![SoundofIceMelting_JJ[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/soundoficemelting_jj1.jpg?resize=300%2C375&quality=83)
Maybe they need to link up with artist Paul Kos whose performance art is seen at right. His emotive imagery and recordings of ice melting dates all the way back to 1970. Yes, regular man-made ice makes sounds while it melts too. According to the press release, this “research” was also done in a studio, rather than in situ. It’s all about the tiny bubbles escaping it seems, something I’ll bet Don Ho would appreciate.
Hmm, maybe they should team up with these guys and release an album: “City College of New York music professor Jonathan Perl teamed up with City University of New York climate professor Marco Tedesco to create musical soundscapes or “sonifications” that document the changes in the glacial ice in Greenland over the last 54 years.”
Or maybe these guys: “Glaciers are dying, but they are not doing so quietly. The Glacier Music project of the Goethe Institutes in Tashkent and Almaty uses the sounds and powerful emotional image of melting glaciers as source of inspiration for festivals, open calls, concerts, sculpture, video and sound installations.“.
Emotifying ice melt has been a popular pastime with warmists, who have traditionally focused on the supposed plight of polar bears. However, the sound of melting ice is hardly anything new, explorers and the indigenous people of the Arctic have heard it for centuries. With 50 words for snow, I’m betting they even have a word for noisy melting ice since they’d hear it every spring.
Glaciers sizzle as they disappear into warmer water
The sounds of bubbles escaping from melting ice make underwater glacial fjords one of the loudest natural marine environments on earth
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 27, 2013 – Scientists have recorded and identified one of the most prominent sounds of a warming planet: the sizzle of glacier ice as it melts into the sea. The noise, caused by trapped air bubbles squirting out of the disappearing ice, could provide clues to the rate of glacier melt and help researchers better monitor the fast-changing polar environments.
Geophysicist Erin Pettit, a researcher at the University of Alaska, had often heard popping, crackling sounds while out kayaking in the frigid northern waters. The sounds were also picked up by underwater microphones Pettit set up off the Alaskan coast, and at a much louder volume than above the surface.
“If you were underneath the water in a complete downpour, with the rain pounding the water, that’s one of the loudest natural ocean sounds out there,” she said. “In glacial fjords we record that level of sound almost continually.”
While Pettit suspected the din was caused by melting ice, she couldn’t confirm that hypothesis without a more controlled experiment. So she enlisted the help of Kevin Lee and Preston Wilson, acoustics experts from the University of Texas. Pettit sent the Texas researchers chunks of glacier, which they mounted in a tank of chilled water. Lee and Wilson recorded video and audio of the ice as it melted and were able to match sounds on the recording to the escape of bubbles from the ice.
“Most of the sound comes from the bubbles oscillating when they’re ejected,” Lee said. “A bubble when it is released from a nozzle or any orifice will naturally oscillate at a frequency that’s inversely proportional to the radius of the bubble,” he said, meaning the smaller the bubble, the higher the pitch. The researchers recorded sounds in the 1 – 3 kilohertz range, which is right in the middle of the frequencies humans hear.
Scientists have known for decades that the bubbles in glaciers form when snow crystals trap pockets of air and then get slowly squashed down under the weight of more snow. As the snow is compacted it turns into ice and the air bubbles become pressurized. The regular way the bubbles form means that they are evenly distributed throughout the ice, an important characteristic if you want to use the sound intensity of bubble squirts to measure ice melt rate.
While the symphony of melting ice might not carry the same emotional wallop as images, sound still has its own, sometimes very loud, story to tell. Pettit and Lee say they could imagine using hydrophone recordings in glacial fjords to monitor relative changes in glacier melting in response to one-time weather events, seasonal changes, and long-term climate trends. Because sound travels long distances underwater, recording microphones can be placed a safe distance from unstable ice sheets. The audio recordings would complement other measurements of ice melt, such as time-lapse photography and salinity readings.
Presentation 4aUW4, “Underwater sound radiated by bubbles released by melting glacier ice,” will take place on Thursday, Dec. 5, 2013, at 9:55 a.m. The abstract describing this work can be found here: http://asa2013.abstractcentral.com/planner.jsp.
OK, let’s mind. PRESS RECORD.
PRESS RECORD.
Did I hear PRESS RECORD? I hope we are documenting all these strange, modern happenings going on. We must act now!
Oooops! Blockquote messed up.
[Ok, so blockquote is messed up (in your previous reply). Ain’t gonna get fixed until you ID what it should be. 8<) Mod]
This could work.
I’ll jump into the DeLorean and go back to the year 1066 and make some recordings. Should be able to get a trend.
I’ll be Back ! January 2015 and let you all know !
I live in Alaska and often marvel at how glaciers have shaped the land here. I am Tlingit, and know from our oral history that the Tlingit have adapted to the natural ebb and flow of glaciers. In more recent history, my great-grandfather, Sitka Charlie (X’aasku) guided John Muir and Reverend Samuel Hall to Glacier Bay in 1879. At this point John Muir “discovered” it. In 1915, Reverend Hall wrote in his book “Alaska Days” that “…Where Vancouver (in the 1790’s) saw only a great crystal wall across the sea, we were to paddle for days up a long and sinuous fiord; and where he saw one glacier, we were to find a dozen”
In the hundred years between Vancouver’s visit and Muir and Hall’s visit glaciers retreated for many miles, and that was natural, but recent withdrawal is attributable to Man’s sin of emission? Color me skeptical.
Chinook Winds
In 1975 my brother was on leave from the Army, and we went to the house my grandfather had built on Flathead Lake, in the northwest corner of Montana. It was the first week of February, and the daytime high was around 16F, with a night time low around 0F. The lake had frozen solid that year, (largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi ) and the first night there, my brother came in and woke me up because a ‘Chinook Wind’ was coming in. A ‘Chinook’ is when the jet stream drops down in the tropics, and gobbles up a bunch of very warm air before continuing on it’s way. That night, at about 1 am, the ‘Chinook’ blew in, raising temperatures to perhaps the mid 70’sF. We were standing on the dock, marveling at the temperature, when the ice on the lake started cracking. It was the absolute most unnerving sound I have ever heard in my life. The magnitude was such that it was louder than lightning striking within a half mile. It was groaning, screeching, screaming, all at a level that precluded conversation on any level. The hair on my arms, back of my neck, was all straight out — just like a Halloween cat. We stood there in wonder for maybe an hour, when all of a sudden the temperature dropped like a rock, back to seemingly 0F again. (sorry — can’t do ‘degrees’ symbol)
I’m fairly certain had it been a few years later, James Hansen and company would have been on grandad’s dock wringing their hands.
For my money, whatever sounds melting glaciers or icebergs make, it ain’t a pimple on the backside of a cracking lake.
Maybe the tiny bubbles are what inspired this guy’s creative interpretation of early climate science hypotheses.
Now here in the area near Seymour Texas when it real hot we have to wear ear plugs because of the noise the fly wings make due the the high temperatures .
Very rapid high pitched sizzling sound a lot like a glacier ice melting at the bottom of a glacier.
There, see how easy it is to out lie them, we tall tale Texans ain’t gonna play second fiddle to this bunch of long hair hippies….
HEAVY SNOW is just a thing of the present. We must act then!
Fortunately I am retired now, but even more fortunately I had things more productive, interesting, and rewarding to do when I was working than recording and writing about melting ice.
My man-made ice makes a cracking sound when I pour the vodka onto it.
@ur momisugly Louis
From Trollvinter, by Tove Jansson. (My translation.)
Just before the great cold comes:
“He listened, and thought that the stillness itself had a deep, singing tone. Perhaps it was the ice that froze even deeper down in the sea.”
Climate scientists? The Eco-Green rent-seeking crowd? I’m not aware of any actual ‘life’, however …
/sarc
bob paglee says:
December 1, 2013 at 2:57 pm
===============
Nice try, but I’ll still go with this one:
What is sad is that the melting glaciers may “kill” the “missing heat”
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A “one liner” if I ever heard one.
(For those of you who may not remember “Fizzies”, http://www.fizzies.com/. (of course, CO2 was involved.)
Perhaps the best album reflecting the logical end of our tyrannical government-controled lives is the 1978 album by DEVO “Are We Not Men”.
Mankind is devolving quickly thanks to the rapid pace of government run amok.
This isn’t pretty and it’s not going to end well…..at all….
And so it goes……until liberty and sanity are restored…..
“Tiny bubbles,
in my wine,
makes me feel happy,
makes me feel fine.”
Ice does make a sound like finger nails on a chalk board.I would much rather listen to a
‘babbling brook’. It’s been said that there’s five sounds that they(it) make(s) and i’m not sure but it could be studied. Could you imagine that…… “Hey, proffessor said we’re going to study a babbling brook.” “Oh ,really,I thought that was settled science ,that water can’t talk?” “well,he said that with all that grant money those guys over in ‘glacier science’ have been druming up,we have to get on the bandwagon.”
http://www.logicalfallacies.info/relevance/bandwagon/
Thanks for the interesting articles and comments.
Bill Illis
December 1, 2013 at 2:56 pm
says:
‘Why are people so upset about some melting glaciers. What exactly lives on glaciers. Nothing.’
I sort of hate to tell you this but there actually is something that lives on glaciers. Supposedly there was a joke that Alaskans played on sourdoughs by claiming there was such a thing in Alaska as an ice worm. Well, guess what? There actually is such a thing as an ice worm and they do live on glaciers and feed on glacial algae. The worm bodies will actually reduce to a liquid form (dare I say, melt?) at temperatures over 41 degrees Fahrenheit.
To be honest I think it would be more amusing to watch (with magnification because they’re pretty tiny) these worms fritter about and cavort on top of the ice then it would be to listen to the ice melt. Heck, I think it’d be more amusing to watch paint dry.
Why are hands/fingers so hard to paint/depict in art ?
Check it, nobody tries.
I can remember recordings of whale songs being sold with the tag line “get them now before all the whales are gone”. That didn’t happen for various reasons one being that cosmetics stopped using whale products and moved onto good petrochemicals, now they are bad petrochemicals, next it will be biochemicals from corn soya etc.
James Bull
Sshhh, Be Quiet. If you are real quiet, you can hear the sound of air leaving…
.
.
..the CAGW balloon…………
The middle of the human hearing range is about 632 Hz. The ear is most sensitive at about 4KHz. The very high sensitivity range runs 2 to 5 KHz. You can read more about that here:
http://www.audioholics.com/room-acoustics/human-hearing-amplitude-sensitivity-part-1