UPDATE: Apparently Joe Romm can’t handle this information. Ecotretas records the action here.
Readers may have seen this BBC story:
BBC – Earth News – Climate change threatens slow swimming narwhals
“That places them at high risk from climate change, as narwhals will not be able to cope with shifting, highly mobile ice floes caused by warmer seas.”
As explained below, a narwhal fossil find suggests that the Arctic may have been more open and warmer in the past.
Guest post by Ecotretas (visit his blog here)
In early August, an ice island calved from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier. Later in the month, an ice chunk broke off Ellesmere Island, away from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf. An interesting phrase from the CBC article caught my attention:
| At 40 metres thick, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is estimated to be 3,000 to 5,000 years old, jutting off the island like an extension of the land. |
The key detail was the age of the ice shelf. Being 3000 to 5000 years old correlates very well with the existence of the Holocene climatic optimum. This data is confirmed from several sources, including references several decades old:
| Radiocarbon dates and glaciological features of the Ward Hunt area along northernmost Ellesmere Island suggest the following chronology, which is consistent with world-wide climatic oscillations: 1) 10,000-4100 B.P.: deglaciation, and development of several marine levels, particularly one now 40 m. above sea level, at 7500+-300 B.P.; 2) 4100-2400 years B.P.: climatic deterioration, glacial readvance and formation of ice shelves; 3) 2400-1400 years B.P.: general climatic amelioration; development of dust ablation horizon on Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, glacial retreat; 4) 1400 B.P. – present : climatic deterioration, with renewed thickening of Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, and beginnings of growth of ice rises; the last-mentioned experienced maximum growth in the interval between 350-170 years ago; slight glacial readvance. |
Steve McIntyre brought up some interesting questions several years ago, and has raised the issue several other times. Other indirect evidence of less ice in the Holocene, and one of my favorites, is given by the discovery of a narwhal tusk, on the northwest coast of Ellesmere Island, that was radiocarbon dated at 6,830 ± 50 B.P. From the abstract of “An early Holocene narwhal tusk from the Canadian high Arctic” we can read:
| The specimen represents an early Holocene range extension of 400–700 km over the present. Because the narwhal requires abundant open water to survive, the Holocene tusk is an important independent item of proxy data on palaeoclimatic change. Contemporary migration routes are directly related to seasonal sea ice in the inter-island channels of the central Canadian Arctic archipelago. The presence of a narwhal on the northwest Ellesmere Island coast at 6,830 ± 50 B. P. suggests that sea ice and ice-shelf conditions were more favourable at that time. A comprehensive chronological framework for late Quaternary and Holocene geomorphic/climatic events from northern Ellesmere Island records a warm early Holocene characterized by abundant driftwood entry into the high Arctic. |
The same issues can naturally be also found for the Nares Strait, where the Petermann glacier drains. A paper by John England, referenced in the CBC article above, doesn’t leave any doubts about what was going on several millenia ago:
| Re-entry of the sea throughout Nares Strait is shown by a series of paleogeographic maps based on geomorphic evidence and radiocarbon dates on shells associated with marine limit. Deglaciation at the north end of the strait occurred by 10.1 ka BP and, at the
south end, by 9.0 ka BP. Nares Strait may still have been blocked by ice north of Kane Basin at 8 ka BP, however by 7.5 ka BP it provided an unobstructed seaway from the Arctic Ocean to Baffin Bay. |
Other papers, like “Late Pleistocene-Holocene Marine Geology of Nares Strait Region“, from Mudie et al., don’t leave much doubts about what was the past climate of the region:
| Palaeoceanographic reconstructions from dinocyst assemblages show that from ~6.5 to 3.3 ka BP, there were large oscillations in summer sea surface temperature (SST) from 3 °C cooler than now to 6 °C warmer, and that variations in SIC ranged from two months more to four months less of heavy ice compared to now. |
While it is sad that ice sheets are melting, it’s nothing new for Nature. In historical terms, ice sheets have gone, and gotten back. One might just wonder what was causing climate change then? Or understand that this melting may even be good for science, as collecting samples from where ice is gown, will certainly reveal our past history in more detail…
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
“They appear to be one of the slowest swimmers out there.”
Nonsense. They can outrun a killer whale.
As with the whole Poley Bear “issue”, the biggest threat is human hunting. In the case of the Narwhal, though, their tusk alone can fetch $4,500 in the eurasian market.
Just wanted to add that the graph in the Wikipedia entry on the Holocene Climatic Optimum is one of those that convinced me that AGW is a complete fabrication.
Below is a fascinating read. You’ll need coffee and biscuits ready as it’s a long read. :o)
“Historic Variation in Arctic Ice” by Tony B
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/historic-variation-in-arctic-ice-tony-b/
Here are two more links from our Scandinavian cousins which suggest things were not always icy in the Arctic:
Holocene sea-ice variations in Greenland: onshore evidence (from studies of driftwood): 1. Ole Bennike. Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Oster Voldgade 10, DK-1350 Copenhagen K, Denmark
http://hol.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/14/4/607
and http://www.apex.geo.su.se/images/stories/apex2009.pdf
For ICE DATING see this link:
http://www.icr.org/article/ice-cores-age-earth/
I’m getting a terrible feeling that anthroprogenic Native Americans and their domesticated Narwals are going to now be blamed for melting the Arctic Ice Cap when the Bag Guys forced millions of Narwals to dive under the ice when trying to escape the dinner table and they released all that terrible methane in fear of the imminent demise of one of their number at the hands of 2 1/2 men. There’s just no other proven settled scientific explanation for it. Fat Albert will no doubt get another Noble Casino Chip and ‘Unofficial’ Grand Peace Prize for this discovery, and Nature Magazine scientific article, and Book, and TV special for Kindergardners to watch, etc., etc.. What a guy! What a worthless, @ur momisugly#$%%^&##@ur momisugly guy! (Poor Tipper! She left too soon.)
Same story for me. Romm is censoring content which shows his thesis to be wrong.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/09/08/censorship-award-for-the-day/
Very interesting Ecotretas, I have placed link to your Blog in my pages: http://www.oarval.org/ClimateChange.htm – Climate Change; The cyclic nature of Earth’s climate
http://www.oarval.org/CambioClima.htm – Cambio Climático; La naturaleza cíclica del clima Terrestre
http://www.oarval.org/meteorologFL.htm – Meteorology for South Florida and the Caribbean
http://www.oarval.org/meteorolog.htm – Meteorología para Caracas, Venezuela, y el Caribe
Keep up the good work!
I wonder what the Narwhal and other marine mammals did during previous glacial periods?
More fun from Romm
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/09/08/reading-romm/
Gee I was hoping for comment by R Gates, paulw, Anu, and a few others who usually appear to admonish skeptics’ and crow about small victories. I guess they cherry-pick their posts too. They show up for all the zags but skip the zigs. Integrity much?
berniel & Alan the Brit
You two probably know more about academic studies based on environmental determinism than do I. Quoting Ellen Churchill Semple and Ellsworth Huntington suggests so. Anyway, the facts you take from them, perhaps, are allowed. Their viewpoint is much tarnished as is their interpretation of events.
http://geography.about.com/od/culturalgeography/a/envdeterminism.htm
Isn’t there a theory that the earth’s axis shifts every 10,000 years and this affects our climate? I though the last incident was about 6000 years ago.
The narwhals are safe for this year:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
The warmest year on record which GISS decided on the basis of first half of 2010 temp results may have jumped the gun a bit – the temp has slipped below last years’ just now and with the deepening La Nina and hurricanes fizzling out, loose ice for narwhals to bump their heads on will soon be getting scarce again.
We sceptics would want to be especially sensitive about summary moral encoding of science and of particular movements in science. The application of eugenics theory in 1930s Germany makes it very difficult to deal with a whole lot of science that emerged out of Darwinism before WWII.
Some of this science was infused with, and in support of, colonalist racial chauvanism. Huntington? Yes, outrageously so! Nonetheless it is undeniable (but yet ignorable) that some influencial and valuable ideas developed in this milieu, ideas lately re-packaged in a new softer language, and now only becoming permissible in the sociology and psychology.
The article linked above counters what was labelled harshly as ‘determinism’ with the softer ‘possibilism’ — where “the environment sets limitations for cultural development but it does not completely define culture.” Would you trust an Alarmist’s account of a sceptics position? Read Huntington yourself and you will find that this is pretty much what he defends against his contempory critics in just the text I quoted. (As for his racial chauvinism, no defence was called for!)
You caution that “the facts you take from them, perhaps, are allowed.” Why not allow all the facts of their scientific speculations? Why not allow a debate over Huntington’s hypothesis of natural climate fluctuation (ie, roughly sinc-ed ‘pulsations’ of various amplitudes and frequencies) since the retreat of the last Ice Age — an hypothesis first proposed to a barrage of criticism in 1907, and then supported by the ingenious new methods of paleo-climatology invented by forgotten Austrian, Swedish, English and America field researchers during the following decades.
Today the contras of AGW are forever portrayed as unscientific, novel and from outside of science; where as in fact, ‘though obscured, the whole history of the science is found solid below them — and this AGW scare is found to emerge a late and perverse interpretation of the evidence.
Only after we bravely abandon Mr Hultquist’s ‘perhaps’ can we scrape back the whitewash covering the implication of our own current advancement in the (real and fantastic) crimes of our fathers. We are bound to do this because it is just as Mr Orwell said: “He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.”
(I hope to explain more about Huntington and his contemporaries in a blog post shortly.)