6 km³. At 100 km³ per year, it will take 300,000 years to melt.
The next problem is with the NASA temperature map. From the NASA article “The scientists estimate the level of uncertainty in the measurements is between 2-3 degrees Celsius.” They are claiming precision of better than 0.05°C, with an error more than an order of magnitude larger than their 25 year trend. The error bar is large enough that the same data could just as easily indicate rapid cooling and blue colors. That will get you an F in any high school science class.
And that is exactly what happened. The hot red map above was preceded by a cold blue map which showed Antarctica getting cooler. What motivation could NASA have had to change colors without mathematical justification?
NASA justified their heating up Antarctica with this comment :
This image was first published on April 27, 2006, and it was based on data from 1981-2004. A more recent version was published on November 21, 2007. The new version extended the data range through 2007, and was based on a revised analysis that included better inter-calibration among all the satellite records that are part of the time series.
As I have already pointed out, this is absurd. Their error bar is so large that they could have painted the map any color they wanted. Apparently someone at NASA wanted red.
But why are we looking at temperature trends anyway? The real issue is absolute temperatures. Some of the regions in which GRACE claims ice loss in East Antarctica average colder than -30°C during the summer, and never, ever get above freezing. How can you melt ice at those temperatures?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Antarctic_surface_temperature.png
I overlaid the Antarctica summer temperature map on the GRACE “melt” map, below. As you can see, GRACE is showing ice loss in places that stay incredibly cold, all year round.
The problem with GRACE is that it measures gravity, not ice. Changes in gravity can be due to a lot of different things beneath the surface of the ice. Antarctica has active magma chambers. Plate tectonics and isostasy also cause gravity changes.
We should be clever enough not to be blinded by technology. The claims that ice is melting in East Antarctica don’t have a lot of justification.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The poles are great places to lie about because relatively few people ever see them, let alone notice some kind of amorphous change over the decades. It’s bad enough when the AGW crowd talk about changes that are(n’t) happening in our neighborhoods but when it comes the the hidden corners of the globe – The poles, at depth, high desert – virtually all first hand knowledge to counter their statements is in very short supply.
Robert:
And how do you account for the uncertainty in the isostatic adjustments? It is the 900 pound gorilla that affects all of those unanimous studies you are quoting. In West Antarctica we have some idea about it, based on GPS measurements on exposed nunataks, but in most of East Antarctica there is no exposed bedrock, so it’s really just guesswork.
A couple of months ago a similar complaint was lodged here, to which one of the moderators replied that WordPress presented the comments to them in LIFO sequence, so that if the moderator took a break for an hour or two, comments could get considerably out of sequence. (Not that that’s necessarily what happened in your case.)
If glaciers are out-flowing faster because edge-ice has melted because of warming seas, shouldn’t there be a lot more icebergs among the sea ice? Is anyone tracking what the percentage or amount of bergs is? If not, why not?
Roger Knights
If there were a recent change in the rate of glacial movement near the coast, it would take tens or hundreds of years for the effect to propagate 1000km inland.
Ice is extremely viscous at -50C.
From Wikipedia
The Antarctic Plate is a tectonic plate covering the continent of Antarctica and extending outward under the surrounding oceans. The Antarctic Plate has a boundary with the Nazca Plate, the South American Plate, the African Plate, the Indo-Australian Plate, the Scotia Plate and a divergent boundary with the Pacific Plate forming the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge.
The Antarctic plate is roughly 60,900,000 square kilometers[1]. It is the fifth biggest plate in the world.
The Antarctic plate movement is estimated at least 1 centimeter/per year towards the Atlantic Ocean
1cm per year laterally measured, but this means there is motion and redistribution below of the masses that compose the plate, and it is logical to believe they are of the same order of magnitude. This is different from the isostatic corrections taken because of the ice volume. The ground moves and changes densities.
It is not possible to solve an equation with more unknowns than data inputs, which is what they are doing. They are ignoring changes in gravitational pulls due to tectonic motions which are of the same order of magnitude as the gravitational changes they measure.
I worked at Vanda Station in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica for 4 months.
The station is on the edge of Lake Vanda – a 5×1 km lake that is some 270 m deep. It is an inland lake that is fed by melt water from a coastal glacier and is about 15 km east of the divide of the transantarctic mountain range. It is very sensitive to climate change and during the eighties and early nineties it was rising by 600mm during the summer and losing 300mm from sublimation causing a net rise of 300mm per year. this rise has now ceased. The highest level the lake reached was 46 m above the 1985 level and that was 5000 year ago. It has also dropped to only 70m depth during some ice ages.
The point for this discussi0n is that in Antarctica there is negligible melt, sublimation is the main form of ice loss from the surface. This lake gives some indication of the rate of sublimation from the surface of antarctic ice (the rate would may be slower on the plateau as it is colder, but the air is also dryer which would increase sublimation).
On the other side there is accretion of ice from the atmosphere plus a miniscule amount of fallen snow (5mm / year near the divide at the head of the )Wright Valley.
However it is difficult to determine how much snow falls. Many people fail to understand that blizzards are blown surface snow – not falling snow. As these blizzards can have the air to 1000 ft full of snow it is impossible to detemine how much snow falls relative to what is just being blown around.
In December January when the sea ice on the Ross Sea has broken out then any cloud moving inland across the continent will leave snow where ever the cloud is in contact with the land – but it rarely falls as snow.
There is some 20 years of data on the rate of ablation of glaciers on the edge of the plateau and on various lakes in the dry Valleys but when NZ government formed NIWA (National Institute of Water and Atmosphere) they told the hydrologist in charge of this project to drop his data in a rubbish bin – which he did and then put it in his car. Hopefully it will emerge some day.
This was pretty criminal as his data on the glaciers would be very useful today to look at what is actually happening in Antarctica from 1974 to 1992.
Hope that provides some useful information for those not familliar with Antarctic ice.
The next problem is with the NASA temperature map. From the NASA article “The scientists estimate the level of uncertainty in the measurements is between 2-3 degrees Celsius.” They are claiming precision of better than 0.05°C, with an error more than an order of magnitude larger than their 25 year trend. The error bar is large enough that the same data could just as easily indicate rapid cooling and blue colors.
I’m not sure this is quite what they mean. Individual single measurements may have an uncertainty of 2-3 deg but that’s not the same as the uncertainty in the trend. If the uncertainty is due to a lack of precision then with a large enough sample the errors should pretty much cancel themselves out. Consider this analogy:
Say I want to measure the average height of an adult male in the UK but can only measure to the nearest foot. This basically means that anyone below 5ft 6in is recorded as 5 ft and anyone above 5ft 6in is recorded as 6ft (ignore those below 4ft 6in and above 6ft 6in for this purpose). The uncertainty in the individual measurements is clearly quite larege. However, providing I take a large enough sample – and one which is representative of the population as a whole I should still get a mean value which is not too far wrong. From a sample of 1000 I should get ~160 (16%) who are recorded as being 5ft tall and ~840 (84%) as being 6 ft tall. The mean of the sample would therefore be 0.16*5 + 0.84*6 = 5.84 (i.e. ~5ft 10in).
This is actually not a particularly good example because the uncertainty is not evenly distributed around the mean of the population. For example if the true mean height were 5ft 6in then we’d get around half measuring 5ft and half measuring 6ft (mean = 5ft 6in). The point being that if the uncertainty/errors are understood then they can be managed and – even if there is a bias – it won’t necessarily affect the trend.
It seems to me that the temperature of the oceans around Antartica is irrelevant. They are, and have been, above freezing for a very long time. Similarly the inland ice in antartica is at an average temperature which is below freezing. It seems to me that you will only get appreciable loss of ice when the inland ice moves towards the sea where it melts in the warmer waters. It is not at all clear to me what that mechanism might tell us about AGW. Any connection it might have to AGW is extremely obscure.
Of course, what we are really interested in here is not melting ice, or even rising sea levels. What we are really interested in is average loss of land area due to (possibly) rising sea levels. We don’t need any clever technology to check for average loss of land area. We need a good map from a hundred years back and a good map from today – and someone with time on their hands to compare the two.
Seems a lot of this “science” is about spending as much money as possible, rather than being as effective as possible.
Lets say that the active magma under the place is melting the lower regions of ice, for the sake of arguement. Cap and Trade isn’t going to do a thing about it.
0.1°C ±3°C
That’s the Antarctic situation cleared up then.
Steve Goddard,
It might be useful for you to respond in detail to Robert’s remarks which do not at all seem tangential to this discussion. Please?
Be careful. The entire atmosphere above you may come crashing down on you and crush you too.
Peter Foster says:
June 30, 2010 at 12:59 am
I worked at Vanda Station in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica for 4 months.
The station is on the edge of Lake Vanda – a 5×1 km lake that is some 270 m deep. It is an inland lake that is fed by melt water from a coastal glacier and is about 15 km east of the divide of the transantarctic mountain range. It is very sensitive to climate change and during the eighties and early nineties it was rising by 600mm during the summer and losing 300mm from sublimation causing a net rise of 300mm per year. this rise has now ceased. The highest level the lake reached was 46 m above the 1985 level and that was 5000 year ago. It has also dropped to only 70m depth during some ice ages.
???
This last sentence “It has also dropped to only 70m depth during some ice ages” implies that the melt stopped during the ice ages, right?.
You are saying that the observation that the rise has ceased points to the direction of cooling, no? Not enough summer melt?
Who was the hydrologist in charge?
anna v says:
June 30, 2010 at 12:37 am (Edit)
It is not possible to solve an equation with more unknowns than data inputs, which is what they are doing. They are ignoring changes in gravitational pulls due to tectonic motions which are of the same order of magnitude as the gravitational changes they measure.
Well said Anna. So in layman’s terms, it’s a load of old cobblers.
I’ve always wondered why NASA never went back to the moon, or managed to build new and approved space vessels.
Now I know. They ousted all the good engineers for climate extremists.
All that needs to be shown!
Construction Crane Buried in Ice Sheet
http://www.iceagenow.com/Construction_Crane_Buried_in_Ice.htm
Oh!,how silly of me, the DAGW is heating the steel thus the crane and towers are sinking
“Thinning reduces lateral traction and through grounding line retreat, basal traction…these events lead to accelerated ice flow and thinning directly upstream, which can then diffuse rapidly further inland [Joughin et al., 2003; Payne et al., submitted manuscript, 2004]…Ocean currents on average 0.5_C warmer than freezing appear to have precipitated a sizable drawdown ofice from the WAIS interior. Elsewhere, ice shelf erosion [Shepherd et al., 2003] and disintegration have preceded increased discharge from glaciers upstream [De Angelis and
Skvarca, 2003]. The consequences of a warming ocean on the grounded Antarctic ice mass needs more attention than it has received to date [Warwick et al., 1996].”
“Ocean temperature was estimated beneath each ice shelf from vertical profiles recorded at 22 stations (see Figure 1) occupied during a 1994 cruise around Pine Island Bay [Giulivi and Jacobs, 1997].”
Warm ocean is eroding West Antarctic Ice Sheet
Andrew Shepherd,1 Duncan Wingham,2 and Eric Rignot3
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 31, L23402, doi:10.1029/2004GL021106, 2004
Okay Goddard, your move. Prove its not warming there, and that glacier acceleration does not propogate inland. Due note, there is a plethora of evidence which shows that propogation occurs very quickly. I’ll look up the papers in a few minutes. Radar interferometry allows for direct measurements of glacier accelerations. It’s not guess work.
The whole truth!
VolcanoesThe South Pole
http://hotgates.stanford.edu:3455/SouthPole/554
“The profiles in Figure 8 show a particularly close correspondence between sudden, large-scale retreat and
sudden acceleration. In this case, a retreat of 1400 to 1600 m between 1998 and 2003 was associated with an acceleration of 40% for both glaciers.”
“The acceleration appears to be linked to frontal retreat and thinning. We suggest that thinning of the buoyant glacier termini under a prolonged negative mass
balance regime can explain both the acceleration and retreat
[after van der Veen, 1996; Vieli et al., 2001].”
Widespread acceleration of tidewater glaciers on the Antarctic
Peninsula
H. D. Pritchard1 and D. G. Vaughan1
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 112, F03S29, doi:10.1029/2006JF000597, 2007
“Between 1996 and 2007, Pine Island Glacier sped up 42% and ungrounded over most of its ice plain. Smith Glacier accelerated 83% and ungrounded as well.
Speed up propagates beyond the limit of the PALSAR data…
The inferred near balance of the 1970s suggests that the ocean changes responsible for that evolution originated for the most part around that time. This coincides with a period of increasingly more positive southern annular mode (SAM) [Marshall et al., 2004], which has increased westerly wind flow, leading to northward-drift of surface water and sea ice, and bringing warmer Antarctic circumpolar water (ACC) against the coastline.”
Changes in West Antarctic ice stream dynamics
observed with ALOS PALSAR data
Eric Rignot1,2
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 35, L12505, doi:10.1029/2008GL033365, 2008
Once again, the evidence supports my conclusion.
“Thomas et al. (2004b) showed that the ungrounding of the ice plain upstream of
the grounding line was the most significant control on glacier speed, and that the
corresponding perturbation in force balance could propagate far upstream
quickly.”
“One implication of these observations is that ice shelves do not need to
experience surface melting, rifting or collapse to cause significant glacier change.
A thinning ice shelf in front of a weakly grounded glacier may trigger a rapid
retreat with important consequences.”
“Jacobs et al. (1996) found that warm circumpolar deep water intrudes onto the
continental ice shelf in Pine Island Bay. Jacobs et al. (1992) subsequently showed
that the signature of ice shelf melting in the Amundsen Sea is observed in a
40-year time-series of oceanographic data collected in the Ross Sea. A warmer
ocean is the only plausible explanation for the simultaneous melting of all ice
shelves, the simultaneous glacier speed up from an entire region and the absence
of ice shelf thickening in response to faster flow (Shepherd et al. 2004; Payne et al.
2004).”
Changes in ice dynamics and mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet
Eric Rignot
Phil Trans. R. Soc 2006, 264, 1637-1655
Thereby proving-
-Inland propagation occurs quickly
-melting on ice shelves is not required for the loss of mass
-important portions (pine island bay) of the WAIS are experiencing oceanic warming.
Lets see your evidence countering mine?
My take on this would be that the AGW crowd are putting their backs to the wall as they are surrounded by inconvenient facts. The window of opportunity for their fame and glory is rapidly diminishing. The American government is under pressure from up coming senate election, to do something about ” carbon ” or its all over red rover. Much money is at stake, not just in grants, but carbon trading per sec. Rabidness is getting louder, but less are listening.
As to the ice melting and or falling into the ocean, that makes the water cold, sucking heat out of the worlds climate. The southern hemisphere is having a touch of the unexpected colds at the moment. With some nasty looking cold fronts moving up from antarctic at this time it sure not getting warmer soon.
The alarmists are pointing at the melt of the arctic as proof of AGW,, this is also pumping heat out of the ocean. With both hemispheres pumping heat out of the ocean we can expect some nasty winters.
Warmer winters are a keystone of AGW how many cold ones will it take before they go ooh aah well umm er er maybe,,..
Robert
Suppose there had of been a recent increase in ice movement near the terminus of the glaciers. It would take hundreds of years for that to be expressed as changes in ice thickness 1000km away, as is claimed in the GRACE maps.
Ice at -30C is extremely high viscosity. If they dig a hole in the ground a mile away from your house, does it change the elevation of your house much?
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050516/full/news050516-10.html
Willis,
the west side has more outlet glaciers than the east in this region (see Cook et al., 2005 )
Brian Angliss,
Leakage from outside the ice sheet occurs because the averaging function extends beyond
the boundaries of the ice sheet. To account for the omission of l = 1 we used degree-1 coefficients calculated from a combination of GRACE and ocean model output as described by Swenson et al. [2008].
Several studies pointed out already that the ice sheet losses were
accelerating, e.g., Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) surveys [Rignot and Kanagaratnam, 2006; Rignot et al., 2008a, 2008b], GRACE [Velicogna and Wahr, 2006b; Chen et al., 2006a, 2006b], and altimetry [Howat et al., 2008; Krabill et al., 2004]
Yet, results from the analysis of glacier motion and surface elevation changes suggest a continuous increase in
mass loss until 2006. This supports a quadratic trend for the GRACE mass observations, instead of a straight line.
Increasing rates of ice mass loss from the Greenland
and Antarctic ice sheets revealed by GRACE
I. Velicogna1,2
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 36, L19503, doi:10.1029/2009GL040222, 2009
TTY, see below:
Mass changes in three regions of Antarctica that display prominent geoid-height change are determined by adjusting predictions of glacier melting at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula and in the Amundsen Sea Sector, and of the glacial-isostatic adjustment (GIA) over the Ronne Ice Shelf. We use the GFZ RL04, CNES RL01C, JPL RL04 and CSR RL04 potential-coefficient releases, and show that, although all data sets consistently reflect the prominent mass changes, differences in the mass-change estimates are considerably larger than the uncertainties estimated by the propagation of the GRACE errors. We then use the bootstrapping
method based on the four releases and six time intervals, each with 3.5 years of data, to quantify the variability of the mean masschange bestimates.
Regional ice-mass changes and glacial-isostatic adjustment in
Antarctica from GRACE
Ingo Sasgen a,⁎, Zdeněk Martinec a,b, Kevin Fleming a
Earth and Planetary Science Letters 264 (2007) 391–401
Once again, I am not trying to overflow people with literature. It is just I see that clearly individuals need to refresh their knowledge on antarctic glaciology prior to making posts they can not support with evidence…