From the National Science Foundation – Press Release 12-115
Remote Siberian Lake Holds Clues to Arctic–and Antarctic–Climate Change
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Intense warm climate intervals–warmer than scientists thought possible–have occurred in the Arctic over the past 2.8 million years.
That result comes from the first analyses of the longest sediment cores ever retrieved on land. They were obtained from beneath remote, ice-covered Lake El’gygytgyn (pronounced El’gee-git-gin) (“Lake E”) in the northeastern Russian Arctic.
The journal Science published the findings this week.
They show that the extreme warm periods in the Arctic correspond closely with times when parts of Antarctica were also ice-free and warm, suggesting a strong connection between Northern and Southern Hemisphere climate.
The polar regions are much more vulnerable to climate change than researchers thought, say the National Science Foundation-(NSF) funded Lake E project’s co-chief scientists: Martin Melles of the University of Cologne, Germany; Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Massachusetts Amherst; and Pavel Minyuk of Russia’s North-East Interdisciplinary Scientific Research Institute in Magadan.
The exceptional climate warming in the Arctic, and the inter-hemispheric interdependencies, weren’t known before the Lake E studies, the scientists say.
Lake E was formed 3.6 million years ago when a huge meteorite hit Earth, leaving an 11-mile-wide crater. It’s been collecting layers of sediment ever since.
The lake is of interest to scientists because it has never been covered by glaciers. That has allowed the uninterrupted build-up of sediment at the bottom of the lake, recording hitherto undiscovered information on climate change.
Cores from Lake E go far back in time, almost 30 times farther than Greenland ice cores covering the past 110,000 years.
The sediment cores from Lake El’gygytgyn reflect the climate and environmental history of the Arctic with great sensitivity, say Brigham-Grette and colleagues.
The physical, chemical and biological properties of Lake E’s sediments match the known global glacial/interglacial pattern of the ice ages.
Some warm phases are exceptional, however, marked by extraordinarily high biological activity in the lake, well above that of “regular” climate cycles.
To quantify the climate differences, the scientists studied four warm phases in detail: the two youngest, called “normal” interglacials, from 12,000 years and 125,000 years ago; and two older phases, called “super” interglacials, from 400,000 and 1.1 million years ago.
According to climate reconstructions based on pollen found in sediment cores, summer temperatures and annual precipitation during the super interglacials were about 4 to 5 degrees C warmer, and about 12 inches wetter, than during normal interglacials.
The super interglacial climates suggest that it’s nearly impossible for Greenland’s ice sheet to have existed in its present form at those times.
Simulations using a state-of-the-art climate model show that the high temperature and precipitation during the super interglacials can’t be explained by Earth’s orbital parameters or variations in atmospheric greenhouse gases alone, which geologists usually see as driving the glacial/interglacial pattern during ice ages.
That suggests that additional climate feedbacks are at work.
“Improving climate models means that they will better match the data that has been collected,” says Paul Filmer, program director in NSF’s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the “Lake E” project along with NSF’s Office of Polar Programs.
“The results of this collaboration among scientists in the U.S., Austria, Germany and Russia are providing a challenge for researchers working on climate models: they now need to match results from Antarctica, Greenland–and Lake El’gygytgyn.”
Adds Simon Stephenson, director of the Division of Arctic Sciences in NSF’s Office of Polar Programs, “This is a significant result from NSF’s investment in frontier research during the recent International Polar Year.
“‘Lake E’ has been a successful partnership in very challenging conditions. These results make a significant contribution to our understanding of how Earth’s climate system works, and improve our understanding of what future climate might be like.”
The scientists suspect the trigger for intense interglacials might lie in Antarctica.
Earlier work by the international ANDRILL program discovered recurring intervals when the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted. (ANDRILL, or the ANtarctic geological DRILLing project, is a collaboration of scientists from five nations–Germany, Italy, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States–to recover geologic records from the Antarctic margin.)
The current Lake E study shows that some of these events match with the super interglacials in the Arctic.
The results are of global significance, they believe, demonstrating strong indications of an ongoing collapse of ice shelves around the Antarctic Peninsula and at the margins of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet–and a potential acceleration in the near future.
The Science paper co-authors discuss two scenarios for future testing that could explain the Northern Hemisphere-Southern Hemisphere climate coupling.
First, they say, reduced glacial ice cover and loss of ice shelves in Antarctica could have limited formation of cold bottom water masses that flow into the North Pacific Ocean and upwell to the surface, resulting in warmer surface waters, higher temperatures and increased precipitation on land.
Alternatively, disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may have led to significant global sea level rise and allowed more warm surface water to reach the Arctic Ocean through the Bering Strait.
Lake E’s past, say the researchers, could be the key to our global climate future.
The El’gygytgyn Drilling Project also was funded by the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP), the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, Alfred Wegener Institute, GeoForschungsZentrum-Potsdam, the Russian Academy of Sciences Far East Branch, the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, and the Austrian Ministry for Science and Research.
-NSF-
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It must be extraordinarily inconvenient to wrap AGW are facts that suggest natural variability. It also demonstrates why these Warmists are such poor scientists.
One day a researcher will simply point out his findings without the obligatory AGW wrap and he will actually be respected.
Wait a minute… a huge meteorite hit Earth leaving an 11-mile-wide crater and for 3.6 million years no one has done anything to keep this sort of thing from happening again?
Is not it pure wonder how far one can get with logic?
IPCC AR4 WG1 FAQ 9.2 Can the Warming of the 20th Century be Explained by Natural Variability?
“It is very unlikely that the 20th-century warming can be explained by natural causes.”
because
“The models fail to reproduce the observed warming when run using only natural factors.”
Therefore
“The human influence on climate very likely dominates over all other causes of change in global average surface temperature during the past half century.”
Summary: If it can’t be explained by computational climate models using natural factors, it is man made.
NFS Press Release 12-115 Remote Siberian Lake Holds Clues to Arctic–and Antarctic–Climate Change
“Simulations using a state-of-the-art climate model show that the high temperature and precipitation during the super interglacials can’t be explained by Earth’s orbital parameters or variations in atmospheric greenhouse gases alone, which geologists usually see as driving the glacial/interglacial pattern during ice ages.”
Summary: Super interglacials can’t be explained by computational climate models using natural factors.
Therefore super interglacials are obviously anthropgenic.
Unfortunately there is the minor issue of the utter lack of human presence on Earth 400 or 1,100 kyears ago. But wait. What if our distant descendants would discover a particularly clever way for carbon sequestration? I mean they may dig time tunnels into the deep past and dump their carbon pollution there. And it is entirely consistent with the fact the farther one goes back in geologic time the higher the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere!
Of course it implies the tunnels will have been designed much deeper than the level of these super interglacials. The only reasonable explanation that comes to mind is they will do sloppy work possibly using faulty materials in construction supplied by irresponsible vendors, so their time tunnels will get cracked and leaking all over history, but at some points more than usual. There, you have it.
As I have said, is not logic wonderful?
We have learned two important lessons:
1. Our era is criss-crossed by faulty time tunnels possibly leaking stuff
2. People will occasionally do slapdash job even in the future
Leif Svalgaard (June 22, 2012 at 8:08 am)
“I now think [actually since 30 years] that the finding was spurious.”
The SPE analysis was framed optimally in neither 1973 nor 2009.
It took only a few seconds to figure out where you guys lost course 30+ years ago: http://i45.tinypic.com/2nbc3dw.png .
I’m impressed that looking at these sedimentary laminae we can see the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves and the disappearance of the Greenlandic ice cap. Maybe there is a fossil emperor penguin beak or two in the sediments. Now that is extrapolation gone a land bridge too far.
It seems clear that in desperate efforts to salvage the crumbling AGW edifice, alarmists are rushing around looking for ways to make the ice disappear and bring on the droughts, floods and shoreline submergence. After climategate, there appeared to be a hiatus of CAGW papers as the ‘consensus’ recovered from shame and despondency following being caught ‘en flagrante’ (a period of hysterics and gnashing of teeth rather than scientific production). Skeptics finally were able to get a toehold in the published literature with the gatekeepers hors de service, and since, the team and its fledglings.have been popping up with mission-oriented papers to deal with skeptics – a time I refer to as the Whack-a-Mole alarmist literature period. The only trouble is, looking for alternatives to meet their climate armageddon forecasts, and shooting off in all directions, they have caused CO2 to take a back seat, the MWP, LIA, to reappear, the 30s to reclaim the hottest period of the 20thCentury, fossil fuels to return to some respectability (shale gas is too good to shelve, German’s are back to coal, solar and wind people are going broke…. Boy that climategate was huge.
Luther Wu says:
June 22, 2012 at 8:59 am
“the finding was spurious.”
I take that statement as a pre- release notice.
More like a post-post-release
vukcevic says:
June 22, 2012 at 9:16 am
Hi doc, learning is for school kids and scholars, adventurers are interested in discoveries.
Spurious correlations are not ‘discoveries’
Paul Vaughan says:
June 22, 2012 at 9:51 am
It took only a few seconds to figure out where you guys lost course 30+ years ago
We can’t all be geniuses like you.
/sarcon
As a recreant unrepentent programmer, I can tell you explicitly what customers and bosses would say when faced with a program that fails to perform. On second thought, skip that before I get banned. I’ll tell you instead what the marketing folks would say after they spun the results senseless; “After extensive preparations and tests our super climate model performed excellently, but the results will need years of study.”
/sarc
What this does mean is that state-of-the-art climate model doesn’t work beans when compared with real data. Not to worry, we’ve already decided all results.
What!? And from this you haven’t already verified that tipping points are caused by… whatever is the CAGW’s favorite bad thing this week. Or is it that the data need ‘adjustments’ to convert it to usable current databases?
Leif Svalgaard says:
Spurious correlations are not ‘discoveries’
‘Correlation between a flat car tyre and price of a postage stamp is spurious’.
300-400 year long correlation between solar magnetic and the Earth’s magnetic changes
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Aa-TSI.htm
it is puzzling, it is not easily explainable, it is on no account spurious but a worth while scientific discovery.
It also appears in another set of data by Jeremy Bloxham and David Gubbins.
Science is not settled on this one, it is just opening a new chapter !
p.s. Have a good look on this one too: http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GTavSpec.htm
As I read it, this paper seems contrary to CAGW dogma in at least two ways:
1) No “tipping point” even in conditions warmer than alarmists predict for the next century;
2) There is substantial but unknown natural variability in the climate system even after orbital mechanics and greenhouse gasses are taken into account.
If that’s a fair summary, I have to wonder how it managed to get published.
The short of it is the corollary to Occam’s Razor: if your explanatory model is not adequate to explain your phenomeon, then either it needs to be more complex, or your theory is wrong.
vukcevic says:
June 22, 2012 at 11:26 am
‘Correlation between a flat car tyre and price of a postage stamp is spurious’.
300-400 year long correlation between solar magnetic and the Earth’s magnetic changes
is equally spurious. The changes of the Earth’s field take place in the core which is completely shielded from any outside magnetic changes [which you claimed that you ‘knew all about’]. The core field is thousands of times stronger than the external field and its changes are highly irregular. This is what they look like: http://www.leif.org/research/core-secular-change.png
Vuk,
The fundamental problem with doing any correlation with the “global temperature” is that
the global temperature is not really a physical measure. It’s a mismash of the subsurface water
temperature ( 70%) and the air temperature over land at 1.5 meters.
It’s one thing to look at that metric as it compares to itself and we can look at trends in that metric as indicators. But it’s not a measurement of the same thing. Lord knows why Hansen decided you could average water temperatures and air temperatures, but there you have it.
If you want to get any attention for the the relationship you propose you need to have the
physics expressed.
steven mosher says:
June 22, 2012 at 12:24 pm
If you want to get any attention for the relationship you propose you need to have the physics expressed
I think you miss the point, which is that he claims this is ‘new physics’ [as it is impossible using current physics] and is a major discovery.
No, No, No. IF AGW is true, then there can only be one explanation for those past ultra warm periods that can not be explained by orbital and solar influences. That previous human civilizations flowered and then destroyed themselves along with the normal climate only to be reset by an ice age. What is happening now, has happened before. We are merely the genetic survivors of previous civilizations who haven’t learned their lessons and are doomed to Karmic reincarnation for our endless sins. ala Battlestar Galactica /sarcasm/
Lief, what new physics? How about the application of the proper physics called enthalpy? Any scientist and engineer worth their salt knows you don’t measure heat in degrees K because it’s only a PARTIAL measurement. Purporting to assert climate change from a trend in tenths of a degree K is sheer incompetence. You use the wrong units, you get the wrong results. In the vernacular, if you do a half assed job, you get a half assed result.
James Hansen is incompetent. What is the proper unit measurement of Heat? James Hansen doesn’t know because he demonstrated he doesn’t know by using the wrong unit measure.
dscott says:
June 22, 2012 at 12:41 pm
Lief, what new physics? … if you do a half assed job, you get a half assed result.
Not me, but Vuk is claiming this, and it is even worse than a half assed job, it is simple nonsense dressed up as a major discovery by an adventurer who doesn’t need to learn [“that is for school kids and scholars”]
to Leif Svalgaard
and
Steven Mosher
Science is not settled, it is opening a new chapter !
See it, read it, study it, it is a window to the true nature
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GSO.htm
(ignorance is a bliss, obscurantism is an affliction)
vukcevic says:
June 22, 2012 at 1:17 pm
Science is not settled
What you are peddling is not science, but nonsense. And as you say, ignorance is indeed bliss, so stay happy.
dscott says:
June 22, 2012 at 12:41 pm
Lief, what new physics? How about the application of the proper physics called enthalpy? Any scientist and engineer worth their salt knows you don’t measure heat in degrees K because it’s only a PARTIAL measurement. Purporting to assert climate change from a trend in tenths of a degree K is sheer incompetence. You use the wrong units, you get the wrong results. In the vernacular, if you do a half assed job, you get a half assed result.
James Hansen is incompetent. What is the proper unit measurement of Heat? James Hansen doesn’t know because he demonstrated he doesn’t know by using the wrong unit measure.
=========================
They’re not measuring the direct (beam) heat from the Sun, they’re measuring shortwave, Light. They say that beam thermal infrared doesn’t play any part in heating their Earth, they claim that in their world shortwave, Light, physically heats land and oceans. Blue visible light they say heats the oceans deeper down because it travels deeper. They have given the real world properties of thermal infrared to visible light and the two shortwaves either side, uv and near infrared. They’re living in a different world, their fisics is make-believe in the real world, and clearly imposssible. They have other imposssible stuff in their world, molecules of carbon dioxide that overcome gravity by their own ideal gas molecular energy …
Their fisics was deliberately created to promote AGW, it is science fiction. Their cartoon energy budget, KT97 and kin, is a comic cartoon in the real world.
They can’t see the joke.
They can’t hear it either, their atmosphere is empty space as their ideal gas molecules have no volume, etc.
Myrrh says:
June 22, 2012 at 1:42 pm
They can’t see the joke.
They can’t hear it either, their atmosphere is empty space
Even though your nonsense is certainly entertaining, perhaps let it go this time. A joke repeated too often is no longer funny.
Leif Svalgaard says:
What you are peddling is not science, but nonsense.
……………….
Here is spectrum of four major variables, all data are from respectable sources http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GSO.htm
Perhaps you would be so kind, not for mine, but for the benefit of other readers, to say which particular set of data, if not all are nonsense.
Perhaps you are unduly concerned, as long as your views are based on the knowledge what the data represent, rather than on a belief what data I used should not show.
I indulge in ignorance of attitudes, but greatly enjoy getting best out of laboriously collected and assembled numerical information, including your own, for which I have greatest respect.
Views and interpretations are transient, good data are longer lasting and solid foundation for advancement in science.
vukcevic says:
June 22, 2012 at 2:51 pm
Perhaps you would be so kind, not for mine, but for the benefit of other readers, to say which particular set of data, if not all are nonsense.
None of the data is nonsense, just your ideas about them. And I’m not the least concerned about the data.
Bill Illis says:
June 22, 2012 at 6:39 am
It seems odd to me that a lake at 67.5N 172E was not glaciated in the last 3.5M years yet Wisconsin, south of 49N, was glaciated multiple times. Is/was Lake E in a dry valley?
So we agree, data shows true nature, rather than one we would whish to perpetuate.
Perhaps if you look at the graph you would agree even more so.
Billy Liar says:
June 22, 2012 at 3:19 pm
Bill Illis says:
June 22, 2012 at 6:39 am
It seems odd to me that a lake at 67.5N 172E was not glaciated in the last 3.5M years yet Wisconsin, south of 49N, was glaciated multiple times. Is/was Lake E in a dry valley?
Perhaps this will help: “The formation of an ice sheet or ice cap requires both prolonged cold and precipitation (snow). Hence, despite having temperatures similar to those of glaciated areas in North America, Europe, and East Asia remained unglaciated except at higher elevations. This difference was caused by the fact that the ice sheets in Europe produced extensive anticyclones above them. These anticyclones generated air masses that were so dry on reaching Siberia and Manchuria that precipitation sufficient for the formation of glaciers could never occur (except in Kamchatka where these westerly winds lifted moisture from the Sea of Japan). The relative warmth of the Pacific Ocean due to the shutting down of the Oyashio Current and the presence of large east-west mountain ranges were secondary factors preventing continental glaciation in Asia.”