There’s some surprising reaction to the press release we covered on WUWT recently.
Here’s some excerpts:
Knowing how the massive ice sheets atop Antarctica and Greenland work is key to
predicting how global warming could raise sea levels and flood coastal cities. But a new study upends what scientists thought they knew. It turns out it’s not just ancient snow that makes up the ice sheets, but water deep under the sheets also thaws and refreezes over time.
To put it in non-scientific terms, lead scientist Robin Bell told msnbc.com, the study
redefines “how squishy” the base of ice sheets can be. “This matters to how fast ice will flow and how fast ice sheets will change.”
“It also means that ice sheet models are not correct,” she said, comparing it to “trying to
figure out how a car will drive but forgetting to add the tires. The performance will be very
different if you are driving on the rims.”
Reporting in this week’s issue of the peer-reviewed journal Science, Bell and his team
described how ice-penetrating radar peeled back two miles of ice a million years old in the
center of Antarctica.
…
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The modelers have no idea how large amounts of ice behave. The models are hacked up to reflect known behavior. If you ask the modelers privately they will probably admit as such. I saw one admit it publicly, something like: “you plug in the equations and pile up the ice and then it just sits there — so you have to hack the code to make it move, because we know it does move…”
They’ve been learning from Scotrail.
It’s the wrong sort of ice.
What makes them think that this re-frozen ice would be more “squishy”? The Vostok ice-cores actually go down into such re-frozen ice from Lake Vostok (this refrozen layer is about 200 meters thick). One of the things that distinguished it from ordinary glacier ice was that the ice crystals were vey large (10-100 cm). That doesn’t sound very squishy to me. Conductivity was also much lower than in glacier ice which means less contaminants which is also likely to make it less “squishy”, not more.
The ground-radar image tells the same story. The ordinary glacier ice is obviously forced to flow up and over the refrozen ice, which seems to behave more like rock than ice.
Some help please from some of our more erudite readers.
?supercooled water?
Does water not freeze at 0C even if under pressure?
Cheers
Paul
Global warming could. Their research is good in that it furthers the understanding of ice sheets and bad in that they are hanging their research on predicting the outcome of ice sheets moving and melting as a result of global warming. The problem is global warming being called a truth by these scientists while it is an unproven theory. And where sea levels are concerned there is a lot to be considered when and if the weight and area of the ice changes over a time not known.
The research itself should be called into question when the global warming hook is invoked as a truth and the reason for the scientific research. The problem is with conflict of interest where the researcher needs the grant money which is allocated often times by politicians who need the research findings tied to global warming to gain public support in regulations and taxes for a political agenda.
Ok. I’m no scientist and I understand very little of the technicalities of this. However, if true, and if the radar image above is correct, how does that affect all of these ice cores they have been taking. Do the ice core analysis take into account this refreezing?
A further thought. This big blob of refrozen ice apparently sits right on top of the Gamburtsev subglacial mountains. Now, the Gamburtsev mountains have always been a big mystery since they sit right in the middle of of the East Antarctic precambrian shield. Ordinarily mountains just don’t occur in shield areas. One (rare) exception is intra-shield hotspot volcanoes. The Tibesti mountains of Africa is perhaps the best example. If the Gamburtsev Mountains is a volcanic range then there is an obvious mechanism both for melting and up-doming of the ice-sheet. It is known that volcanic eruptions and even whole volcanoes can occur under an ice-sheet, without necessarily breaching it.
“Given already known melt in Greenland and parts of Antarctica, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change earlier estimated sea levels will rise between seven inches and two feet this century.”
The article spends a great deal of time discussing sea level rise in spite of the fact that the findings reported suggest that the sea rise models are entirely wrong. The article also fails to note that a sea level rise of 7″ would be consistent with the last 300 years. But is very inconsistent with recent measures that show virtually no sea level rise for the last 80 years. All of the article is a bit confusing, as the author continuously interjects his vast ignorance on climate science throughout piece, as if he were the researcher.
“Larry Geiger says:
March 9, 2011 at 8:45 am
Ok. I’m no scientist and I understand very little of the technicalities of this. However, if true, and if the radar image above is correct, how does that affect all of these ice cores they have been taking. Do the ice core analysis take into account this refreezing?”
It should not be much of a problem. The Vostok ice-core actually penetrated some distance into refrozen ice above Lake Vostok. Both the refrozen ice and a shear-layer above it were pretty obivious. However if this is wide-spread phenomenon (which is far from certain) it might not be possible to find sites with really old undisturbed ice, even in East Antarctica.
@Wade The name of the game is Calvinball
“Paul Maynard says:
March 9, 2011 at 8:30 am
Does water not freeze at 0C even if under pressure?”
No, up to a point the freezing temperature does go down as the pressure goes up, to a minimum of about -20 C. However pressure never gets that high even in a very thick ice-cap. Water has an incredibly complex phase diagram with several different types of ice. Here is a phase diagram:
http://pruffle.mit.edu/3.00/Lecture_29_web/img20.gif
Pull My Finger says:
March 9, 2011 at 5:13 am
Sounds like squishy science to me. At least they didn’t claim “it’s worse than we thought!”.
____
Actually, they are about the claim that…see:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12687272
Antarctica and Greenland melting even faster than IPCC predictions, probably leading to a greater than predicted sea level rise by 2100. This is no different than the surprize arctic sea ice loss (greater than models predicted) in 2007 and continuing now. Things are happening faster than models predicted because these linear models can’t accurately describe the nonlinear chaotic nature of the climate undergoing rapid change with multiple interacting feedback processes.
@Glen Shevlin
Been done and done and done. Don’t nobody read nothin anymore (before we pay for transporting a radar set to the south pole)? http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002AGUFMMR71A..06D
A Greenland Curiosity.
I happened to pick out a book from my shelves the other day that I did not even know I possessed. It is a 1975 publication from Greenland’s Julianehaab Museum (Julianehaab is now known as Qaqortok’) celebrating the 200th anniversary of this Greenland town.
Written before the world was gripped by global waming frenzy, it has a graph showing 780 years of temperature variations in West Greenland from and a guess about the future trend, which appears to have been influenced by view prevailing at that time that the world was entering a global cooling period.
The graph is « based on » the work of W. Damsgaard, which can only refer to Professor Willi Damsgaard, the father of Greenland ice core analysis, who died in January this year at the age of 88.
What struck me about the text was the way in which it takes for granted that the temperature in Greenland is marked by regularchanges between periods that are somewhat warmer and periods which are somewhat colder. The graph show 6 periods with significant warming and 3 other with a little warming, and 5 cooling period (and «3 small dips)
« The edges of the glaciers and inland ice move backwards and forwards in step with the changes in temperature and in precipitation. The concenttration of sea ice also varies in these periods, » it said (I am translating this from a Danish text).
There is a striking contrast between this atttitude and the attitude that has gained hold since to the effect that there is something exceptional about the (possibly – not for nothing that I read WUWT regularly) warmer period over the past 30 years and the fluctuations in sea ice.
The caption to the graph read (again translatred from the Danish):
« Climate curves for the past 780 years….. We see the regularity with which cold and warm periods follow each other. The dotted line at the top shows the most-probable climate trend over the coming decasdes. We shall first see a warm period again, such as we experienced at the beginning of the 20th century, in about a hundred years time. »
“It turns out it’s not just ancient snow that makes up the ice sheets, but water deep under the sheets also thaws and refreezes over time.”
What does that do to the sampling and proxies?
From what I read, this study could indicate that ice loss is not nearly as great as estimated, because the assumption in the models is that once the ice melts it runs into the ocean. This study says that quite a bit refreezes underneath.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12619342
Liquid water at the base of the sheet has long been recognised to be a “lubricant” for movement, but the latest data adds a whole new dimension to our understanding, said Professor Bell.
“We’ve known there’s been melting under ice sheets from a long time – since the 1960s,” she explained.
“Then it was demonstrated this water could move, it could slosh around; but I think we still had this idea that it just spilled into the ocean.
“Well, now we can show these hydrologic systems are modifying the fundamental stratigraphy of the ice sheet.”
>> Mike
>>Hard to imagine turbulence in something moving as slowly as the
>>Antarctic ice sheet, but there it is.
Looks exactly like a wave-cap cloud on a mountain. I daresay it behaves exactly the same too – just slower.
I which case, it may be a permanent feature even though itnis moving – continuously forming and reforming, just like a cap cloud does.
Nice cross section. Interesting dynamics. But the science was already settled before we knew this.
.
@D. King says: March 9, 2011 at 9:50 am
I concur, what does that do to ice-core proxies ???
but the science is settled ??? what … so are they saying that they actually went out an observed the ice caps and found out that their PHD’s are based on incomplete and possibly faulty information ? i.e. what they don’t know about the field that they are considered an “expert” in is actually greater than what they do know about their field …
observe first then come up with theories and models instead on coming up with theories and models and THEN observing nature …
these researchers just became actual scientists as opposed to previously when they were simply academic theorists …
I don’t suppose anyone can explain to me how a mountain range can be *underground*?
>>Paul
>>Does water not freeze at 0C even if under pressure
Sometimes it does not freexe even at reduced temperature – if it is not disturbed too much. Small cloud droplets can remain liquid down to -40oc, if you do not disturb them.
This is the main iceing problem for high flying aircraft, because the supercooled liquid droplets will freeze as soon as they his an aircraft.
.
View from the Solent says:
March 9, 2011 at 4:47 am
“What’s the SI unit of squishiness?”
In honor of the most salient example, I would propose the CRU.
The radar image is fascinating, not just for the melt water, but for the compression of the layers above. It’s obvious that the under ice topography will need to be considered when examining ice cores. This is like …well…science.
Small error in the article (which has been corrected now at msnbc.com) that is affecting your excerpt. It should read “Bell and her team” not “his team.”
Bob Shapiro says:
March 9, 2011 at 6:29 am
Is there any way that they would have/could have taken this Radar Picture from ground level? That seems inconceivable to me, so I expect it was an “image” from a satellite.
That being the case, then how in the world can they produce a picture in profile?!!
Please, tell me this is not just a hoax that made it past the Peer Review Process.
Bob, if you take a transect on foot across a landscape and record ascent a descent you have the data for a profile. If you fly a plane over head with look-down radar you can record the same profile without wearing out boot leather. If you traverse the same terrain in a truck with a seismic rig you can use the rig to map subsurface geological features. Similarly, employing ground penetrating radar, you can achieve similar results. If you fly over head and use some of the more specialized kinds of radar such as SAR you can tune the beam to penetrate surface material, but it will reflect off discontinuities beneath the surface, providing a profile of the buried discontinuity. The same methods have been used to map buried river channels in the Sahara. So, there is no reason that it would be a hoax, nor is there any reason to think such a report would not pass peer review, unless of course it contradicted contemporary wisdom and indicated that the participants in “consensus science” would need to go and learn something.