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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vukcevic says:
June 22, 2012 at 3:25 pm
So we agree, data shows true nature, rather than one we would whish to perpetuate.
You seem to wish to perpetuate your nonsense interpretation, as you try to hijack every thread with it.
Bill Illis said:
How does it get 4.5C warmer 125,000 years ago with CO2 at 280 ppm and methane at half of today’s numbers. hmmm. How does it get 2.0C warmer 410,000 years ago and Greenland’s glaciers melt out completely in the southern third with CO2 at 280 ppm and methane at half of today’s levels. Obviously, there is an answer.
* * *
There is an answer.
On the Eemian period (125,000 ya) see: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005AGUFMPP41B0648K
On MIS 11 (410,000 ya) see http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22Marine+Isotope+Stage+11%22
Didn’t even bother reading this one,
If the humid equatorial zone changes by as much as a few points of a degree, then arid places like the poles will change by multiples of that. Enthalpy says this.
That’s it. As long as we’re arguing temperature and not energy…
DaveE.
Regarding whether this area was glaciated or not, they say it wasn’t .
But the area immediately north of the location was probably glaciated around 2.5 Mya and several other times since. The Arctic Ocean north of Russia and north of Europe is within the continental shelf and these areas have probably been pushed below sea level due to glaciation several times in the last 2.5 Mys.
Glaciers carry a lot more weight than is generally recognized and large parts of the continents have been pushed below sea level in the past lasting for millions of years at a time.
Eurasia is a bigger continent than the above sea level maps indicate.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 22, 2012 at 1:51 pm
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.
==========
It will always be funny, as each newcomer gets the joke. It will be a timeless classic in science in the years to come, when rational science is once again a discipline. People will look back at this time and be astonished at the breadth of the science scam, far, far greater than the Piltdown Man. The Piltdown Man is limited in amusement not because it’s no longer funny, but because only a few appreciate the joke because education and communication about it is limited..
To any who understand the difference.
On page 19 here is a map of the US showing heat bands of beam energy: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19730014021_1973014021.pdf
giving Figure 5 – Solar heat, btu/ft2/average day.
Please would you explain what this is saying, I’m not a scientist so in simple terms in English and not in Mathematics, and explain the differences in measuring and what is being measured between btu and kW.
Bearing in mind that in the comic cartoon energy budget of AGW they claim that a) shortwave light physically heats land and oceans and b) that thermal infrared, the direct beam heat from the Sun, doesn’t play any part in this except for a token 1%; the meme is ‘shortwave in longwave out’.
Data are facts, not individual opinions. It is important to show theresult of spectral analysis of relevant data, while contemporary interpretations (wherever they come from) may be totally irrelevant.
Sorry that should be, differences between btu/ft2 and W/m2
For example. What is this actually measuring?:
http://mb-soft.com/public2/energyso.html
First graph – it has excluded all of thermal from the picture and has the measurements in W/m2.
What would happen to that graph if the measurements were all in Btu/ft2?
Shortwave wouldn’t show. Btu is the measure of energy it takes to heat something up, that is what thermal means in the difference in traditional science between heat and light, and light, photo, is not a thermal energy.
Visible light is not a thermal energy. It is not hot. It doesn’t move matter into kinetic energy states to heat it up, how can it be measured in Btu? We do not feel it as heat because it isn’t heat.
It is thermal infrared direct from the Sun which is collected in Solar Thermal heating systems, while visible light is collected in PhotoVoltaic systems to turn into electricity and is irrelevant to heating up matter.
http://www.eere.energy.gov/basics/renewable_energy/solar_resources.html
Why? Because they’re measuring different properties, different entities?
Heat is not Light. Thermal infrared is the direct heat from the Sun, heat is a powerful energy which heats things up. The best that can be done with shortwave light is to turn it into electricity and it produces little enough of that. Solar Thermal’s power can also be used to create electricity, it’s got plenty of power to spare for this..
Back to the first link which shows NO thermal measurements in the graph, it says –
How are they going to know if heat energy has been excluded and they pretend it is something else?
Are these saying the same thing as they make out by saying one is just an ‘English’ measuring system? What is the difference between British thermal units and Watts?
Is the Solar Constant a measurement of Heat or Light? If it’s both, where is the great heat we feel from the Sun in this graph? Which certainly feels a lot on a hot day…
We cannot feel shortwave Light. We cannot feel it because it is not hot. If it was heating us up we could feel it as hot.
Shortwave direct from the Sun including uv and near infrared are not hot, they are not thermal energies, they cannot heat us up.
NASA used to teach the difference:
So, compare with the graphic, second on page: http://www.ucar.edu/learn/1_1_2_5t.htm which shows thermal infrared to 1mm, unlike the previous graph which cuts it off.
In its spiel it says, correctly, my bold,
And then, it gives figures for LIGHT not Heat!
What happened to the energy from the Sun which is primarily heat, because they’ve defined radiation as heat transfer and said it is the primary energy from the Sun, because they ignore it completely and go on to say:
It has excluded all Radiation which it itself first defines as the transfer of heat, energy (which is only thermal infrared) and which is says is primarily this of all the energy radiated from the Sun! And which it shows on its own graphic does exist.. What would that graphic look like if it were done to scale?
Come on, people. What’s up with that??
100% uv, visible, near infrared and a bit of radio and microwave when it has just said that of the energy radiated from the Sun it is primarily Radiation=Heat. It has taken the non-primary energy from the Sun and made that 100%. So another joke, in the AGWScience Fiction world they can’t feel any heat from the Sun either.
Hasn’t it, AGWScienceFiction memes producing department, deliberately given all of the power of the primary energy from the Sun, the direct heat energy from the Sun, to shortwave? Hasn’t it deliberately screwed with real world physics? Isn’t it deliberately confusing by mixing up terms?
Does that Solar Constant relate at all to visible light or is it simply an inaccurate ‘transliteration’ of the traditional physics Btu heat measurement which is Radiation=Thermal Infrared? As the earlier link I gave showed for the US.
All, all, the heat we feel from the Sun is thermal infrared.
The amount that the other electromagnetic wave lengths are capable of directly heating matter is non-existant.
For those claiming that shortwave direct from the Sun physically heats the water in the oceans – prove it. Show and tell.
Or admit you’ve been had.
And let’s move on.
It works both ways:
If the Arctic/Antarctic can warm & shrink in tandem, they can also freeze and grow.
The road ahead might well be of an icier variety. There is nothing going on right now that says there will not be another Ice Age, that I can see. The last 8 Ice Ages were oblivious to CO2 levels, so what makes this one any different?
Now, now, folks, it really is cruel to taunt Dr. Svalgard by thinking unauthorized thoughts. It gets him all riled up and the next thing you know he’ll be out on the porch shouting “You kids get those theories off my lawn!”.
Nolo Contendere says:
June 23, 2012 at 7:18 pm
“You kids get those theories off my lawn!”.
In science, “theory” means something specific. What was peddling here was not ‘theory’, but simply nonsense. But such is there much of on the Internet, even on WUWT.
Thank you, Leif! As you [as usual] correctly point out, the term “theory” has a very specific meaning in science. Before theory, there is hypothesis. Before hypothesis, there is conjecture. And before conjecture, there is nonsense: witch doctor territory.
As far as I can see [which I admit may not be very far], CO2=AGW is a conjecture, and CO2=CAGW is nonsense.
Myrrh asked, with specific reference to a DOE web site on solar panels:
“Why (w-h/m**2 in one place and btu/ft**2 in another)? Because they’re measuring different properties, different entities? ”
Actually, no. It’s because heating systems are typically described in BTUs and electrical loads are typically described in watts, watt-hours and related units. Describing the panels in these 2 different ways makes it easier for the electrical guys or the heating guys to figure out the answer to “how much is enough?” without going through an awkward conversion. The plate on the side of my furnace describes its heat output in BTUs. The electrical loads in my house have little plates that describe their requirements in watts or kilowatts (or amps, which is a convenient conversion to watts when you know the voltage).
Since scientists aren’t generally concerned with heating houses, they tend to use Watts, meters and similar units. Many of these units “play well” with the Metric system, which itself is convenient for lots of reasons. BTU/ft**2 would not fit in very well.
By the way, you referenced w/m**2 and BTU/ft**2 in asking how a chart would be different in BTU/ft**2. That wouldn’t work at all because w/m**2 is not the same kind of measurement as BTU/ft**2. Watts are a measure of power. To measure energy, like BTUs, you use watt-hours.
There’s a pretty good Wikipedia article on insolation that can help you understand how the Sun heats the Earth and, yes, much of it is done with visible light.
———
Arctic ice volume plotted in an interesting way:
http://iwantsomeproof.com/extimg/sia_5.png