Story submitted by Eric Worrall
British Botanists conducting a Summer survey of Scotland’s tallest mountain, Ben Nevis, have been stunned to find evidence of recently formed multi-year ice fields, areas of compacted snow, some of which weigh hundreds of tons.
According to the BBC;
“Hazards common in arctic and alpine areas but described as “extremely unusual” in the UK during the summer have been found on Ben Nevis.
A team of climbers and scientists investigating the mountain’s North Face said snowfields remained in many gullies and upper scree slopes.
On these fields, they have come across compacted, dense, ice hard snow call neve.
Neve is the first stage in the formation of glaciers, the team said.”
The team has also encountered sheets of snow weighing hundreds of tonnes and tunnels and fissures known as bergschrunds.
Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-28885119
This is how ice ages start – a buildup of snow which does not melt in the Summer, which leads to a positive feedback loop, as the growing ice sheet reflects more and more sunlight back into space.
I’m sure the missing heat is being stored in these new glaciers somewhere. Maybe ice mass balance compression. It will be confirmed when glacial isostatic adjustment looks like sea level rise.
Methinks the Scots must be hiding the missing [heat] under their kilts.
JBJ says:
August 24, 2014 at 2:39 pm
This is off the topic … but I fear some data tampering … does anyone remember this graph for 2013 http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php It was not like this at all the last time I looked at it!!! It has been doctored!
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Wayback machine has versions back to 2009
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Oops. “missing” should read “missing heat”.
[Butt all thongs (er, things) are hotter under a missing kilt. .mod]
Walter Dnes
Prominent climatologists Kukla and Mathews wrote a letter to Pres. Nixon in 1972 warning him of the coming extensive glaciation within a century. It was the global cooling hype of 1970s. My guess is we might see a 30-year cool period similar to 1945-1977 but we will not return to the LIA. The sun is not like the Sporer and Maunder minima. Sea level today is at least 20 cm higher than in 1850 due to thermal expansion and melted glaciers. IMO the 1,000-year natural warm cycle of Roman Warm Period, MWP and the present is intact.
MarkG, Mid-August was the typical first snowfall in Wyoming from at least the mid-1950’s through 1980. This was also when Glaciers were expanding the region. We have 2 generations that are unaware of the naturally cool part of an 80 year climate cycle. If we are entering a cool phase glacier expansion, like what happened between 1950 and 1980, can happen.
Permanent Snow fields in Scotland are not unusual, Cairgorm and Ben Nevis are both know to have had them among British mountaineers. The last few years they have been smaller and on “the Ben” have retreated to a few well shaded gullies but their return is not so much of a surprise.
Sorry, I must have missed it. You did say “That seems to tie in with Winnipeg’s new glacier” as opposed to the snow pile collected from parking lots.
Sorry Jimbo… really. I sometimes feel like I’m being ignored these days… was actually asking if my post even appears.
I live an hour from the Rockies – to me having snow and ice nearby every day of the year is kinda normal. I’m always an hour drive away from it. If that ever ends, then and only then will I start “believing” there might be some kind of warming going on.
Per Strandberg (@LittleIceAge) August 24, 2014 at 4:53 am
Not a bad confection, explaining how warming causes glaciers. There is a theory, which first scared me a little bit in the 70’s, that warming, or a change of ocean circulation causes the Arctic to melt which then leads to greater humidity and snowfalls in northern lands. The result is the great ice sheets, but they in turn raise the albedo in the region, cooling the earth and eventually refreezing the Arctic, and eliminating the ice sheet. The cycle then repeats.
It’s not my theory but it does illustrate how you can be a warmist and still be prepared for anything.
This is the blog for one of the mountaineers helping with the survey http://abacusmountainguides.blogspot.co.uk/.
If you look at his entries for 13th August, 22nd June, 16th June you can see photos of the snow build up.
It may not look much to those who live in mountainous areas but Ben Nevis is only 1,344m (4,409ft) high and is on the coast directly in the path of the warm Gulf Stream.
I’m expecting a research vessel to get stuck on Ben Nevis any day now
So Scotland did not get the memo. The computer models email system must have had a hiccup, no big deal. Maybe they should change the title from “Global warming” to “We hate CO2 (WHCO2) . It does not matter if it is warm or cold, snow, rain, or drought, up or down or a tuba or a pizza with pepperoni, it is due to mans elicit and scandelous relationship with CO2.
R.L.Cooper
August 24, 2014 at 11:26 am
there was an article on the net the other day that the montana dakota area is going to have a very bad winter this comming year. now this is a genuine Montana stove top tail.
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Great story!
BTW is this what they mean by a positive feedback loop in climate science?
Hmm – to those saying this is not unusual:
“She said: “Not only have we gathered potentially ground-breaking geological data and significantly added to the known populations of arctic-alpine species, the team have also discovered alpine saxifrage, which has never been found on the mountain before.””
– interesting that arctic-alpine plant species are migrating south.
I thought we generally frowned on positive feedback loops.
A total non-story. Snow patches in summer in the highest Scottish peaks are not that unusual. And to extrapolate to ice ages is plain daft.
Meanwhile in Greenland it has been a heavy melt year – above average almost all summer and for two periods above 2 SDs:
http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/
@James Baldwin Abbott,
Nice try, but what they found wasn’t just a “snow patch”, but amidst the snowfields something called neve, which is the first stage in the formation of a glacier. And yes, that is how ice ages start. Since the start of ice ages some 2mya, it is the preferred state of the earth, lasting some 5 to ten times as long as the interglacials. Cooling is actually something to be concerned about, as it is far more deadly. The worry about a slight warmup after the LIA is what is daft.
Possibly the most surprising thing about this is that it comes after the warmest start to a year on record for Scotland.
January-July 2014 is the warmest Jan-Jul period in the UKMO Scotland record, available here: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/datasets
Indeed, spring (Mar-May) 2014 was the warmest spring on record in Scotland. (The UKMO temperature data for Scotland start in 1910.)
August 2014 has been slightly below the August average for the UK, but it would be indeed be surprising if it’s been cold enough to start a new ice age off in Scotland.
Ah, the Highlands! … queue Scottish weather jokes … 🙂
Bruce Cobb – see the response from DavidR confirming again that it is a non-story.
Most of the world’s glaciers are in retreat. The 2 largest ice sheets/caps (Greenland and Antarctica) are losing mass.
A few patches of compacting snow on the highest mountains in Scotland, where such patches often survive the summer, is simply not a story and it is clutching at straws to extrapolate such features into predictions about ice ages. There would need to be at a minimum regional evidence of glaciers forming/expanding before any such notion was entertained.
The UK has had one of its warmest periods on record through last winter and spring. There was ZERO snowfall across large parts of England and here in central Essex we recorded just 11 air frosts during the whole winter period, with a lowest temperature of only -3.5C.
Not only did Scotland have a warm spring, the UK as a whole had its warmest (and 3rd wettest) Jan – July period since records began in 1910.
So no ice age. Having been to Scotland many times I would be far more concerned about the midges.
James Abbott August 25, 2014 at 10:51 am
“….here in central Essex we recorded just 11 air frosts during the whole winter period, with a lowest temperature of only -3.5C.”
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Scotland beat you, but only just. There were ~ 18 air frost days in Scotland this winter, the second fewest of any winter on record (started 1961). That’s about 19 days below the 1981-2010 average.
Again, hard to reconcile this with an impending ice age centred on Ben Nevis in August (but you never know!).
Source: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/datasets
http://cairngormwanderer.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/a-glacier-in-the-cairngorms/#comment-3370
“A professor at Dundee University made the headlines this week with a claim that Coire an Lochain in the Cairngorms held a glacier as recently as the 1700s”
James Abbott
August 25, 2014 at 10:51 am
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The most important by far of the world’s ice sheets, the EAIS, is growing and cooling:
http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/antarctica/east-antarctic-ice-sheet/
sturgishooper
Yes you are correct, but there is net mass loss from Antarctica as a whole.
Quote from a researcher following their paper published in Cryosphere:
“We have found that, since 2009, the volume loss in Greenland has increased by a factor of about two, and the West Antarctic ice sheet by a factor of three,” said glaciologist Angelika Humbert, one of the study’s authors. “Both the West Antarctic ice sheet and the Antarctic peninsula, in the far west, are rapidly losing volume. By contrast, East Antarctica is gaining volume, though at a moderate rate that doesn’t compensate for the losses on the other side of the continent.”