News Brief by Kip Hansen
No, really…no kidding here…this is a real disaster. This is not Fake News!
Here’s the story, from the NY Times’ Tatiana Schlossberg (and here):
“Ice from the Canadian Arctic has completely melted, leaving puddles of water in its place and scientists devastated.
O.K., this is what actually happened: Ice cores, millennia-old ice samples extracted by scientists from locations across the Canadian Arctic, melted because of a freezer malfunction in a lab at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. The loss of these ice cores could hinder scientific research into how changes in the atmosphere have shaped Earth’s climate history, and how they could affect its future.
On April 2, the temperature of a storage freezer in the Canadian Ice Core Archive rose to about 100 degrees —… “
Now that’s Arctic warming — 100 degrees (F?) in a storage freezer?
“…some part of the cooling system failed, “then tried to get itself back into action and in the process, piped hot air back into the room,” according to Martin Sharp, the director of the archive. The freezer became so hot that it tripped the fire alarm, Dr. Sharp said, and partially or fully melted 180 ice cores collected by government scientists since the mid-1970s from the snowy expanse of the Canadian Arctic.
Dr. Sharp, also a glaciology professor at the university, said there was water all over the floor, and steam rising from puddles of ancient water.”
Luckily, although there were 12 complete cores, comprising more than 1,400 one-meter segments, which were believed to cover about 80,000 years of atmospheric history, “none of the 12 main cores were wholly destroyed.” They did lose about 12% of the total collection.
The loss of this important repository of ice cores and the data that could be extracted from it is regrettable. We are assured that steps are being taken to prevent any future loss.
My sympathies go out to the Canadian Ice Core Archive, Dr. Martin Sharp, its Director, and the many scientists who work will be hampered by this sad event.
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Didn’t we cover this two days ago?
Yep… but it’s worth repeating.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/04/10/catastrophic-meltdown-of-canadian-ice/
It’s probably worth repeating then that all mission critical digital applications such as was in place for these U of A freezers be shadow protected by an analog sensor and separate alarm system (on a double battery back up UPS) so that at least the alarm bells go off with a temperature spike independent of the digital controls that managed the freezer. At least they would have been forewarned about the freezer malfunction immediately and independently of the cause of the freezer failure. Just a simple analog sensor and alarm. That’s one of the reasons we put analog volt/amp gauges in electrical panels so that if the digital controls or display wonk out, then at least you can see the basic data you need.
They use wind power to keep the freezers going…
Discussion of that story’s on ice.
Well Dang, if they had installed renewable energy supplies for this freezer, instead of some fossilized fuel powered junk, this would not have happened.
Lemme guess; they want some more grant money to go and dig a new ice core out of the Canadian Arctic ??
G
The last one didn’t show what it should have, so they need to get a new one.
Well, they did predict catostrophic warming and here it is.
Yep, they told me that if I voted for Trump there would be catastrophic ice loss in Canada, and here it is!!!
Yep, and I bet they hadn’t paid any heed to the hard lessons
learnt by the IT industry (backup, backup, and backup)
I bet they were the complete ice cores, not longitudinally sectioned
with the other section(s) stored in other freezer(s) elsewhere on
different power supplies and well away from terrorist/warmist/green
action …
Call me cynical, but cui bono? Odd this should happen just now, as “The Movement’ starts to encounter real headwinds for the first time – in the form of sceptics in government in US and UK. Or perhaps its just bad luck….
“…some part of the cooling system failed, “then tried to get itself back into action and in the process, piped hot air back into the room,”
Yeah, that sounds a bit suspicious, I can’t imagine any dedicated cooling system that could go in reverse, that’s not how they work. The heat created during the cooling process radiates off a compressor, and would be vented so it can’t make contact with the coolant. Sounds like sabotage or intentional tampering, or they’ve entrusted archival ice cores to a system designed and built by some pol’s dimwitted nephew.
I have seen air conditioners work in reverse. It happened when a distribution transformer blew out. In the dark, the utility technicians installing the replacement didn’t notice they’d hooked up the 3-phase power the wrong way. So the next day all of the big air conditioners were running backwards. Luckily the compressors had bypass valves apparently for this very situation.
In fact, freezers have a defrost cycle, where heat is put into the evaporator, to melt ice that builds up on the coils. Recently our meat freezer had a failure of the circuit board on the compressor/evaporator controls, (it was less than 20 days old.) this exact scenario occurred.
Your conclusion sounds plausible. I’ve seen systems installed by relatives. One ultrapure water system looked to be working becase there was pressure on one of the guages. I followed that line for 5 to 6 meters and found an open line. There were no valves between the guage and the open line. Someone had jimmied the guage so that the relative would appear to be ahead of schedule.
The Russians did it.
By bizarre coincidence, the very cores that indisputably prove AGW and imminent global destruction, are the ones that melted.
I thought it would have been the cores that Disprove it
“I thought it would have been the cores that Disprove it”
You may be right. I understand that one of the lost cores was from Mt Logan. That core has never been fully published for some odd reason……
Do not worry, We will use Models to simulate the “data” and it is probably going to be “much worse than we thought” /sarc
By statist economics this is a “broken window” boon . Now there will be jobs for Trump displaced “climate” workers going out in the field and replacing the samples .
They’ll be busy marching in DC for the near future.
Climate scientists going out into the field? Getting their hands dirty? Dealing with the real world? Really?
Reminds me of a politically incorrect joke about two Irish men walking past a bar, well it could happen.
@Paul Jackson
Hey, I resemble that remark! 😉
I guess that we should not look to scientists for appropriate mitigation strategies because they can’t seem to come up with their own loss prevention plans in the present. Nature preserved those ice cores for millions of years and they can’t keep them frozen for several decades.
They use the same model coolers to cool all of those hot nuclear reactor spent fuel cores. They are designed to work for a million years.
g
Do they really fill the ice core drill holes with kerosene to keep the bit from freezing?
There’s no mental like environmental.
How important could the cores be – or how negligent the scientists – if there weren’t redundant systems protecting them? I’ve never encountered a refrigeration system that doesn’t break down at some point.
exactly…..the cores were so important they put them in a used LG in the garage
Well they have one installed at Vostok Base in Antarctica, to make sure the ice cores don’t melt.
The ice cores are encased in a huge guard ring of solid ice that goes down almost all the way to the Vostok Lake.
The system has worked perfectly for at least the last 800,000 years.
G
Meanwhile, rabid CAGW promoters work feverishly to “save” data from purported imaginary destruction by the current U.S. Administration.
…as smoke rises from UEA and Penn State climate departments and several EMP are recorded…
In climatology, the concept of saving data works differently. It involves keeping it out of others’ hands, even if it has to be destroyed in order to “protect” it as Phil Jones infamously suggested.
They are saving the work from people who might try to use it maliciously.
IE, tell the truth.
Can’t you all see that this is a wonderful opportunity for grant funding to improve ice-core storage systems, strategies, maintenance protocols?
Next, we will witness mass breakage of ARGO floats, requiring a new round of funding to improve THEIR technology.
Then, a critical failure of satellites that measure temperature, requiring … you guessed it … a new round of funding to improve THOSE.
Ah, the opportunities seem endless. Break some stuff, so that we can get paid to fix it.
I’ve always believed that ice core samples should be stored at the same conditions of temperature and pressure that they were under to minimize the effects of storage.
This is a new facility and the ice had just been moved from eastern Canada.
It came from Newfoundland and in Newfoundland they lost the recipe for ice.
Was the collection insured? That would give some sense of how “irreplaceable” these cores are. My guess is that the main impacts here, besides the uproar of fixing/upgrading the freezers and the alarms/inspection system, is that any publication based on the data in the cores now has a broken audit trail. You can read the paper, and maybe you can read the notes and data from which the paper was created. But you can’t go behind the notes to the physical evidence. Not sure how big a problem that would be.
Unless the glaciers etc from which the cores were taken have disappeared or greatly altered, I wouldn’t think this loss is irreversible. As some have said, “broken windows” and a chance for another field trip or six.
Unless there is some reason that new cores from the same location might yield conflicting data. That might make replacement ice cores a detriment. No sensible reason to think that would be, anyway.
Some of the places they took the ice samples from have now melted, so yes, for those it is irreplaceable.
Such as?
I would have thought it would have had an alarm system to warn when it approached a certain temperature ??
It’s a huge embarrassment to the manager of the facility when it happens, from my experience. Time to invest in sensors that interface the building automation system and have someone in physical plant receive a text when temperatures are abnormal. (Call-out = time+1/2)
The custodial staff that cleaned it up were probably on overtime also (or a contractor was on call). No schools staff sufficiently to allow for occasional extraordinary incidents these days.
When I had to remediate research lab freezer failures there was also a biohazard disposal and disinfection needed. Usually the flooring was damaged from water along with the ceiling of any room below and the contaminated contents of both spaces had to disposed of, if not autoclavable.
I”l give you pretty goods that Otzi has a system in his display case to warn of to high a temp.
This incident looks to be a communication breakdown which exacerbated a mechanical failure and resulted in great monetary expenditure for the institution.
There really is something wrong about this whole thing. True, the ice cores were special, but the demands on the cooling system were not. Exactly this kind of commercial refrigeration has been done in millions of locations worldwide since forever.
something is very fishy here … so the system shuts off … usually a refrigerator will very slow warm up, taking hours or days to get to a melting scenario … I don’t buy the pumped hot air excuse …
They’re climate “scientists”, not engineers. What did you expect – competence?
They had a monitoring system, no doubt, bit someone got tired of all the text messages and turned it off.
Our irrigation system for the golf course also runs our fire system. On all the time and for less than $1,000 CAN we had a cell based monitoring system installed. Redundant sensors warn if temperatures fall below 40F threatening a freeze and other sensors note moisture, voltage, phase issues etc. Has saved us a number of times. The only pain is the 800 yard walk down to the pump house usually during a storm and in the dark. They should have one of these installed…ed
As is typical with Universities, rather than using a proven commercial solution, they create their own home brew, half baked solution. Likely the case here. What does a ‘server error’ (as reported in the previous article) have to do with an over temperature alarm?
Somebody was probably emailed by an internet-dependant system and a server bombed when IT folks were not there to restart it, resulting in the faculty not being informed until after the fact. Our in-vitro bone growth researcher came in on weekends and holidays because he did not trust Metasys automation and security guard surveillance to save his work for him.
This is undoubtedly a comedy of errors which resulted in the tree falling silently in the woods, so to speak.
I’ve seen through a few of those during my university employment.
In chemical plants, we occasionally have a mass breakdown a major system alongside a broken alarm for that same system. Most big incidents actually are a result of at least a double-breakdown. They are rare, but they do happen. If a system is big enough and goes long enough without trouble, complacency sets in and people skip the manual checks.
In fact, I had a comparable issue last year, where a system broke, and alarm broke, and then the manual checks were too scant to notice the issue. It was quite a scandal when it was discovered 3 days later.
Don’t go conspiracy theory on this. The situation has happened before and will happen again.
Ask anybody who runs a grocery store, institutional food service or meat locker, walk-in freezers fail way more often than reach-ins. Not only that, one system often supplies multiple walk-ins.
In the scientific equipt industry the same things are called controlled environment rooms. With enough bux, you can have a cascading system which reduces the temps to -40C so you can roll in a rack of ice core samples 20 feet long. There are several things which can shut down these sophisticated systems to protect their vital components and adequate alarms are provided. What didn’t happen here was diligent monitoring of the alarms. That is what caused the losses.
I have been there when undetected mechanical failures causing losses of specimens, sometimes living (for several generations) have occurred in university research labs. The experience is like finding a dead relative for the faculty and staff involved. That’s as accurate as I can recall it. Half of their tenure accomplishments vaporize.
I can empathise with these dedicated scientists in their obvious setback, and extend my genuine sympathy.
Man Made Global Warming at work…
Only ONE freezer ? ? ? ? ?
Actually, no one found out in time to move them, from what I get.
Ice melts…
Go figure!
It can be a good learning experience for them … they can now understand what tipping point really means.
Let that be a lesson to them.
And now that they is nothing for the ice core scientist to do, how many will be in the unemployment line any time in the future?
They’ll get a paid sabbatical and support for a new expedition. These are not contractors, they’re faculty.
Faculty can be removed for incompetence.
Mechanical failures which happen to go undetected long enough to cause a loss of a specimen are not an indication of incompetence on the part of the faculty involved. The incompetence is in the administration of the institution. Facility managers, low-level administrators and IT people were all partly responsible for this from my experiences, having been in a similar situation before.
Could this have happened if the refrigeration system worked with CFCs?
‘Samples of millennia old ice’ rather than “millennia old ice samples” a nit pick perhaps.
Perhaps, but a much better placement of the modifier to capture the true meaning of the situation.
True, the original seems to imply that the samples have been in storage for millennia.
They were, until some grave robber dug them up; he had a better use for them; called MONEY.
G
Urederra: good one!
Gary Pearse: not a nit. Sloppy journalism, good catch.
I’m sure the power failure will be blamed on global warming anyway.
Core blimey.
There’s nothing at all unusual about freezers failing; that’s what keeps refrigeration mechanics in business. In fact, with the newer, more corrosive refrigerants, freezers don’t last as long as they used to.
Considering what those ice cores must have cost, it is really unbelievable that they didn’t have redundant, periodically-tested monitoring of the freezers. That is truly government-level incompetence.
Here’s a discussion of freezer temperature monitors. There are many products out there, some of them very inexpensive. Many of them can directly send automatic text messages, emails & phone calls in the event of a failure:
http://hvac-talk.com/vbb/showthread.php?144202-temperature-alarm-for-walk-in-cooler-freezer
Hundreds of thousands of stores and restaurants use these things. Any refrigeration mechanic should be familiar with them.
what’s happening to the oceans, what is happening to children’s minds, what is madness, this is close, amen
Would not be the best place to store ice cores, the, eh, arctic? Dig out a cold store at yhe bottom of the Greenland ice cap. With two kilometers of ice on top and a few hundred meters below, what could go wrong?