From Oregon State University and the department of “we fully understand Earth’s climate, we just need more funds” department comes this bit of a surprise. (h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard)
Researchers find 200-year lag between climate events in Greenland, Antarctica
CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study using evidence from a highly detailed ice core from West Antarctica shows a consistent link between abrupt temperature changes on Greenland and Antarctica during the last ice age, giving scientists a clearer picture of the link between climate in the northern and southern hemispheres.
Greenland climate during the last ice age was very unstable, the researchers say, characterized by a number of large, abrupt changes in mean annual temperature that each occurred within several decades. These so-called “Dansgaard-Oeschger events” took place every few thousand years during the last ice age. Temperature changes in Antarctica showed an opposite pattern, with Antarctica cooling when Greenland was warm, and vice versa.
In this study funded by the National Science Foundation and published this week in the journal Nature, the researchers discovered that the abrupt climates changes show up first in Greenland, with the response to the Antarctic climate delayed by about 200 years. The researchers documented 18 abrupt climate events during the past 68,000 years.
“The fact that temperature changes are opposite at the two poles suggests that there is a redistribution of heat going on between the hemispheres,” said Christo Buizert, a post-doctoral research at Oregon State University and lead author on the study. “We still don’t know what caused these past shifts, but understanding their timing gives us important clues about the underlying mechanisms.
“The 200-year lag that we observe certainly hints at an oceanic mechanism,” Buizert added. “If the climatic changes were propagated by the atmosphere, the Antarctic response would have occurred in a matter of years or decades, not two centuries. The ocean is large and sluggish, thus the 200-year time lag is a pretty clear fingerprint of the ocean’s involvement.”
These past episodes of climate change differ in a major way from what is happening today, the researchers note. The abrupt events of the ice age were regional in scope – and likely tied to large-scale changes in ocean circulation. Warming today is global and primarily from human carbon dioxide emissions in the Earth’s atmosphere.
The key to the discovery was the analysis of a new ice core from West Antarctica, drilled to a depth of 3,405 meters in 2011 and spanning the last 68,000 years, according to Oregon State paleoclimatologist Edward Brook, a co-author on the Nature study and an internationally recognized ice core expert.
Because the area where the ice core was drilled gets high annual snowfall, Brook said, the new ice core provides one of the most detailed records of Antarctic temperatures at a very high resolution. Greenland temperatures were already well-established, the researchers say, because of high annual snowfall and more available ice core data.
“Past ice core studies did not reveal the temperature changes as clearly as this remarkable core,” said Eric Steig, a professor in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington, who co-wrote the paper. Steig’s laboratory made one of the key measurements that provides past Antarctic temperatures.
“Previous work was not precise enough to determine the relative timing of abrupt climate change in Antarctica and Greenland, and so it was unclear which happened first,” Steig noted. “Our new results show unambiguously that the Antarctic changes happen after the rapid temperature changes in Greenland. It is a major advance to know that the Earth behaves in this particular way.”
Kendrick Taylor, chief scientist on the project, said the core enabled the research team to get the relative timing of Greenland and Antarctic temperatures down to several decades.
“We needed a climate record from the Southern Hemisphere that extended at least 60,000 years into the past and was able to resolve fast changes in climate,” said Taylor, from the Desert Research Institute in Nevada. “We considered sites all over Antarctica before selecting the site with the best combination of thick ice, simple ice flow and the right amount of annual snowfall.”
Taylor and colleagues formed a science and engineering team consisting of 28 laboratories from around the United States. “The resulting information provides unprecedented detail about many aspects of the Earth’s past climate,” Taylor said. “This will provide a generation of climate researchers a way to test and improve our understanding of how and why global climate changes.”
OSU’s Buizert said it is “very likely” that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, is involved in these abrupt climate reversals.
“This ocean circulation brings warm surface waters from the tropics to the North Atlantic,” said Buizert, who is in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. “As these water masses cool, they sink to the bottom off the ocean. This happens right off the coast of Greenland, and therefore Greenland is located in a sweet spot where the climate is very sensitive to changes in the AMOC.”
Brook said the AMOC seems to be critical, but was probably part of a combination of factors that ultimately controlled these past abrupt changes.
“Although ocean circulation may be the key, there are probably other feedbacks involved, such as the rise and fall of sea ice and changes in ice and snow cover on land,” Brook said. “There is probably some kind of threshold in the system – say, in the salinity of the surface ocean – that triggers temperature reversals.
“It’s not a problem to find potential mechanisms; it’s just a question of figuring out which one is right. And the precise timing of these events, like we describe in this study, is an important part of the puzzle.”
The paper:
- Nature 520,661–665(30 April 2015) doi:10.1038/nature14401
The last glacial period exhibited abrupt Dansgaard–Oeschger climatic oscillations, evidence of which is preserved in a variety of Northern Hemisphere palaeoclimate archives1. Ice cores show that Antarctica cooled during the warm phases of the Greenland Dansgaard–Oeschger cycle and vice versa2, 3, suggesting an interhemispheric redistribution of heat through a mechanism called the bipolar seesaw4, 5, 6. Variations in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) strength are thought to have been important, but much uncertainty remains regarding the dynamics and trigger of these abrupt events7, 8, 9. Key information is contained in the relative phasing of hemispheric climate variations, yet the large, poorly constrained difference between gas age and ice age and the relatively low resolution of methane records from Antarctic ice cores have so far precluded methane-based synchronization at the required sub-centennial precision2, 3, 10. Here we use a recently drilled high-accumulation Antarctic ice core to show that, on average, abrupt Greenland warming leads the corresponding Antarctic cooling onset by 218 ± 92 years (2σ) for Dansgaard–Oeschger events, including the Bølling event; Greenland cooling leads the corresponding onset of Antarctic warming by 208 ± 96 years. Our results demonstrate a north-to-south directionality of the abrupt climatic signal, which is propagated to the Southern Hemisphere high latitudes by oceanic rather than atmospheric processes. The similar interpolar phasing of warming and cooling transitions suggests that the transfer time of the climatic signal is independent of the AMOC background state. Our findings confirm a central role for ocean circulation in the bipolar seesaw and provide clear criteria for assessing hypotheses and model simulations of Dansgaard–Oeschger dynamics.
From the West Antarctica ice sheet. There’s a lot of volcanic activity around there. If Western Antarctic glaciers melt or move at faster than the “normal” glacial place such as Thwaites Glacier, well, no surprises there.
The W. Antarctica ice sore is now known as the Yamal Core.
I’d be pretty sore if people keep drilling holes into me.
There is a cottage industry of CAGW scientists searching for proxy evidence to support the cult of CAGW.
The questions 1) what drives/causes the Dangaard-Oeschger cycles (hint it’s the sun, there are cosmogenic isotope changes each and every time there is warming and cooling), 2) how much of the warming in the last 150 years was due to the sun vs. the increase in atmospheric CO2, and 3) how much of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 was due to natural sources of CO2 vs. anthropogenic emissions (Salby’s analysis indicates natural sources of CO2 account for no less than 66% of the rise in atmospheric CO2) will be resolved over the next few years based on current observations rather than the interpretation of the proxy data.
Any significant global cooling and/or a significant drop in atmospheric CO2 levels would generate excitement followed by concern.
Curious that now that there is record sea ice coverage in the Antarctic (all months of the year, for consecutive years, the first observational evidence of the start of cooling) and a return to average sea ice coverage in the Arctic, that the University of Illinois stops updating Cryosphere today. Hopefully they resolve the problem.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/
Tip of the hat again to WUWT’s essential and helpful moderators.
Best wishes,
William
I wouldn’t trust steig to push a pram without the baby in it.
kokoda
April 30, 2015 at 12:02 pm
The W. Antarctica ice sore is now known as the Yamal Core.
KOKODA
Is that EYE SORE? or perhaps ice core. Eye sore seems most appropriate.
Deservedly so, but I am used to Disqus which is a more ‘modern’ toll and it allows edits.
“Warming today is global…”
Here’s the warmest 25 years in the annual temperature record for Oregon State University’s own weather station:
Year Ann F Ann C
1 1940 55.69 13.16
2 1934 55.24 12.91
3 1941 55.05 12.80
4 1939 54.99 12.77
5 1992 54.86 12.70
6 2014 54.81 12.67
7 1958 54.46 12.48
8 1931 54.40 12.44
9 1938 54.30 12.39
10 1926 54.21 12.34
11 1936 54.17 12.32
12 1995 54.09 12.27
13 2003 53.93 12.18
14 1942 53.92 12.18
15 1987 53.76 12.09
16 1947 53.74 12.08
17 2004 53.63 12.02
18 1937 53.62 12.01
19 1998 53.52 11.95
20 1918 53.49 11.94
21 1925 53.47 11.93
22 1928 53.41 11.89
23 1945 53.40 11.89
24 1932 53.39 11.88
25 1997 53.32 11.84
The period of complete records is 120 years and data is observed by the university at a rural site.
l don’t have a temperature record of my area in the UK.
But l have kept a record of the date of the first snowfall of the winters since 1977. While the latest snowfall of the season has happened recently (2013-14). But guess what!, the year in which it fell the most early in the season was the 2012-13 season. Yes just the year before the latest snowfall in the record.
“Warming today is global and primarily from human carbon dioxide emissions in the Earth’s atmosphere.”
Ah, the money phrase! More funding please.
Of course, they are ignoring that we have not warmed in over 18 years and the atmosphere has not warmed significantly since 1988, 27 years. And, they clearly KNOW that CO2 drives the climate. Yeah, rigghhtt.
l think they are looking in the wrong place if they are trying to pin the blame for the abrupt temperature changes in Greenland on ocean circulation. l think its far more likely that these sudden changes are linked the changes in the variation of the weather patterns/jet stream over the longer term. What l think that happened is when a “Arctic blast” weather pattern over North America become a dominant pattern over 10’s ~100’s of years it was that what lead to cooling on the Atlantic side of the NH. When the persistence of this weather pattern broke down to the more variable weather patterns like we get now. lts this what lead to the rapid warming, only to change back again when the “Arctic blast” pattern become more dominant once again.
Missed out a “to”.
Strange how the cause is automatically CO2 with nothing shown to back the theory.
Leave it to Leif to point out ocean cycle papers, cus he knows it ain’t the sun 🙂
What ever happened to the settled science ?
well if the moon was really a space ship then it wouldn’t be too difficult to bump it into permanent eclipse, just saying like.
l think it would more useful to sturdy the temperature changes between the northern Pacific area and what was happening over on the Atlantic side of the NH during the ice age. Because l believe they are correct when they suggest that much of the climate change during the ice age was regional.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X06007941
There is much evidence for synchronous climate change. The N.H. and S.H will never change in the same degree due to geographical considerations but evidence suggest they are in sync overall..
Even the same hemisphere does not change in sync in every place although the overall change in the climate will be in sync.
This is another one of those one wonder articles when it comes to why the climate changes, does not impress me.
The article did not claim that they were out of sync, just out of phase.
These past episodes of climate change differ in a major way from what is happening today, the researchers note. The abrupt events of the ice age were regional in scope – and likely tied to large-scale changes in ocean circulation. Warming today is global and primarily from human carbon dioxide emissions in the Earth’s atmosphere.
The above from the article which means they endorse AGW theory hence anything they have to suggest about climate change is meaningless.
Salvatore Del Prete April 30, 2015 at 2:45 pm says:
“Warming today is global and primarily from human carbon dioxide emissions.”
How can you say that if there has been no warming for 18 years? Atmospheric carbon dioxide keeps increasing but is unable to create that greenhouse effect that has been drummed into your brain for decades. If some part of your brain is still alive it should tell you what that means.
With the rush to get stuff into print for another international dud of a mtg, these guys don’t seem to realize that all this new stuff negates the CO2 theory as a control knob. That’s why their statutory genuflection to CAGW is always a non sequitur because they not only offer no support to the idea but they weaken it more and more. They seem to always pick up some of the stuff that skeptics have, in vain, tried to get them to consider. Ocean currents, Enso and other oscillations – the synod is especially het up about the AMO and the PDO that they discovered just last year. They’ve even …horrors… mentioned the quiet sun.
They sucked the juice out of aerosols like a viagara fix to support a sagging climate sensitivity. They’ve kidnapped the Pope, found that ice models left out melting characteristics of ice and the Hadley cells in their spiral of death. Fools are getting stuck in the Antarctic and Arctic ice in the summer time, desperate to witness the spiral, earthquakes and shrinking rabbits are are linked to climate change and, by logic, each other. With the change in gov in OZ and the recent “chair” given to the hated Lomborg, The Centre of Excellence is cranking out the wierdest papers – I’m expecting another epidemic of climate blues, at least in OZ.
I just hope we aren’t heading into another abrupt climate change of a cooling sort.
Ahhh the race to publish …
lol…. are those Dung Beetles, Max?
Grauniad beetles.
Say Max, do you have a library full of these things ??
Did the ancient Egyptians teach their Scarabs to pull this stunt ??
Reminds me of the old Protestant church down the road from where I lived while attending the UofA.
It had a very steep typical church roof of corrugated iron sheets, which used to be standard NZ roofing.
So this flock of invader Indian Mynahs, would get up and sit on top of the roof ridge, all lined up and cackling away like Mynahs do.
Then one or two brave birds, would leap off the ridge, and slide down the corrugations on their arses, while the rest of the crowd cheered at the top of their lungs.
Then just before they crashed headlong into the rain gutter at the bottom, they would spread their wings and fly off the end, and back up onto the ridge, to watch the next bunch of hoodlums perform.
Dunno if they were high on some sort of fermented berries or what; but it seemed to be a favorite pastime; well in winter anyhow, because in summer, their arses would get roasted on the way down.
But your rolling dung beetles get some sort of Prize Max !!
g
Max you are indeed a treasure! I love it. Each beetle has the same “paper” (looks like some kind of control knob) he’s rushing to the publisher.
Great you have some data – now what? How about making a testable prediction for your oceanic mechanism? Even if this is more of “Who dunnit?”, you still need to prove the ocean mechanism described exists, and to do that you’d need to build a model for the behavior observed and again make a prediction to test it. Or you can just stick to idle speculation, which is SOP in climate science.
Related to methodology, recently heard Bill Nye claim in a YouTube video that “extreme heat events”, which are killing people is statistically tied to climate change. He did not offer to explain how statistics predict past events since “statistics are hard”. Ironically Bill mentions this in the context of discussing his debate with Ken Ham on creationism. Bill demolished Ken Ham in the debate, but apparently learned quite a few of Kens tricks:
1. Appealing to emotion: “Climate Change is killing people”
2. Post-hoc rationalization: Ken Ham selects certain recent events and then claims the Book of Genesis predicted them. Bill Nye does the same thing with severe weather events. To prove a statistical model or any other model, predictions are made before the event not after the event.
3. Vague terms: What exactly is an “extreme heat event”?
4. Circular argument: Climate change “extreme heat events” are different from natural “extreme heat events” because climate change “extreme heat events” are caused by climate change.
5. False equivocation: Equating young earth creationists with climate skeptics.
6. Dishonesty: Equating young earth creationists with climate skeptics.
I am not sure how Bill Nye catapults the scientific method and his integrity out the window when it comes to climate change after using it so well in debating creationism.
I am neither a scientist nor a mathematician, but it strikes me as not unusual that the occurrence of a 200 (or 206) year cyclic event observed at one pole would look very much like the one at the other pole, regardless of whether there is a “200 year lag.”
The distinguished authors of the article might just as well argue that sunrise this sunday will be due to a newly discovered 7 day lag between sunday sunrises rather than the fact that it will occur as a result of a normal 24 hour daily cycle. Surely they deserve a generous federal grant to determine which is correct.
Sorry but a couple warm summers could melt off decades or centuries of ice . It isn’t like these are tree rings.
So who decides that it is something out of the Northern hemisphere, Greenland in this case, that is suposedly responsible for something happening at the other end of the planet.
Where is the research that turns another of these supposed and claimed Northern Hemisphere drivers of the climate claim on it’s head and suggests that just maybe it is the immense continent of Antarctica and it’s immense surrounding Southern Ocean and it’s equally immense volumes of water and the consequent currents that creates instability and changes that also drive the Greenland climate and / or other Northern Hemisphere land and ocean climate shifts.
97% of all climate research begins, is researched, and ends with Northern Hemisphere climate scientists stating that their research indicates without fail, that all climate change related phenomena begin, end and are created and caused by Northern Hemisphere man made or oceanic and / or atmospheric phenomena.
Truly another example of the immense bias and closed minds of the Northern Hemisphere climate warmist researchers who appear incapable expanding their [ limited ] intellect beyond their own limited circle and take a good long look at that immensely varying world that lays far distant from their own lavish Northern Hemisphere Ivory towers.
From the climate research impact I reckon that those few million of us here down under should just take our “bottom” half of the planet and wander off to find another star where we might get some recognition for our role in the constant and natural changes that occur in our planet’s climate.
Faculty of the Science is Settled
Department of Haven’t a Clue
Almost 200 year gap between climate changes in Greenland and changes in Europe
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n2/abs/ngeo2053.html
“It’s not a problem to find potential mechanisms; it’s just a question of figuring out which one is right. And the precise timing of these events, like we describe in this study, is an important part of the puzzle.”
This proves that we are all doomed and that we will pay for our CO2 sins, if not now, 200 years down the road. When that happens, don’t come crying to me.
So what’s the magnitude of these “large, abrupt changes” ? 0.5c ? 1c ? Larger ?
A new study using evidence from a highly detailed ice core from West Antarctica shows a consistent link between abrupt temperature changes on Greenland and Antarctica during the last ice age, giving scientists a clearer picture of the link between climate in the northern and southern hemispheres…..
Greenland climate during the last ice age was very unstable….
The researchers documented 18 abrupt climate events during the past 68,000 years….
The fact that temperature changes are opposite at the two poles suggests that …
We still don’t know what caused these past shifts, but….
The 200-year lag that we observe certainly hints at…
These past episodes of climate change differ in a major way …
Past ice core studies did not reveal the temperature changes as clearly as this remarkable core…
Previous work was not precise enough …
We considered sites all over Antarctica before selecting the site….
This will provide a generation of climate researchers a way to test and improve our understanding
OSU’s Buizert said it is “very likely” that….
Brook said the AMOC seems to be critical, but was probably part of a combination of factors…
Although ocean circulation may be the key, there are probably other feedbacks involved…
There is probably some kind of threshold in the system – say, in…
It’s not a problem to find potential mechanisms; it’s just a question of figuring out which one is right.
Yeah I know warmies..picky picky!
If their observations are accurate the explanation is simple. The lag time is due to the length of time it takes for the AMOC circulatuon that sneaks south along the bottom to carry the detritus from D-O events near Greenland all the way to Antarctica. An interesting way to determine the actual speed of that circulation.