Eric Worrall writes:
Based on the current rate of Antarctic ice growth, how long until an ice bridge forms between South America and Antarctica?
Lets start with a simplification – if you squint hard Antarctica is a circle. Antarctica, according to Wikipedia, is 14 million square miles. Sea ice this year covered 20 million square miles. So what is the radius of a 34 million square mile circle?
area = PI x radius ^ 2
so
(34,000,000 / PI) ^ 0.5 = 3289 miles
So the radius of our “circular” Antarctica is approximately 3289 miles.
According to Wikipedia, the distance between Antarctica and South America is 500 miles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Passage So we need to calculate, what is the perfectly circular volume of sea ice required to increase the radius by another 500 miles?
Using our area calculation,
Area = PI x radius ^ 2
Area = PI * (3289 + 500) ^ 2 = 45 million square miles.
Since 34 million square miles (the land area of Antarctica + sea ice) is already taken, to increase the radius of Antarctica enough to close the gap, ice growth needs to fill in another 11 million square miles.
At say 300,000 square miles growth per year (lets not forget, this year busted records by 600,000 square miles), and via my drastically simplified calculation, we could expect Antarctic ice to close the Drake passage in 36 years – by 2050.
Interestingly 2055 – 2060 is the peak of the coming Little Ice Age event predicted by Dr. Khabibullo Abdusamatov, head of the space research sector of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ astronomical observatory, in his press release in 2006.
http://en.ria.ru/russia/20060825/53143686.html
This is a very rough calculation, so please don’t take it as a firm prediction – I am most definitely not a polar ice or ocean expert. There are many other factors, such as the brutal winds and currents which blast through the Drake Passage, which would likely impede the formation of sea ice. On the other hand, the growth of ice would increase the albedo of an enormous area of ocean, causing more sunlight to be reflected back into space – though as we are talking about polar ocean, it doesn’t receive much sunlight to start with.
Story Title:
One line summary of story: The growth of Antarctic ice
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The [strait] between Antarctica and South America has high winds are swift currents. I don’t think ice could form there and stay put for very long, unless we’re in an ice age.
Good post, an amusing pastime tweaking the “Concerned Ones” noses with linear extrapolations from natural cycles.
But according to the Team solid ice from Antarctica to South America will just be weather.
Two hot days this Fall however will be Climate.
In response to the question asked in the title, I’m pretty sure we will need to model it in order to form a peer reviewed consensus answer. 🙂
Oh yes, let’s! Albedo of snow/ice varies from 0.8 to 0.4 depending on age, roughness, accumulation of contaminants like dust, so those factors will all have to be modeled. Then there’s albedo of water which varies with angle of incidence anywhere from 0.08 to 0.65 so has to be modeled according to time of day AND time of year 24X365. Then there’s the amount of energy with is required to turn water into ice which is way different in salt water (versus fresh) since the entire water column must cool to the freezing point before ice forms at the top, so the energy calculation changes with distance from shore as the water gets deeper, so a lot more energy involved. We’ll need to include also the amount of energy radiated to space which is lower from ice than from water, so as water area turns to ice, that factor messes up the albedo corrections we did earlier…. and of course we have to take into account that the earth’s orbit is elliptical, and so the amount of TSI changes over the course of the year which has to get fed back into all the albedo adjustments. And with all that stuff going on, the temperature differential between arctic and temperate zones also changes which messes with prevailing winds, hadley cells, and all that. Modelling it should be a piece of cake….
Well, I got all of the modeling done (except for the column of water bit). 8<)
I set latitude of the ice by changing the day-of-year (which uses the 2011-2013 average ice areas) and then allowing the user to assign an anomaly to match the total sea ice she or he wants to look at. Then you can look at all latitudes for the same day, or all of the times of the day for a single latitude.
Except ole davidmhoffer done did fergit the losses side.
Evaporation rate changes with humidity, air temperature, wind speed, and surface type, wave height, and surface temperature.
Conduction and convection losses change with most of them things too.
Yeppers, radiation losses change with air temperature, sky temperatures, sky clarity, surface type, and surface temperature.
He's almost got the going-in side;
Almost left off the change in sunlight at TOA over the year.
Got the change in water's albedo 'bout near right on.
Did leave off the change in atmosphere clarity as a function of latitude AND day-of-year.
Done did fergot to include the Air Mass change as a function of latitude and time of day.
Didn't change the albedo of arctic sea ice with day-of-year.
Its a climate science model, it does not have to be based on anything but the press conference. (emphasis on the “con” in conference)
RA and David, you are both good with numbers, and I bet you think the error estimates for the surface GAT are far larger then anyone admits. Here is a German paper that well supports that view. The error margins for surface GAT just increased 100 fold.
http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/uploads/media/E___E_algorithm_error_07-Limburg.pdf
I constantly spent my half an hour to read this weblog’s content daily along with
a mug of coffee.
Cheers! I do two cups, both extra bold, cream only.
Antarctic sea ice isn’t evenly distributed by longitude. It extends far north of the Antarctic Circle south of the Atlantic and to a lesser extent Indian Ocean, and is well within the Antarctic Circle south of the Pacific Ocean. The difference is large, approaching 1,000 km.
There are likely several reason’s; the layout of the Antarctic continent, more heat transported southward by the Pacific ocean conveyor, distribution of katabatic winds, ++.
If sea ice does continue to increase, I’d bet on most of the increase being where the furthest northward extents exist already. Which is east of the Magellan Strait. Although sea ice does get blown eastward at a fairly rapid rate, so winds may distribute it fairly evenly.
Antarctic plate drift should put it contact with the Cape of Good Hope in about 30 million years give take 10 million years.
Unlikely because Africa is moving north east and Antarctica is fairly stationary. Cape Horn may be a different matter.
Isn’t that about when the rising ocean starts lapping at the Statue of Liberty ? 🙂
(Extrapolation of similar value).
Forget about the mathematics, what we need is a computer model.
I vote that WUWT applies for a US government loan to begin this program with an initial report to be presented by the project manager at the Lima UN get together in Dec 2014. If Lima does not sound too inviting for whoever goes, don’t forget that there will be a few side trips for the troops up to Machu Picchu. And I believe the coast of Peru has some of the best seafood in the world.
But we should not just rely on a computer model. It must be backed up by actual measurements.
My suggestion is that Leonardo DiCaprio hires out the same mega yacht Topaz from Manchester City Football Club owner Sheikh Mansour which he and his buddies used to watch the World Soccer Cup in Rio de Janeiro.
The yacht should be positioned at Palmer Station on the Antarctic Peninsular at the beginning of winter for the next 5 seasons and be manned by a party of University of NSW volunteers led by Professor Chris Turney and an ABC journalist to take piccies and report progress of the ice.
To prevent boredom during measurement of the the slow daily increase of sea ice in the direction of South America, the team could be given the additional task of counting penguins. And especially for Leonardo there would be the odd opportunity of some soccer on ice with the crew of Palmer Station.
You never know, an ice bridge may be coming faster than we think and we need some dramatic action now.
No loans! You aren’t thinking like a climate scientist…GRANTS! why pay back the money when you can get them to just give it to you.
And before long it will reach Australia. I’m a Queenslander, so I already think the Antarctic Circle runs through Tweed Heads. The prospect of actual Glaciers along the Gold Coast really gives me the shivers.
LOL – I hear you, last January (in the middle of SH Summer) I visited Brisbane, and shivered because I was cold.
If an ice bridge did form, disrupting the circulation of the Southern Ocean, it would have consequences for the established circulation patterns in the Atlantic and Pacific.
OMG, is this some kind of joke? Given a spherical cow…
I don’t understand the point of this article. To me, it looks totally worthless.
It is called ‘HUMOUR’ I believe.
Hey now…a spherical cow makes the problem much easier, and when you change the model to 6 cylinders of appropriate size, the answer really doesn’t change much, but adds to the complexity by a factor of 6. Now we all know that a cow doesn’t resemble anything like 6 cylinders, but a much more complex shape which can be approximated as follow: the head: a cylinder 5cm X30cm (forms upper jaw and nasal part) a cylinder 5cm X 30cm (forms lower jaw) attached to a sphere of radius 10cm with two smaller hemispheres of 3cm (eyes), this is attached to a 10cmX50cm cylinder (neck) which is attached to a 150cmx250cm cylinder(body) etc. We can add to these any number of other shapes, each one adding a little to the total, but adding orders of magnitude to the calculations. The question is at what point does the spherical nature of our initial cow detract from the problem at hand. Of course I always found the part about placing that spherical cow into a vacuum at absolute 0 as the more problematic part of the problem.
The above was typed with tongue firmly planted in cheek. The problem really does illustrate something though. In a radiative physics problem the complexity of the shape does change the answer, but it depends on how much precision you need. For back of envelop estimates, that spherical cow is all the answer you need – it sets the upper limit on how long thermal equilibrium takes. However, if you are asking “how long can I safely expose a real cow to the cold of space (lets forget the vacuum for the moment)?” that is a different level of need for precision, and modeling it down to fractal shape matching may be required.
The problem as it applies to GCMs is they are essentially modeling a spherical cow and wanting an answer that tells us trends to tenths of a degree. I am afraid the spherical cow approach (5×5 degree grid cells?) doesn’t have the level of detail required to observe to the degree of temperature.
This whole article is poking fun at the “let’s take the last few years trend, linearize it and project it to infinity” approach that most climate alarmism is based on.
Couldn’t the south island of NZ get there first? Go for it the Frosty Ferns !
How long until Antarctic ice touches South America?
Answer when Leonardo Di Caprio can no longer sail around it.
From the looks of him it looks like he just got back from training…in Syria!
Who the hell cares what this actor thinks?
Do you mean “Drake’s Passage” which is north of Tierra del Fuego or Cape Horn which is south of T. d. F.?
Drake’s Passage is also south of Tierra del Fuego.
If the ice does touch South America the ocean currents are not necessarily blocked because the ice would float an the surface and the currents could still flow beneath it.
http://perezhilton.com/fitperez/2014-06-13-leonardo-dicaprio-takes-super-luxury-yacht-to-brazil-world-cup#.VCJuKRby3At
Here is Captain Leo,s Saudi owned CO2 polluting luxury private yacht .Picture courtesy of bitchy Hollywood celebrity blogger Perez Hilton.
Cool calculation. Of course it assumes the current increase is a long term trend. But that’s the same mistake that led the AGW supporters to think the arctic would soon be ice free.
Bob Clark
And therein lies the source of why such silliness is fun.
“Hey, South America, is it ok if I touch you down there?”
I was just wondering what it would take for Antarctic Sea Ice and the tip of South America to touch. Thanks for the math. Did you notice how the tip of SA is getting a bit frostier with each image of late?
For other math along these lines please see my article, http://pathstoknowledge.net/2012/03/12/how-much-energy-is-required-to-melt-all-the-ice-in-greenland, that asks “How Much Energy Is Required To Melt All The Ice In Greenland?”
I have a question for the boffins of this blog. What is the climatic effect of the reduced wave action caused by such a large area of normally turbulent sea being ice covered? Colder ? Hotter? The Al Gore effect?
Approximately zero as a direct effect.
Secondary effects are mainly decreased heat loss from the oceans. Although ice albedo increases are significantly larger.
Net – increased sea ice causes substantial climate cooling.
Eric Opps, despite otherwise informative posts here you based on “[Antartic] Sea ice this year covered 20 million square miles.”
Really 20 million square kilometers by extent, 16.8 sq. km by area for winter max sea ice surrounding Antarctic last week.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/antarctic.sea.ice.interactive.html
The metric system is great, we can confuse things in US with rest of planet, in any case, would like to see corrected redo of calculations in metric or standard.
It is also not a perfect circle either with a bit less west of Cape Horn and more everywhere else.
OZ on metric but still drive left side of road, but a good political turning point down under, no doubt sea ice data at recorded record had a turning point too heading North despite false global warming hot air.
This scenario is unlikley because of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. This powerful current effectively isolates Antartica from the northern warmer waters.
Nice try though.
The meme that bugs me most is “Antarctica is melting at an accelerated pace and the meltwater is freshening the salty seas causing increased sea ice extent because of the higher freezing point”…
Has the melt increased in any verifiable way? (Mass loss/gain argument)
Has the salinity of the Oceans changed to a point that is significant enough to increase the freezing point?
Does the fresh meltwater readily mix with the salt water or does it stay on the surface creating the sea ice?
Since most of the continent rarely gets above freezing (even in their Summer,Jan-Feb) is there a calculation to determine the “break even”melting point of land ice when it is below freezing given the amount of incoming solar radiation, the albedo and the ambient temperature? Given the known incoming amount of solar radiation, is there a point at which it is cold enough for the ice not to melt?
Is there a calculation to determine if combined solar radiation and pressure causes melt that overcomes the albedo and temperature constraints? (Is it regelation?) time for my second cup of Java!
No clima-catrastro-physicist has ever reported measurements of any of those values, nor – more importantly – the measured change in those values over time.
Note that almost all of the claimed melting is in the Amundsen Sea. Now, check the picture and you will see the latitude of the sea ice is further south close to Amundsen Sea.
It would seem that particular area is the one that would be seeing the gain if melt-water really had any influence at all. Instead, it is likely the warmer water from the active vulcanism in that area has actually reduced the total amount of sea ice.
Also, note that since this area produces much of the ice that flows towards South America in the circumpolar current, continued geothermal activity would likely extend the time period for sea ice to reach South America. In fact, without this geothermal activity we could be seeing an even larger sea ice extent right now.
As a pure math problem, it is a good one. But if you gave it to a student to solve, there would be cries of alarm from the alarmists as to deafen all other news.
As an exercise in weather, it is a fascinating idea. Even during the height of the LIA (well from the 16th century at least), ice did not cover the distance. So the effect on temperatures? Scientists want to know. Alarmists want to politicize how ice forms because of record heat.
I have a question. Why has no one used the word “unprecedented” yet?
We were afraid we were going to misspell it. 8<)
That word is not in my vocabulary.