From the Alfred Wegener Institute:
North-East Passage soon free from ice again? Winter measurements show thin sea ice in the Laptev Sea, pointing to early and large scale summer melt
Bremerhaven, 8 June 2012, The North-East Passage, the sea route along the North coast of Russia, is expected to be free of ice early again this summer. The forecast was made by sea ice physicists of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association based on a series of measurement flights over the Laptev Sea, a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean. Amongs experts the shelf sea is known as an “ice factory” of Arctic sea ice. At the end of last winter the researchers discovered large areas of thin ice not being thick enough to withstand the summer melt.
“These results were a great surprise to us“, says expedition member Dr. Thomas Krumpen. In previous measurements in the winter of 2007/2008 the ice in the same area had been up to one metre thicker. In his opinion these clear differences are primarily attributable to the wind: “It behaves differently from year to year. If, as last winter, the wind blows from the mainland to the sea, it pushes the pack ice from the Laptev Sea towards the North. Open water areas, so-called polynyas, develop in this way before the coast. Their surface water naturally cools very quickly at an air temperature of minus 40 degrees. New thin ice forms and is then immediately swept away again by the wind. In view of this cycle, differently sized areas of thin ice then develop on the Laptev Sea depending on wind strength and continuity“, explains Thomas Krumpen. (See info charts)
However, the expedition team was unaware of just how large these areas can actually become until they made the measurement flights in March and April of this year. In places the researchers flew over thin ice for around 400 kilometres. The “EM Bird”, the torpedo-shaped, electromagnetic ice thickness sensor of the Alfred Wegener Institute, was hung on a cable beneath the helicopter. It constantly recorded the thickness of the floating ice. “We now have a unique data set which we primarily want to use to check the measurements of the earth investigation satellite SMOS“, says Thomas Krumpen.
The abbreviation SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) is actually a satellite mission to determine the soil moisture of the mainland and salinity of the oceans. However, the satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) can also be used to survey the Arctic sea ice. “The satellite can be used above all to detect thin ice areas, as we have seen them, from space“, explains Thomas Krumpen.
The SMOS satellite measurements from March and April of this year confirm that the thin ice areas discovered by the expedition team were no locally restricted phenomenon: “A large part of the North-East Passage was characterised by surprisingly thin ice at the end of the winter“, says Thomas Krumpen.
The new findings of the successful winter expedition give cause for concern to the scientists: “These huge new areas of thin ice will be the first to disappear when the ice melts in summer. And if the thin ice melts as quickly as we presume, the Laptev Sea and with it a part of the North-East Passage will be free from ice comparatively early this summer“, explains the sea ice physicist.
In the past the Laptev Sea was always covered with sea ice from October to the end of the following July and was navigable for a maximum of two summer months. In 2011 the ice had retracted so far by the third week of July that during the course of the summer 33 ships were able to navigate the Arctic waters of Russia for the first time. The North-East Passage is viewed by shipping companies to be a time and fuel saving alternative to the conventional Europe-Asia route. The connection from Rotterdam to Japanese Yokohama via the Nord-East Passage is some 3800 sea miles shorter than taking the Suez Canal and Indian Ocean route.
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General information on the SMOS satellites may be found on the ESA website at http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMB4L4AD1G_Germany_0.html and on the sea ice thickness measurements of the satellite at http://www.esa.int/esaLP/SEM361BX9WG_index_0.html
The Alfred Wegener Institute conducts research in the Arctic and Antarctic and in the high and mid-latitude oceans. The Institute coordinates German polar research and provides important infrastructure such as the research ice breaker Polarstern and research stations in the Arctic and Antarctic to the national and international scientific world. The Alfred Wegener Institute is one of the 18 research centres of the Helmholtz Association, the largest scientific organisation in Germany.
davidmhoffer says:
June 13, 2012 at 7:36 pm
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Probably the most concerning aspect of reduced ice cover is that it assists the cooling of the globe: ice acts as a blanket restraining heat loss from the Arctic Ocean.
pkatt says:
June 13, 2012 at 11:42 pm
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In the past when ships sailed through these pasages they did not have the benefit of satellite imaging nor GPS positioning. The significance of this should not be underestimated since these modern navigational aids make a huge difference in that they identify where the open channel is, and they assist the ship plotting a route to and within the open channel.
It is therefore likely that in past when ships manged a successful transit (without such navigational aids) that the ice conditions then encountered if anything were less harsh than the conditions being encountered today.
“Amongs experts the shelf sea is known as an “ice factory” of Arctic sea ice. At the end of last winter the researchers discovered large areas of thin ice not being thick enough to withstand the summer melt.”
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“LOS ANGEL.ES. May 30.— A mysterious warming of the climate is slowly manifesting itself in the Arctic, and in the Antarctic ice regions and the major Greenland ice cap should reduce at the same rate as the present melting, oceanic surfaces would rise to catastrophic proportions, and people living in lowlands along the shores would be inundated, said Dr. Hans Ahlmann, noted Swedish geophysicist to-day, at tbe University of California’s Geophysical Institute.”
This is 1947.
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/62904258?searchTerm=climate%20change&searchLimits=
“Scientific Documentary: The Russian icebreaker North Pole maps out a sea route from Murmansk to the most western sea port of Russia. North Pole moves through the Barents, Kara, Laptev, East Siberian, Chukchi and Bering Seas mapping a route and taking scientific samples of the ice and sea bed, checking the ice drift and the atmosphere of arctic region.”
Newsreel also from 1947.
http://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.44539
Eli Rabett says: June 14, 2012 at 1:53 am
Oh yes, one of the drivers of changes in wind pattern is human influences on the climate. A perfect storm.
Can you present any evidence to support your supposition?
Eli Rabett says:
June 14, 2012 at 1:53 am
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good grief
And it’s knows as the “ice factory” among experts…….because it produces ice like an assembly line
…and the melt..and the ice is melting……blah blah blah
it’s -40, they are not talking about melting….they are talking about wind making it an assembly line
ice factory
Nothing really new.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_auxiliary_cruiser_Komet
Besides, for what purpuse does Russia have a number of nuclear ice breakers in the Arctic Sea?
Eli Rabett says:
June 14, 2012 at 1:14 am
“In Khatanga, on the Laptev Sea, roughly in the middle of the Northern Sea Route, it is now 26 C, or 79 F. This is warmer than Paris is going to get today, or probably all week.”
If it were global warm then Paris would be much warmer.
ON EDIT. It it were global warming then Paris would be much warmer.
“In 2011 the ice had retracted so far by the third week of July that during the course of the summer 33 ships were able to navigate the Arctic waters of Russia for the first time.”
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1936 “saw a spectacular increase in activity along the
Northern Sea Route; a total of 160 ships travelled parts of the route (the bulk
of them from the west to the mouth of the Yenisey and back), while 16 vessels
made the through-passage, 14 from west to east, and 2 from east to west, the
latter being Vuntsetti and Iskru homeward bound to Leningrad (Belov, 1969).
The ships heading east included the first Soviet warships to utilize the
Northern Sea Route, the destroyers Voykov and Stulin, escorted once again by
Fedor Litke (Burkhanov, 1959; Zinger, 1948; Belov, 1969).”
http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic33-1-3.pdf
It got colder again the following year, trapping Lenin’s convoy in the Arctic Sea. He wasn’t too happy about it, having named himself after the River Lena.
Quoting the Great Russian Encyclopedia on the Laptev Sea, Wikipedia states: “The ice sheet starts melting in late May-early June, creating fragmented ice agglomerates on the north-west and south-east and often revealing remains of the mammoths. The ice formation varies from year to year, with the sea either clear or completely covered with ice.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laptev_sea
“SMOS Satellite imagery suggests NE passage to open soon”
Good.
Imagine a new cult religion. It’s believers would carry out bizarre rituals and lifestyles in the the vain belief that they are controlling Arctic sea ice. Their goal would be to have the Arctic always covered with ice. When this is accomplished they would attain salvation and eternal life in paradise.
No. Who would believe that?
“Eli Rabett says:
June 14, 2012 at 1:14 am
In Khatanga, on the Laptev Sea, roughly in the middle of the Northern Sea Route, it is now 26 C, or 79 F. ”
Alert is 1°. Thule, Tiksi, etc. are in the 4-6°C range. Khatanga is the odd man out but it is only 21°C. The area around Khatanga has to be getting pretty slushy.
richard verney says:
June 14, 2012 at 3:26 am
“Probably the most concerning aspect of reduced ice cover is that it assists the cooling of the globe: ice acts as a blanket restraining heat loss from the Arctic Ocean.”
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This has to be the silliest bit of sciency-sounding nonsense I’ve heard on this site.. Richard Verney, do you understand the concept of “albedo”?
Are we absolutely sure about the “disappearance”
Since we lost the AMSR-E instrument on Aqua and while we are waiting for the new data from AMSR2 on GCOM-W, the current batch of Satellites can at best be described as patchy or flaky. Take a look at this http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/cgi-bin/seaice-monitor.cgi?lang=e the current source data is from Windsat and is not patch on the coverage we used to have from Aqua. Great big holes in surface coverage day after day affecting the area seen/measured. At this time of year JAXA used to apply a tweak to the results as the ice surface began to melt changing its characteristics in it’s response to the Radar. What are the odds that this carefully calibrated 6 monthly modification hasn’t been/cannot be applied appropriately to the WIndsat data stream?
I look forward to the results coming in from the AMSR2 instrument on the GCOM-W Satellite once it has completed its commissioning/testing phase.
And then we will be able to see if Al’s prediction of all gone in Summer by as soon as 2014 (Check out his Nobel Peace Prize winning speech) is true or just plain hogwash.
Dave
Apologies if I gave the wrong impression of AMSR as radar. It just listens to microwave radiation. It doesn’t send any. http://nsidc.org/data/docs/daac/amsre_instrument.gd.html
“Peter says:
June 14, 2012 at 9:58 am
richard verney says:
June 14, 2012 at 3:26 am
“Probably the most …”
Dear Peter:
The average solar input at the north pole is 40-50 W/m2 and until the sun
Let’s look at heat transfer at the north pole. The average solar input is 40-50 W/m2. The average arctic output is 150 W/m2. What do you call something that exhausts energy? Hint: look at the front of your car. Yes, it is called a radiator.
The tropics receive 330 W/m2 and exhaust 250-270 W/m2 for 50-80W/m2 gained. What is the heat source on your car? Yes – the engine.
Now, if you took heat transfer in engineering school you would look up the thermal conductivity of ice and note that it is approximately 2.2 W/(m.K). Since the average arctic ice is 2 meters thick we will use that as our standard. Cardboard is has a conductivity of .12. So in theory we would need about 3 inches of cardboard but we will say the AGW people are right and reduce it to 1.5 inches.
Put 1.5 inches of cardboard in front of your radiator. Note that the cardboard blocks convection and evaporation much like ice does and has about 1/2 the R value (a sop to the AGW people).
Take a trip of about one hour and report the result.
Remove the “ice” and repeat the trip.
Note that our simulated ice makes your car run warmer.
Albedo only affects available radiation. There isn’t much. Seawater albedo is dependent on angle. The sun can only get 23 degrees over the horizon and it has to exceed some critical angle (6 ?) before most of the radiation is absorbed.
However, at -40 °C winter temperatures, open water will lose 120 Watts/m2 (3 W/m2*K) through convection and 200 W/m2 to evaporation and if a polynya forms it will be unimpeded by ice (those are rough numbers). The heat loss through 2 meters of ice is about 1 W/m2. For our AGW friends that’s 1 meter of ice and 2 W/m2
Just The Facts says: June 14, 2012 at 4:23 am
Eli Rabett says: June 14, 2012 at 1:53 am
“Oh yes, one of the drivers of changes in wind pattern is human influences on the climate. A perfect storm.”
“Can you present any evidence to support your supposition?”
Well somewhat upside down, but here is one obvious example (pay careful attention to the comments and the links the bunnies have provided) of how human actions are affecting wind patterns, but perhaps more to the point, here are a couple of papers (one, two)
Just google Hadley cell climate change for more.
Best
NOTE: Eli Rabett is actually Joshua Halpern of Howard University
How about Russian hippies in a homemade trimaran built (literally) out of bamboo and duct tape?
Yes, they made it.
Just a correction – for 2 meters of ice and 40 K of heat differential the heat transfer is 20W and for 1 meter it is 40W – thermal conductivity is W/(m2*K) – so the conductivity has to be multiplied by the absolute temperature difference.
“Eli Rabett says:
June 14, 2012 at 2:39 pm
Just The Facts says: June 14, 2012 at 4:23 am”
This could be the start of a useful conversation.
The question is, does human warming which urban focused (to the extent of 10 *F heat bubbles around major cities):
1. Amplify existing weather patterns or
2. Disrupt existing weather patterns.
Don’t know the answer and haven’t given it enough thought to model it.
The first ship traverse of the Northeast Passage was in 1877. That event had to await the construction of suitable iron ship hulls, which could resist the action of floating ice. This ain’t no big deal!!!
Eli Rabett says: June 14, 2012 at 2:39 pm
“Can you present any evidence to support your supposition?”
Well somewhat upside down, but here is one obvious example
http://rabett.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/eli-is-evil-bunny.html
“Goes like this, springtime ozone depletion over Antarctica blows a hole in the belly of the ozone column. That means that there is a lot less ozone over the pole in the stratosphere. Eli has been at this game long enough to have heard every possible joke about sunburned penguins and more serious thoughts about this not doing good things for the phytoplankton upon which much of the oceans food chains depend, but it does something else that is obvious, it causes a strong, local (over the pole) cooling of the stratosphere, because the ozone is not there to absorb the sunlight which is flooding in as the sun rises in the spring. Such a cooling moves the tropopause upwards. Let us stress that this is both a local effect and and a short term one until the ozone hole heals in the late spring/summer”
Firstly, it’s not a “hole”, “The word hole isn’t literal; no place is empty of ozone. Scientists use the word hole as a metaphor for the area in which ozone concentrations drop below the historical threshold of 220 Dobson Units.”
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldOfChange/ozone.php
Secondly the ozone surplus that exists outside of the “ozone hole”;
http://ozoneaq.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/anim-ozspl-full.gif
is likely a dynamical effect of the stratospheric polar vortex, i.e. “The walls of the polar vortex act as the boundaries for the extraordinary changes in chemical concentrations. Now the polar vortex can be considered a sealed chemical reactor bowl, containing a water vapor hole, a nitrogen oxide hole and an ozone hole, all occurring simultaneously (Labitzke and Kunze 2005)”
http://books.google.com/books?id=B93SSQrcAh4C&lpg=PA283&ots=d0-uBRjmyI&dq=%22water%20vapor%20hole%22%20polar%20vortex&pg=PA283#v=onepage&q=%22water%20vapor%20hole%22%20polar%20vortex&f=false
Polar Vortices “are caused when an area of low pressure sits at the rotation pole of a planet. This causes air to spiral down from higher in the atmosphere, like water going down a drain.”
http://www.universetoday.com/973/what-venus-and-saturn-have-in-common/.
“A polar vortex is a persistent, large-scale cyclone located near one or both of a planet’s geographical poles.” “The vortex is most powerful in the hemisphere’s winter, when the temperature gradient is steepest, and diminishes or can disappear in the summer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_vortex
“The ozone hole is in the center of a spiraling mass of air over the Antarctic that is called the polar vortex. The vortex is not stationary and sometimes moves as far north as the southern half of South America, taking the ozone hole with it.”
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/HALOE-Ozone.html
This article and associated graphics help to demonstrate the dynamical effect of the polar vortex on Venus’s south pole:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/venus-polar-vortex/
how human actions are affecting wind patterns, but perhaps more to the point, here are a couple of papers (one, two)
Based on a review of the “one” paper you cited “Change of the Tropical Hadley Cell Since 1950” by Xiao-Wei Quan, Henry F. Diaz, and Martin P. Hoerling:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/people/quan.xiaowei/PDF/HCpaper.pdf
I find no reference to “human actions” “affecting wind patterns” and their most pertinent conclusion that;
“The time history of the southward overturning Hadley cell during the Southern Hemispheric winter lacks a trend, though it does exhibit strong decadal variations.”
appears to directly contradict your supposition that human caused “ozone hole” has caused atmospheric changes. The “two” link you provided is broken, but I don’t expect that we’re missing much…
would someone please answer the “skeptic” magazine article on how to answer global warming deniers. The four irrefutable points they cited: 1) CO2 is increasing, 2) the icecaps are breaking up, 3) glaciers are receding, 4) the oceans are rising – see this month’s issue
Firstly, it’s not a “hole”, “
Depends on how you look at it. In the vertical profile the ozone does pretty much go to zero at what normally was the maximum of the concentration. That is a hole in the mid-stratosphere ozone distribution, but you might prefer mountain top removal as a simile. It is significant. More later perhaps
NOTE: Eli Rabett is actually Joshua Halpern of Howard University
John McNeil:
1. True 2. Not true, especially in the Antarctic 3. Only SOME glaciers are receding while some are advancing 4. Not true