UPDATE – 4/7/13
At the time I wrote this post, April 4th 11:45AM, at ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/trop/quelccaya/
there was a placeholder file quelccaya2013.txt reading then:
“# Data will be added to this file upon publication of Thompson et al. 2013 Science”
It seems they listened. Good on them for doing so (assuming WUWT had an impact). Now there are several data files dated April 5th at 8:20PM.
Steve McIntyre offers some praise and some notes for this latest development here -Anthony
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From the Ohio State University , taken with a grain of salt since Dr. Thompson and his wife Ellen are serial non archivers of ice core data (even when asked for it), which prevents other scientists from checking their work.
Discovery of 1,800-year-old ‘Rosetta Stone’ for tropical ice cores
Find offers the most complete picture of Earth’s low-latitude climate history to date
COLUMBUS, Ohio—Two annually dated ice cores drawn from the tropical Peruvian Andes reveal Earth’s tropical climate history in unprecedented detail—year by year, for nearly 1,800 years.
Researchers at The Ohio State University retrieved the cores from a Peruvian ice cap in 2003, and then noticed some startling similarities to other ice cores that they had retrieved from Tibet and the Himalayas. Patterns in the chemical composition of certain layers matched up, even though the cores were taken from opposite sides of the planet.
In the April 4, 2013 online edition of the journal Science Express, they describe the find, which they call the first annually resolved “Rosetta Stone” with which to compare other climate histories from Earth’s tropical and subtropical regions over the last two millennia.
The cores provide a new tool for researchers to study Earth’s past climate, and better understand the climate changes that are happening today.
“These ice cores provide the longest and highest-resolution tropical ice core record to date,” said Lonnie Thompson, distinguished university professor of earth sciences at Ohio State and lead author of the study.
“In fact, having drilled ice cores throughout the tropics for more than 30 years, we now know that this is the highest-resolution tropical ice core record that is likely to be retrieved.”
The new cores, drilled from Peru’s Quelccaya Ice Cap, are special because most of their 1,800-year history exists as clearly defined layers of light and dark: light from the accumulated snow of the wet season, and dark from the accumulated dust of the dry season.
They are also special because of where they formed, atop the high Andean altiplano in southern Peru. Most of the moisture in the area comes from the east, in snowstorms fueled by moist air rising from the Amazon Basin. But the ice core-derived climate records from the Andes are also impacted from the west—specifically by El Niño, a temporary change in climate, which is driven by sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific.
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  IMAGE: This 2002 photo of Quelccaya Ice Cap, taken from the same spot as a previous photo in 1977, shows the retreat of the ice wall’s vertical margins.Click here for more information. |
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El Niño thus leaves its mark on the Quelccaya ice cap as a chemical signature (especially in oxygen isotopes) indicating sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean over much of the past 1,800 years.
“We have been able to derive a proxy for sea surface temperatures that reaches back long before humans were able to make such measurements, and long before humans began to affect Earth’s climate,” Thompson said.
Ellen Mosley-Thompson, distinguished university professor of geography at Ohio State and director of the Byrd Polar Research Center, explained that the 2003 expedition to Quelccaya was the culmination of 20 years of work.
The Thompsons have drilled ice cores from glaciers atop the most remote areas of the planet—the Chinese Himalayas, the Tibetan Plateau, Kilimanjaro in Africa, and Papua Indonesia among others—to gauge Earth’s past climate. Each new core has provided a piece of the puzzle, as the researchers measured the concentrations of key chemicals preserved in thousands of years of accumulated ice.
A 1983 trip to Quelccaya yielded cores that earned the research team their first series of papers in Science. The remoteness of the site and the technology available at the time limited the quality of samples they could obtain, however. The nearest road was a two-day walk from the ice cap, so they were forced to melt the cores in the field and carry samples back as bottles of water. This made some chemical measurements impossible, and diminished the time resolution available from the cores.
“Due to the remoteness of the ice cap, we had to develop new tools such as a light-weight drill powered by solar panels to collect the 1983 cores. However, we knew there was much more information the cores could provide” Mosley-Thompson said. “Now the ice cap is just a six-hour walk from a new access road where a freezer truck can be positioned to preserve the cores. So we can now make better dust measurements along with a suite of chemical analyses that we couldn’t make before.”
The cores will provide a permanent record for future use by climate scientists, Thompson added. This is very important, as plants captured by the advancing ice cap 6,000 years ago are now emerging along its retreating margins, which shows that Quelccaya is now smaller than it has been in six thousand years.
“The frozen history from this tropical ice cap—which is melting away as Earth continues to warm—is archived in freezers at -30ºC so that creative people will have access to it 20 years from now, using instruments and techniques that don’t even exist today,” he said.
Coauthors on the study include Mary Davis, Victor Zagorodnov, and Ping-Nan Lin of Byrd Polar Research Center; Ian Howat of the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State; and Vladimir Mikhalenko of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation’s Paleoclimatology Program and Ohio State’s Climate, Water and Carbon Program.
I guess Lonnie and his missus are both “distinguished” professors in the sense that the normal rules of science don’t apply to either of them because they give the desired answers.
Andrew Russell says: April 4, 2013 at 4:39 pm
‘Question for you, Nick Stokes: “When members of your scientific community lie, cheat, and steal to further their own ends, should other members refuse to say anything bad about the wrong-doers?”. That’s the question Willis Eschenback asked on Judith Curry’s blog July 25, 2011. It’s still a good question. What’s your answer?’
Please document your accusaations of “lie, cheat and steal” wrt Prof Thompson. And not just a link to CA – your statement, please.
That’s the problem with CA diatribes that lead posts like this astray. “Thompson is a serial non-archiver” means he archives extensively, but not according to Steve McI’s exact requirements.
“This is very important, as plants captured by the advancing ice cap 6,000 years ago are now emerging along its retreating margins, which shows that Quelccaya is now smaller than it has been in six thousand years.”
So if Marcott is correct, and Thompson is correct, the ice “cap” was advancing during the peak temperatures, and began retreating as temperatures began to fall. Therefore lower earth temperatures produce glacier retreat, and higher temperatures promote glacial advance.
Perhaps higher ocean temperatures drive moisture over the mountaintops where higher snow rates promote higher volume and flow of the glacier down the valley. Likewise, lower ocean temps reduce moisture, decreasing deposition and flow, allowing ambient temperatures to melt the glaciers at a rate that overwhelms the slowed advance rate. Doesn’t seem that far fetched really… I was trying to be sarcastic.
So what we have learned today, folks, is that evidence of retreating glaciers is evidence of cooling, not warming. It should be obvious by now that these relationships are what trigger the ends of interglacials. Haha. Once again, a warmist makes another breakthrough that demolishes the settled science.
Wow, this even parallels the story this week that ice melt floating on the water creates more sea ice in Antarctica too, despite violent wave action and overturning for months of the year.
I seem to be “progressing” right along… Can I have my global warming merit badge now?
“This is very important, as plants captured by the advancing ice cap 6,000 years ago are now emerging along its retreating margins, which shows that Quelccaya is now smaller than it has been in six thousand years.”
That statement doesn’t make sense to me. If plants were captured 6000 years ago, that must have happened much further up the mountain, as the glacier slowly flowed downhill since then. Then the glacier must have been must shorter 6000 years ago than today.
Did it really take 10 years to archive data they call a “rosetta stone” ? And is their paper now just in time and any “future use by climate scientists” too late to be included in AR5 ?
Steve M, it is thanks to your tireless efforts that any progress on such matters is being made at all. In the end, I suspect that a lot of papers based on unarchived data/unreplicable methods will end on history’s trash heap. Perhaps including theirs. The shame is, future scientists might be able to extract nuggets we cannot yet imagine, if only folks would preserve the data, or provide other means for replication and reanalysis, like in almost all other disciplines.
In my world, if we say the results are X, our customers had better produce X from our samples in their own labs, so long as they generally follow our device ‘recipe’ (energy storage materials is a young field, with lots of tricks practiced by famous academics, but not quite as bad as climate change.) At least in energy, volts are volts on a calibrated LCR, unlike station temperatures affected by siting, TOB, undocumented homogenization, and gosh knows what else..
The science is settled in invisible patches of non-archived ice…
NIck, please identify a single incorrect statement in the linked post http://climateaudit.org/2012/07/01/lonnie-and-ellen-serial-non-archivers/. As shown in the post, Ellen’s record is particularly bad.
“That’s the problem with CA diatribes that lead posts like this astray. “Thompson is a serial non-archiver” means he archives extensively, but not according to Steve McI’s exact requirements.”
It’s not steveMc exact requirements. Its the requirements of funding agencies. Its the requirement of journals. Its the requirement of science itself.
So if he collected and published about 100 cores and archived 18, while second best was 5 of 6,
that only means is a worse that someone who did less work.
There is no reason for non archival of a single record. No reason. No excuse. no scientif ethic that says 18 out of 19 or 18 out of 24 is “good enough”
The planet is at risk. we need the best minds on all the data we have.
Nick Stokes, 706 p.m.: “Please document your accusaations”
Oh, LOOK A SQUIRREL!…
How clever of you to dodge the question with your favorite technique. Answer MY question, Mr. Stokes, or just admit you are here only to shill for the catastrophe-mongers.
As for YOUR bogus question: Those who take taxpayer’s money to do science, and then blatantly violate the Scientific Method and deliberately refuse to allow independent verification of their “results”, are stealing. As so comprehensively documented by Steve McIntyre at CA (again, http://climateaudit.org/2012/07/08/lonnie-thompsons-legacy/ ), by Andrew Montford in “The Hockey Stick Illusion”, and in any number of places where someone with the slightest bit of intellectual honesty can find that evidence, as well as the massive amount of lying and cheating by The Hockey Team.
Answer the question.
Steve McIntyre says: April 4, 2013 at 8:54 pm
“NIck, please identify a single incorrect statement in the linked post http://climateaudit.org/2012/07/01/lonnie-and-ellen-serial-non-archivers/.”
Right at the top.
“the serial non-archiving couple of Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Mosley-Thompson, who, as it turns out, is an even worse offender than husband Lonnie, if such can be imagined. Their long career of non-archiving has flourished despite clear U.S. federal government policies dating back to 1991 which, on paper, require thorough data archiving by the climate community as a condition of receiving grants.”
And it goes on… and on .
In fact, they have lodged an extensive set of archives. Currently fifteen, and I think most predate last July. Lonnie is listed as as lead contributor, but Ellen is a frequent participant. And as I said above, the next most prolific ice-core contributors, Parrenin and Pedro, have five each. The Thompsons are by far the most prolific. This is not in accord with your characterization.
At least one of those fifteen was archived by Ellen.
Andrew Russell says: April 4, 2013 at 10:06 pm
“Answer the question.”
The question poses facts that I am supposed to respond to. But you give no substance to those facts. Someone, presumably Prof Thompson, is supposed to be “lie, cheat, and steal to further their own ends”. You are free with the accusation, but again all you can do to support them is to link elsewhere. There’s nothing you are capable of saying yourself to back them. But they are your accusations. I am sure Steve McI would deny that they are his.
http://www.dgf.uchile.cl/rene/ACCION/Friday/hardy.pdf
On Svalbard the glacier maxima last 10.000 years happened in the 1910s AD. Since then some has melted again and plants where found a few years ago dated to around the Roman warm period, 2000 BP(I think).
Having the 1970s, last global little cold period, as a starting reference to judge today’s situation on Quelccaya is a bit fetched?
Any reference for this glacier back to the 1930s 1940s?
Nick Stokes, 10:37 pm: “The question poses facts that I am supposed to respond to”
More “LOOK, A SQUIRREL!”
Your refusal to answer a straight forward question, well documented, pretty well answers another question: Is Nick Stokes intellectually honest?
Paper says data already archived:
“The data are archived at the NOAA World Data Center-A for Paleoclimatology: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/trop/quelccaya/quelccaya2013.txt
“
No, they aren’t. That is just a placeholder
“Data will be added to this file upon publication of Thompson et al. 2013 Science”
We’ll see.
Top photo seems to show approx 40 layers. Impossible to estimate the vertical extent, but a continuous core sample would require around 45 times this depth to cover 1800 years. Any idea what typical thickness of one year’s layer thickness might be? Just curious…
Jimbo says:
April 4, 2013 at 4:35 pm
“I have found some reports of climate change changeable weather in Peru. Imagine if the following was caused by heat.”
Actually, according to CNN International’s weather giants the latest flooding in Buenos Aries IS caused by heat, caused by climate change, which also causes record cold in the UK, “extreme snowfall” in Europe and any phenomena, natural or otherwise in between. They even show us a chart, desperately trying to look like a hockey stick to prove it. So it must be true, right, I mean they’d never try to deceive the public, right?
I don’t understand the attacks on Thompson in this article. Obviously it would have been desirable if he had archived all his earlier samples from different locations but he has archived this one. Presumably that means sceptics are free to examine the data and, if they find valid reasons, free to disagree with his conclusions? Shouldn’t he be praised for that?
So Lonnie, how do we know that this not just another Piltdown Mann artifact of selective reporting?
As Tom J says (April 4, 2013 at 2:10 pm) those photos are very suspicious.
The 1977 picture appears to show bare rock face at the base of the ice, which isn’t present in the same spot in 2002. But if you zoom in on the 2002 image, so that the height of the glacier is similar, you can see similar rock features at the base of the glacier.
I suspect that if the 1977 photo was taken from the same location, then it used with a lens with a much longer focal length, and the ice has actually retreated by at most 10’s of meters.
Not everyone who fails to archive data is a crook. Some researchers hang on to their data in the hope that the next field trip will gather further really important data that will allow a world-shattering paper – by them, not some other researcher who would profit from the release of the earlier data, without having done any of the hard work…
Nick Stokes you do understand that if they logged 15 but have collected far more they still be guilty of ‘non-archiving ‘ don’t you ?
Remember the requirements of science are that your work can be both checked and reproduced , their approach towards there data means that is not possible .
Try that claiming that its your data from an experiments and others cannot have it to check it when you hand in an essay has a undergraduate and your see your work failed. Has with other issues why the ‘professional’ working in this area cannot or will not meet the standards expected of students is a very good question.
Off Topic, but get a load of the kind of congenital idiots who are in the UK Government.This particular lunatic is in change of the Energy Department.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/4/5/the-numptocracy.html
Some non-archivers are waiting for their next field trip in the hope that it will produce genuinely bobby-dazzling data that will revolutionise the field. I’ve known one or two to do that for twenty years.
6000 years ago the last ice age was failing, the planet warming, so ice retreat is expected. kilimanjaro is indeed collecting more ice as precipitation in the area rises so replenishing the sublimated ice loss.