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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We can still utilise the water using homeopathic scientific methods – Prince Charles
How long until they decide that they can reconstruct the ice core data from computer climate models and save themselves the time and expense of drilling new cores?
So much for all that data Trump and Pruitt were going to delete…oh wait, Canada?
Steam at 100F? Vapor I guess.
Certainly sounds like Someone was busy Vaping
Steam is microscopic water particles in an atmosphere that are visible, such as fog, water vapor is an invisible gas.
What, no one thought to make copies of the ice cores? Like hard drives…with data on them…which fail on a regular basis? Now we don’t know if the CO2 concentration was higher when compared to current concentrations. Did someone destroy the cores on purpose? Oh pooh…
“On April 2, the temperature of a storage freezer in the Canadian Ice Core Archive rose to about 100 degrees —(presumably Fahrenheit)
To melt large quantity of ice (12 complete cores, comprising more than 1,400 one-meter segments) substantial amount of energy is required.
Was this
a) April fool’s day practical joke gone wrong
b) April fool’s day joke being ‘milked to the melting point’ by the University of Alberta comedians.
vukcevic @ur momisugly 8:54: “…[melting the cores requires] substantial amount of energy involved.” Good point. Can some smart person tell us the energy needed to slag a chunk of ice that is 1400 meters long and probably 10 cm or so in diameter? How does that energy requirement fit (rate of heating x hours of heating) with the described physical plant? Maybe test both assumptions: that it was passive heating (lack of refrigeration to defeat ambient room temperature with minimal circulation between cores (insulated) and that outer environment? And (to me very strange) the alternative assumption that the cooling system was “running backward” and pumping hot air or fluid past the cores? How many Joules would be needed, over how many hours? Has this ever happened in other failures of refrigeration systems?
Put this in the “I smell something funny” file.
Simple problem. First off, the original article said (and this one implies) it was 180m of core (not 1.4km of core, the 1.4km is the total core stored on site, but only 180m was in the faulty freezer). Assuming you are correct and the cores are 10cm (the internet suggests that that is typical)
18,000 cm x π x 5cm = 282,743 cubic cm = 282,743 mL
Ice is 0.92g/mL, so
282,743 mL x 0.92 g/mL = 260,124 g of ice.
it take 1 calorie to warm up 1 gram of water by 1°C. So, the previous article sais it warmed up form -37°C to 40°C:
260,124 g x 77°C = 20,029,548 calories
But it also takes 80 calories/g to actually melt the ice (with no temperature change, just the actual conversion from solid to liquid; fusion)
so 260,124 g x 80 calories/g = 20,809,920 calories (a little more than all the temperature increase combined)
The total is
20,809,920 calories + 20,029,548 calories = 41,619,840 calories = 48404 Wh
That is about the energy from a 100W light bulb running for 20 days. (or 20 100W light bulbs running for 1 day).
Doesn’t seem too unreasonable
I can tell you that refrigeration systems when malfunctioning often do heat the interior rather than cool. It is often not a simple case of no more cooling.
heat of fusion of ice = 333.55 kJ/kg, i.e it requires 333.55 kJ for 1 kg of ice to melt.
“18,000 cm x π x 5cm = 282,743 cubic cm = 282,743 mL”
Should be (5 squared) for area. Just multiply the answers through by 5, and Made in the Shade.
Not bad.
vukcevic, isn’t that what I said just using different units?
Tony, Oh ya, πr^2 Ops. Rather than 20 light bulbs we are now looking at 100 light bulbs.
Tony (second reply), it is not 1400m. The ice in the malfunctioning freezer was only 180m., and you forgot that 1 cubic cm is not 1 g, it as I previously mentioned it is about 0.92 g.
OK, corrected math
18000cm x π x 5cm x 5cm = 1,413,717 cubic cm (or mL) of ice
1,413,717 mL x 0.92 g/mL = 1,300,619 g of ice
(1,300,619 g x 1 calorie/g/°C x 77 °C) + (1,300,619 g x 80 calories/g (fusion)) = 204,197,239 calories
=237,481 Wh = 237 kWh
approximately 99 light bulbe (100 watt) for 1 day.
Hi Jeff, it was meant for us in Europe, where we switched over to the metric (MKS – SI) system years ago, and thus using joules instead of calories.
Using ‘calorie’ and ‘watt’ together in an exam was an absolute no-no and would severely degrade any otherwise excellent project calculation. Thus 100W light bulb uses 100J/sec.
Ayayay. And it is not yes.
The heat capacity of ice and water are different per mass unit. But in the end, it doesn’t make any difference, you should just use less digits, like 2e8 cal.
Take-home message: There is a lot of place for a mistake in a simple calculation.
OK, 10 cm dia. X 1400 meters = 11,000 kg or 12 tons (in round numbers)
Commercial refrigeration units are also rated in tons. That is how many tons of water can be frozen per hour.
A unit might 2 or 5 or so tons. Of course they are all over the map, but this gives a sense of the ballpark we are in.
In any event, if they lost 10% of the cores, they melted 1.2 tons of ice, and that takes a *lot* of heat.
A calorie is a quantity of food.
g
It was positive feedback wot dun it !
qed
g
Magic Eight-ball say: “Something went into defrost mode” might have been due to malfunction or due to operator error or even as a remote possibility sabotage.
I told therm intermittent windpower wouldn’t work
If one wind tower doesn’t give you the accuracy you need. Put up 100 and average them.
Yeah, and build them next to each other, That way when the wind isn’t strong enough to power one of them the rest will be able to make up the difference! [sarc]
Connect them all together with a drive shaft, then if the wind doesn’t blow on all of them, they would all still work.
g
Sounds like these ice core samples held an inconvenient truth, and had to be ‘lost’ asap….
I tend to agree.
“These don’t tell the right story. Lets get some new ones.”
Andrew
Solution – drill new ice cores – problem solved.
The world is full of stories about freezers failing — some in peoples’ basements; some in huge food warehouses and some in important medical laboratories. The owners/operators need to balance the cost of a failure against the cost of simple alarms and complete backup systems.
“What if … ?”
Related: When was the last time you backed up your data?
Most commercial freezer systems contain an evaporator defrost function. Where once per 24 hours, the evaporator (the cold bit) is turned off and heating applied to melt any ice on the evaporator. Otherwise the system clogs up with ice.
Perhaps it was just a stuck relay that left the heating function and they forgot to install a high temperature alarm!!!!
Without the alarm you are admitting your own stupidity.
Still, they have learn something now.
Trump, you lovable bastard!
Perfect!
Now that parts of the record are gone, scientists can make up whatever fits their models to fill the gaps. Leaves much room for creative hindcasting.
The ice was rotten anyway. That is why it melted so quickly
björn: “creative hindcasting” = redundant?
heh the ice cores probably revealed the wrong conclusion, freezer unplugged 😀
There were two freezers involved : a storage unit chilled to -37 C and an adjacent working unit cooled to -25 C. Only the storage unit failed, warming to 40 degrees C.
The ice doesn’t need to melt completely: “Once melting occurs, melted water from one core segment can contaminate other segments stored nearby.”
https://www.ualberta.ca/news-and-events/newsarticles/2017/april/freezer-failure-results-in-damage-to-ice-core-collection
Sounds like “a polar bear ate my homework/data” issue to me. Now they will not be able to document their data supporting previous CAGW research. We just have to trust them now.
Anyone check if “bleach bit” was involved? Ohh …. ammonia was used in the refrigeration system so it could only be expected that bleaching occurred.
Good to see “climate scientist” guys took the same care of there ice cores as they do ACTUAL temperature records (i.e.: unadjusted & unhomogenized)
Jeeze, it’s Canada.
Just keep them outside, eh.
“The samples departed Ottawa on Jan. 12, 2017, and arrived at the U of A’s north campus on Jan. 15…..freezer units were functioning properly at noon on Friday, March 31.
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.
The warming and a separate failure of the temperature monitoring system resulted in the partial melting of ice core samples, affecting 12.8 per cent of the collection. The entire archive, including affected samples, has been secured in a separate freezer with additional safeguards put in place.”
https://www.ualberta.ca/news-and-events/newsarticles/2017/april/freezer-failure-results-in-damage-to-ice-core-collection
Sloppy engineering.
No one considered a simple relay with an alarm bell outside the freezer ?
Or maybe a couple of thousand for a back up refrigerator to protect their millions of dollars ice cores?
If I had a dollar for every time I have seen tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment flooded and ruined because a hundred dollar sump pump failed…
It only took me having to fix one one time, to include in my repair quote a second sump pump, just above the primary one, which was never used unless the other one failed, and so it remained brand new and on standby.
“If a man don’t use his brain, he might as well have two @ur momisugly$$%#o!#s”.
Were the freezers hacked?
“…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…”
Steam, eh professor? Please turn in your credentials.
“Core Archive rose to about 100 degrees”
Steam ?
Fahrenheit – no
Centigrade – yes, “boiling ice cores”, things are far worse than expected.
Is it possible that the ice cores were ‘water boarded’? If the data from the ice cores could not be coerced sufficiently to get the desired results, the climatologists may have reverted to torturing the original ice cores.
“I’m melting…. melting! Ahhhh, what a world!”
That’s it! That’s where Trenberth’s missing heat went to: it’s somewhere over the rainbow!