Cores!
Guest post by David Middleton
A precious collection of ice cores from the Canadian Arctic has suffered a catastrophic meltdown. A freezer failure at a cold storage facility in Edmonton run by the University of Alberta (UA) caused 180 of the meter-long ice cylinders to melt, depriving scientists of some of the oldest records of climate change in Canada’s far north.
The 2 April failure left “pools of water all over the floor and steam in the room,” UA glaciologist Martin Sharp told ScienceInsider. “It was like a changing room in a swimming pool.”
The melted cores represented 12.8% of the collection, which held 1408 samples taken from across the Canadian Arctic. The cores hold air bubbles, dust grains, pollen, and other evidence that can provide crucial information about past climates and environments, and inform predictions about the future.
The storage facility is normally chilled to –37°C. But the equipment failure allowed temperatures to rise to 40°C, melting tens of thousands of years of history. Among the losses: some of the oldest ice cores from Mount Logan, a 5595-meter-high mountain in northern Canada. “We only lost 15 meters [of core], but because it was from the bottom of the core, that’s 16,000 years out of the 17,700 years that was originally represented,” Sharp says.
Scientists also lost 66 meters of core from Baffin Island’s Penny Ice Cap, which accounts for 22,000 years—a quarter of the record. That leaves “a gap for the oldest part, which is really the last glaciation before the warming that brought us into the present interglacial,” Sharp says.
[…]
Apparently the meltdown was due to two three malfunctions:
Investigation points to two malfunctions
An investigation into the freezer malfunction found fault with the cooling system. Specifically, the refrigeration chillers shut down due to “high head pressure” conditions. Essentially, the chillers were not able to reject their heat through the condenser water system—heat instead of cold circulated through the freezer.
Compounding matters, the system monitoring the freezer temperatures failed due to a database corruption. The freezer’s computer system was actually sending out alarm signals that the temperature was rising, but those signals never made it to the university’s service provider or the on-campus control centre.
In the short term, refrigeration technicians are monitoring the freezers through twice-daily checks, Sharman said. The computer database corruption was resolved by adding a second monitoring controller, which is now issuing real-time messaging updates every eight hours.
[…]
- The “chillers” circulated heat through the freezer.
- Database corruption prevented the alarm signals from reaching their destination.
- The failure to visually inspect the freezers on a daily basis before 1 & 2.
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It was all down to the routine update of the software….it seems some of the coding had come from the Mann Hockey Stick data….and it, being corrupted, did likewise to the freezer control software.
Afterall, that makes inevitable sense….adding corrupt data, forcing warming!!!
I am sure it is Trump getting rid of the evidence. We were warned about this.
I guess Justin Trudeau really is an airhead if he is letting Donald Trump control Canadian universities.
I wish I could blame this on climate warming crowd, however I’ve been involved in a number of “university” projects, and the ignorance of your average professor even the most basic of quality control is amazing to me.
Actually, it was the use of solar panels in mid-winter, during the night that caused the failure. Her highness wants to shut down our coal fired plants in a few years, so maybe that reliable source of solar/wind will be much better…. /sarc….
MISSION CRITICAL FACILITIES
When “whoops” is not acceptable, its time to call in engineers skilled in Mission Critical Facility design and operation. e.g. FTCH
SACOM:
Type B Systematic Errors
Related are the problems of Type B Systematic Errors which can equally destroy the objective scientific basis of models and measurements.
Now how can we have NASA’s Independent Verification and Validation Program engaged to thoroughly vet all Global Climate Models to verify and validate that they comply with the purpose of providing objective data information to politicians and the public, free from Type B systemic error and political biases?
Tutorial on CFD Verification and Validation
How can we require that all climate modelers take NASA’s Independent Validation and Verificationcourse?
On Type B errors, see NIST: 2.5.4. Type B evaluations
and BIPM GUM: Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement
The real failure was to delay processing the cores. Analysis should be done soon after collection of vulnerable samples.
Gary,
That may well have been done. However, it is so difficult and expensive to obtain the cores that they are archived so that they can be used if a different question arises that the cores can shed light on. Also, as technology advances, more information can be gleaned from the archived cores as a check on the original results.
These cores were analyzed. They were then archived for future reanalysis and reference.
A very long way from ice cores I know but when farmers take soil samples for analysis across fields it is a requirement that those samples be taken at certain spaced and regular intervals in that field to achieve a reasonable level of accuracy in the final laboratory analysis of minerals, fertiliser levels and etc in that field.
As somebody who is quite ignorant about the statistics involved in the accuracy of the data from each of the one off and quite isolated ice cores that are taken from the various global deep ice deposits on the planet;
What is the true, real world statistical accuracy of the analysis and consequent data from each of these single one off in location and depth and therefore time, ice cores ?
How many similar in depth and etc ice cores from close and adjacent coring locations would be needed to statistically verify the validity of the data supposedly derived from each of these deep ice cores?
Why in fact whilst the coring equipment and living quarters and back up equipment are all in place for a major coring operation in admittedly very harsh conditions, a second set or preferably more of adjacent verification cores not drilled and archived to remove any doubts about the statistical validity of the data being collected from those cores?
Why isn’t there a policy of both collecting a grouping of cores to enable verification of any analysis and data from that grouping of cores plus a policy of locating and housing those precious cores in quite separate and distinct locations to counter episodes of the now quite regular and not at all unusual scientific incompetency such as we see described in this case?
Reminds me vaguely of a freezer in a university pharmacology department that was filled with the carcasses of experimental animals that had been injected with radioactive tracers.
When the freezer failed, the whole contents melted into a single stinking, radioactive soup. Then, when freezer function was restored, the soup froze into a solid block. The whole thing now was of course too heavy to be moved, so it just stayed there for years, with nobody having a frigging clue as to disposal. Happened a good while back, but might still be there …
Too much head pressure happens when someone overcharges the system with too much refrigerant. This causes the compressor to shut down within a short time of starting to avoid damage. It is usually caused by a technician used to working on systems that takes more refrigerant and assumes this system is the same. I would bet this system was redundant with more than one compressor but if someone overcharged each of them then they would all fail. Just my guess.
How long before the conspiracy boys start pointing accusing fingers at those who would profit from the meltdown? Big problem : who gains from this loss? Ice core drillers,probably.
Silly design. Murphy’s law rules.
Come on everybody — we know what’s going on. The ice core meltdown is directly due to climate change. I’m sure of it.
This never would have happened during the ice ages!
Just ask the Ice Sages
I just awakened. Was this a nuclear core meltdown?
There you go! Maybe some CO2 leaked into the box!
Probably someone left the electric blanket on
I think that is the most likely explanation.
It certainly has to have something to do with hot air.
Must admit my first thought was that scene in THE THING where the electric blanket was thrown a cross that huge block of ice and a trickle of water begins to flow from beneath
The Mount Logan core was the onlynone in western Canadian Arctic. It showed recent cooling past 200 years. McIntyre pointed out in 2013 that it was therefore left out of several recent Arctic hockey stick reconstructions, including PAGES2. Now it is melted. So doesn’t have to embarassingly be left out anymore. How convenient.
..It takes 48 hours for a well insulated grocery store, walk in freezer, to gain 4 degrees C after a CONTINUED power loss. Because it is insulated, it will not get above zero C for 4 days unless the store has a complete meltdown of it’s air conditioning system …….(meat manager in Daytona Beach, 10 years)..Going from -37 C to + 40 C is not possible unless intentional !
It depends on the design and defrost setup and the type and mass of product in the freezer. It can be much faster than that and go much higher. 25 years as a refrigeration tech.
Would it be too obvious to point out that ‘acts of God’ occur in mysterious ways especially when helped by ignoring maintenance requirements – deliberately?
Time to enroll in DueDiligence 101, instructor Steve McIntyre:
https://climateaudit.org/2005/02/14/some-thoughts-on-disclosure-and-due-diligence-in-climate-science/
. In addition to familiar forms of financial audit trails, the splitting and retention of drill cores is a form of audit trail in the exploration business.
They may have split them…but stored them in the same place.
This makes me wonder how the frozen human gonads are doing at Colorado State University. Check those freezers!
https://leroymoore.wordpress.com/2014/08/24/a-little-humor-about-the-gonads-samples-that-were-never-studied-see-my-blog-entry-of-august-21-2014/
Risk of having your freezer, or refrigerator, or toaster, or thermostat, or electric car, etc. connected to the IoT?
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to install a low-temperature alarm on this freezer. Thousands or maybe millions of freezers in the world are protected in such a manner. Seems to be something fishy here.
It’s standard stupidity I think. A simple alarm is not sufficiently high tech to be trusted with something this important. They would have hired Honeywell or Johnson controls or some such to provide an alarm “system”. That means solid state sensors ( probably put in the wrong places), wired to a computer which monitors the sensors through some complex sampling software which involves time and temperature functions and perhaps disables during coil defrost cycles. This software signals alarm specifics to secondary software. A hundred places where this can go wrong. KISS!
Of course, if you make it simple, Honeywell and their brethren contractors won’t have a contract to maintain at margins exceeding 100%.
Nothing has been lost, if they head north there’s a vast natural storage of this stuff, they just need to avoid the hole left by the extraction of the last core.
..Good thing Canada seems to have an unwanted abundance of ICE ! …D’OH !
MODS: This comment from about 20 minutes ago was in moderation but seems to have disappeared. Not sure why.
Time to enroll in DueDiligence 101, instructor Steve McIntyre:
https://climateaudit.org/2005/02/14/some-thoughts-on-disclosure-and-due-diligence-in-climate-science/
In addition to familiar forms of financial audit trails, the splitting and retention of drill cores is a form of audit trail in the exploration business.
It’s a university, for goodness sake. As soon as the grad projects were finished they forgot about the ice cores. The university has much more important concerns like developing condos. Give them a break!
It is an expensive and embarrassing accident, but it is no tragedy. There is plenty of ice where that came from. It is not as if it had melted meanwhile and was irrecoverable. They should ask for a grant to re-drill that 12.5% with more modern equipment and better techniques and say that they are going to demonstrate that the ice is going to disappear so it better doesn’t happen again in the future.
It didn’t melt, they are simply correcting for biases.
Perhaps they should check who left the freezer door open after getting some ice to put in their Jack Daniels.
This is homogenisation at its best – the inside of the fridge was lower than the air temp outside so needed to be ‘adjusted’.
I stand to be corrected but I watched an episode of Discovery Channel Canada about these coolers. They are brand new and the cores had just been transferred from a facility in eastern Canada, can’t remember where.
That Discovery Channel is very pro anthropological warming to almost fanatical. They treat Suzuki almost like a god.
Amazingly, a Discovery Channel crew are indirectly responsible for saving much of the ice in that cooler. Many cores had been moved from the doomed freezer to another one with better light for the Discovery Channel camera operator’s benefit.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/ancient-arctic-ice-core-damaged-melting-university-alberta-1.4058756
‘In-filling’ the lost ice cores with ice cores from adjacent freezers should be valid, by current standards.