From CBC, something that goes against claims of disappearing sea ice:
The Rosaire A. Desgagnés dropped its anchor on Saturday about 18 kilometers from the Nunavut hamlet. It sat there until Wednesday when it was unloaded.
The success was welcome news for Waguih Rayes, general manager of Desgagnés Transarctik Inc., which oversees several Arctic ships as the managing partner for Nunavut Sealink and Supply Inc.
An unusual amount of ice and a swamped coast guard made Arctic shipping more difficult than usual this year, according to Rayes.
He told CBC that he was recently on a morning phone briefing with Canadian Coast Guard representatives and that the agency said it is “busy everywhere… [and] they don’t have enough boats to provide the level of service required.”
Lauren Solski, a spokesperson for the Canadian Coast Guard, said in an email that they received no request this year for icebreaking services to get into Resolute Bay.
Other priorities
Solski said the agency can offer help with ice breaking so ships can get to their destination, but when extensive ice is already in the bay where a boat is trying to offload, “cargo operations cannot take place.”
Solski also wrote that while supplying Northern communities was important, search and rescue work and environmental response missions both “take priority” over ice breaking and escorting cargo ships.
A number of search and rescue efforts have demanded the coast guard’s help in the Arctic Ocean this year, including the rescue of passengers on the Akademik Ioffe.
A Coast Guard icebreaker was stationed near the Akademik Ioffe for days after the passengers were offloaded but has since left. (See Also: Ship Of Fools II)
‘Floating chunks of steel’
Arctic and marine consultant Joe Spears has been following the conditions. He said the ice is coming from near Greenland, where it has broken up and been pushed into Canada’s Arctic Archipelago with tides and winds.
Some of these chunks ice are like “floating chunks of steel,” he said.
“The thickness and concentration of ice are worse than we have ever seen since we started servicing the communities [in 2008]” Rayes said.
Rayes said that the conditions have had a spillover effect, slowing down past and future cargo operations this year. A boat to Iqaluit this summer was approximately 10 days late, and delays on this sealift’s route will affect the schedule for its next voyages in the fall.
Read more at CBC News
The Northwest passage was blocked this year, but the Northeast was the place to be for Ships of Fools.
http://earthsky.org/earth/2018-arctic-sea-ice-minimum
“Thick Sea Ice Is Making Arctic Travel And Shipping A Nightmare”…
Maybe it has to do with the fact that 30-35% summer ice cover of the Arctic Ocean isn’t all that much less than 45-55% from the perspective of ships and boats that aren’t icebreakers.
Particularly since the ice-free bits of the Arctic Ocean can still have up to 14.9% ice cover.
“An unusual amount of ice”…no matter what the ice does….it’s unusual
Funny how that happens, huh?
Here in Toronto, we had some localized flooding last spring. Of course, climate models were trotted out to “confirm” this was the “new normal”: hotter climate, more precipitation, more flooding.
Just a few years before that, the same region had a winter and spring with less-than-normal precipitation, therefore less to melt, therefore…The Great Lakes Are Going DRY!!! Climate Change!!! We’ll have to dredge the channels, and the recreational boating industry will die.
Sure enough, they trotted out climate models to “confirm” this was the “new normal”: hotter climate, less precipitation, Great Lakes will lower catastrophically.
Warmunists are lucky that people’s memories are short.
David, how do you post an image as an image ? Since this feature broke last month, I have not been able to get this to work. It seems HTML ” IMG” just get snipped out. How can this be done?
thx.
The graph starts after the “unprecedented” Arctic Ice growth in the 60s and 70s, that brought about the “coming Ice age” scare. Its a real cherry picker, that one.
To paraphrase – the climate alarmists just aren’t going to know what an ice free Antarctic ocean looks like.
Antarctic sea ice might be topping out. The average peak ice date for 1981-2010 is September 26, so this season’s winter maximum is later than usual.
Yesterday’s extent in NSIDC “data” was 18.153 million km sq, vs. 18.154 million on Oct 2. Both figures are in the normal range.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
However, last year’s Antarctic maximum was even later, on Oct 11, and a bit lower than this year’s.
Oh no!
Just as I was getting ready to submit my “Arctic Warming Unprecedented” paper.
(Edited) MOD
submit
[?? .mod]
Well the paper was a bit of a dog.
That’s British humour,……..nice one, taking the pizz out of his howler.
a submut is the scientific term for an under-dog. where did you go to school ? 😉
Living in the Canadian arctic is very expensive. The only year round transportation is by air. For small communities, the airplanes are small and don’t carry too much cargo. Things like fresh milk and vegetables are out of the question.
If you’re lucky your community may get sealift once a year. Typically, you order everything you need for the whole year and it comes in on the sealift.
The story mentions Resolute. It’s a major logistic center for arctic operations and has a ‘decent’ runway, which is to say that can accommodate hundred passenger jets. That makes air cargo a lot cheaper. The result is that it’s possible to have fresh food.
Indeed:
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2018/10/03/cancelled-barge-cuts-off-arctic-hamlets-leaves-crucial-supplies-stranded/
“A massive outflow of heavy sea ice from the High Arctic has cut three communities off from their annual resupply barge shipment leaving household groceries, construction materials and municipal equipment stranded on the docks in Tuktoyaktuk.
The ice is so impassable that Marine Transportation Services Ltd., owned by the Northwest Territories, will have to airlift more than 700,000 litres of diesel and gas to the community of Paulatuk to run the community’s generator.”
Kenn Borek Air uses DC-3s to carry diesel. The payload is around 8500 pounds. Ignoring the fact that the aircraft’s fuel counts against payload, that’s about 4500 liters. So, we’re looking at somewhere over 155 flights. That’s going to cost big time.
commiebob
US Army Air Force tried that trick in WWII to carry fuel to the aircraft flying against the Japanese from Chinese air bases when the Burma Road was cut. Didn’t work – even when the far larger B-29’s tried to put fuel tanks in their bomb bays instead of bombs. Just can’t enough fuel efficiently enough for long distances to make it worth it – outside of war. Even then Stalingrad, Rabaul, Truk … all such resupplies failed to bring in enough.
C-130’s might be a bit better than WWII aircraft. They “only” need home heating oil, gas for the snowmobiles and small generators and chainsaws (?) …
RA? Herc is up to the job. And Russia has a yuge number of heavy lift aircraft they would happily sell, including service personnel who could use the work. Proper allocation and use of resources, not something we humans are especially good at.
I saw a Herc in the arctic once. For whatever reason, the most common planes seem to be DC-3 and Twin Otter.
The DC-3 is pretty amazing. Only five were produced after 1945. That means almost any DC-3 that you see was produced before 1945.
Otter is an awesome aircraft! I have been aboard several DC 3s, love that sound. It is amazing that so many are still working after all these years. Too bad someone with a butt load of money has not started building new ones, material and tech advances would make them live 100 years or more.
Someone quick, get musk on it. I am sure he (thinks) its fixable..
C 130 carry a h3ll of a lot more than that. Got to get with the times! Loves me some Gooney Bird, been out the door of several, their days as a primary workhorse are long past.
As far as I can tell, none of the usual operators has a Herc.
That is a shame, can’t be beat when it comes to move large amounts of cargo and versatile as all get out. Uncle Sugar actually sold a good number of them during the last upgrade/retro fit program.
I suspect that some of the open-water along Russia’s north coast is due to the extreme activity of Russian ice-breakers. Anyone who has seen the spring ice-breaking operations in the Great Lakes knows that once the ice-breakers move through an area it clears out a whole lot faster. Three or Four years ago Mackinaw was heavily ice-bound in late April, three USCG ships and four days later everything was moving freely.
Well, that would surely qualify as “man-made”.
Before people get too giddy, you’re going to see “climate change!” attribution.
“He said the ice is coming from near Greenland, where it has broken up and been pushed into Canada’s Arctic Archipelago with tides and winds.”
The melting ice of Greenland is claimed to be the source of all the ice they have to deal with. Certainly without burning CO2, that ice would never have broken off in the first place! 🙂
And yet Greenland gained ice of more than 8400 times the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza this year.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/09/24/greenland-ice-sheet-apparently-gains-mass-for-the-2nd-year-in-a-row/
But how many Manhattans is that?
How many Hiroshima bombs.
I suppose that the answer to your question is whether your calibration source is a Manhattan made with bourbon or rye.
… 60 guilders or $24 worth of trinkets
How many Latka’s of CO2 did it take to melt what ice made it into Canada’s Arctic Archipelago?
Melting and then refreezing!
Is there anything that manmade CO2 cannot do?
It can’t hide from Al Gore!
Kiw de mowecule, kiw de mowecule!
The article explains that this is not the result of disappearing sea ice but rather the Greenland ice breaking off and floating into the Canadian Arctic. It actually buttresses climate warming
Well, that is what the writer put in words.
Now, is that conclusion, is that written statement correct?
Having read more comments it is now clear to me that the ice breaking off is not the result of warming but of natural physical forces on the ice. At least for me, it was a reasonable question to ask since the author didn’t specify a reason for the breaking off of the ice
And your question was appropriate. Thank you.
Likely, given the tens of millions spent on “climate change education” since their budgets began increasing in 1996-2016, the INTENT of the original writer to create that first impression was fulfilled.
It is unadulterated bullshit. Take a look at how the sea-ice melts. It always gets ice-free first near Greenland while the “Middle Ice” further west in Baffin Bay keeps the Canadian blocked for most of the summer. This year the ice in Lancaster sound near Resolute never melted at all.
It is true that the very bad ice in the Northwest Passage this year partly drifte in, but it came from the north through Peel Sound, not from Greenland. And multi-year ice in the Beaufort gyre kept drifting south, didn’t melt, and blocked the western approach to the passage.
And note that much of the fast ice north of McClure sound never broke up. Is that the fault of melting Greenland ice too?
i have to agree with tty on this.what he states is correct. one thing the alarmist sea ice forum is very good for [its] data on ice movement due to arctic weather patterns and it confirms the above.
The geography does not support any general “conclusion” that “melting glaciers from Greenland” “broke off and blocked the ports”.
Cambridge Bay, Kugluktuk, and Paulatuk are listed above by one reader here as being affected by shipping restriction due to “excessive ice.” (No specific attribution, but the specific ports/towns are mentioned above.) Well, those three communities CANNOT be blocked by floating icebergs released ice from Greenland. They are all on the far northern coastline of the islands well to the west of Greenland’s glacier-covered west coast! Further, there are almost no fixed ice shelves in Canada’s far north (only a few hundred sq kilometers), and so northern hemisphere “shelf ice” is not to blame either. (Unless you consider that the “shelf ice” is expanding (not contracting) and thereby blocking inlets and straits.
The only “ports” named in the original article are Resolute Bay and Iqaluit. Iqaluit is on the southeast coast of the island facing the Davis Strait between Greenland and Canada. It “could be” blocked by icebergs breaking off of Greenland, but the general current and average winds through the Davis Strait tends to push icebergs to south and east, away from that coast line.
Resolute Bay is on the north coast of the northern Canadian archipelago islands. NO icebergs breaking away from Greenland can get up there – and, indeed, no blockage was reported for Resolute Bay.
Resolute Bay is on the north coast of the northern Canadian archipelago islands.
Surely that should be ‘south coast’?
In the past the channels leading south from the Arctic sea through the archipelago were blocked by thick multiyear ice, in recent years that ice has broken up and become more mobile and flows south more than it used to. The ice that is causing problems is some mobile chunks of the multiyear ice blocking parts of the channel. This is a consequence of the overall loss of arctic ice, the Nth shore of the archipelago used to be the resting place of the thickest ice but now this is moving around. This is the source of the ice that has moved past Banks Island, the problem is that it will melt now it has moved south. The region of persistent ice off the Alaskan coast this summer was from there and is now just a trace.
https://go.nasa.gov/2RmFucK
The following describes similar events in the NE.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GL076587
This comment was originally captured by the spam filter. Notice the unfortunate randomly generated URL in the first link. That’s why.
Sorry about that Anthony, I guess their computer generation system doesn’t have a screening system.
It reminds me of a oral exam for one of my graduate students many years ago, his thesis contained variables with various subscripts, two of which were fu for fuel and ck for chemical kinetic. We didn’t notice the occasional unfortunate conjunction, the external examiner however did!
And the vagaries of auto correct spell check deciding what word you actually meant to use! 😉
Good point. Thank you for the correction. Resolute is on the south coast of Cornwallis Island, north of Parry Channel-Barrow-Strait.
Which is even further from the icebergs coming from Greenland. 8<)
Which is even further from the icebergs coming from Greenland.
But the floes have no problem drifting in via Viscount Melville Sound, which is where the MYI is coming from.
“In the past the channels leading south from the Arctic sea through the archipelago were blocked by thick multiyear ice, in recent years that ice has broken up and become more mobile and flows south more than it used to. ”
That is the party-line excuse. But it doesn’t hold up. Have a look at this map:
It shows the ice situation on August 27, a few days before minimum. Notice the large grey areas north of the McClure passage? That is fast (=immobile) ice? Notice the blue/green areas along the northern side of the McClure strait. Those are more or less open areas (it is perfectly normal for the north side to be more open). Notice the red areas in the straits south of the McClure strait. That is the dense ice that blocked the northwest passage. There is no way the ice up North could have gotten down south of the McClure strait and still have left those large fast ice areas behind plus a belt of open water.
What happened was that the ice in Bellot sound, Peel/Franklin Strait and off Cape Herschel simply never melted.
Yes but this is WUWT and they cannot help but mis interpret.
too long in the echo chamber
After a number of searches for an article I had already read, with bing returning lots of “reduced ice conditions” results nonsense.
My searches were explicit. bing results were not.
Anyway, I finally located the article:
And when the historically typical sea ice levels return Arctic basin wide, the climate obsessed will still say that human caused CO2 is dangerously imoacting the Arctic.
The climate obsessed will move on to another area. That’s part of AGW’s strategy. Don’t mention anything from the past and keep the current change fresh in their faces as proof of ‘climate change’. Remember the Great American drought from a decade ago? Or it was never going to rain in California or Australia ?
The Arctic will soon be forgotten as it returns to normal.
You might try DuckDuckGo for searches. duckduckgo.com/
I think they are more unbiased than Google & Bing.
It’s a stupid way for a government to act,” Holland said.”
=========
The TruDope government has redefined stupid. Jet Setting Mr. Dress-Up would rather flit around the world handing out taxpayer millions to people that hate us in return for seeing his picture in the paper.
The carbon tax is doing its job. The True North is freezing up and if Canadians don’t like it, too bad. TrueDope knows best.
“Mr. Dress-Up”
Seriously, don’t abuse my childhood by using this name (for non-Canadians, he was our equivalent of Mister Rogers) like this.
I’d prefer using Junior, Sockboy or Zoolander.
Actually, Trudeau is more comparable to Casey (who was a puppet)…
How about calling him Trudocchio then. His nose actually is growing too. Looking more like his old man every time I see him. Pierre, that is
Other barges for Cambridge Bay, Kugluktuk, and Paulatuk have also been cancelled. Paulatuk will need 600,000 litres of diesel fuel flown in for its generators. Ice conditions are described as “too extreme for icebreakers to be of any help”.
See CBC web site for more information
Let me fix this:
“Some of these chunks ice are like “floating chunks of irony,” he said.”
These northern folks should return to their sustainable lifestyles eating seal blubber, harpooning whales, and spearing caribou. Take away their snowmobiles, outboard motors, and rifles. There, Arctic transportation problem solved. /sarc
Well, it certainly appears that the enviro’s “Northwest Passage” profitable-propaganda trips (at $15,000.00 dollars per passenger!) are tying up scarce Arctic resources up there, burning fuel oil and budgets, and preventing the attention, ships and escorts and ice breakers from getting cargo through?
If it is any comfort every Northwest Passage cruise were either cancelled, turned back, or (in one case) ran aground when they tried an alternative route. And out of 24 yachts trying for the NW passage 2 got through, one was crushed by ice and 21 had the sense to turn back in time.
Here is a good site to follow how the ice situation devekoped this summer:
http://arcticnorthwestpassage.blogspot.com/
Forget about Greenland ice. The problem was simply that the local ice NEVER MELTED.
It’s just soft, rotten ice so go ahead at full speed ahead with all the confidence of global warming like the White Star Line in 1912.
That was no accident. Here’s “proof”.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2-lFLiUgDiE
Perhaps the government agencies in the Arctic region should be investing in C 130s and building more landing strips. I believe I have seen video of C 130s landing on ice, if you can imagine such a thing!
What about military style air-drops?
Collapsible fuel bladders can be LAPSed quite easily. Only problem with airdrop is winds, often in Arctic the wind is rather, well, brisk. Not undo-able, I have seen lots of drops done in bad conditions. In cases where food, medical and material supply is needed quickly it is certainly an option.
“I believe I have seen video of C 130s landing on ice, if you can imagine such a thing!” The mining exploration industry has been moving drilling rigs with C130’s for years … the ice has to be thick enough.
Do I really have to put a sarc tag on that? Hercs can be equipped to land on snow and have been operating off ice “runways” in Antarctica for at least 4 decades.
Those are solid, dead flat ice plateaus in Antarctica. No glaciers at all in most of the Parry Archipelago and not very deep snow. And very rocky ground underneath. Landing strips are needed.
In some regions, in others they land on snow/ice. One of first things I was taught in airmobile ops, know what you are going to land on. The 7 P Principle. Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. These people are the victims of their “government’s” failure to grasp and apply the 7 P Principle. But hey! I am just being repetitively redundant when pointing out “government” does not know what the f*ck it is doing. Ever.
How about simply transporting across land & ice? That’s not as efficient as using ships, but much more efficient than using cargo planes.
If you think that you have never tried moving anything over sea-ice. It works OK for flat, fast ice, but most sea-ice is mobile with leads and compression ridges and is perfectly awful to travel through.
There is a reason getting to the North Pole without air supply is virtually impossible.
N B Northern Canada is an archipelago. Most settlements are on islands.
Railroad! Only thing it can’t do is float.
Well, don’t know if anything the Russians built in the 50s and 60s is actually around now.
Then again, you can do it:
http://www.allworldwars.com/Ice-Railway-Bridge-Over-The-Dnieper-by-Ludwig-Schmeller.html
Reports like this give me the shivers but there might be a correlation with my Mediterranean climate.
So, let’s not “vaguely and generally wave hands” but actually lookup the Canadian Archipelago Sea ice Area for the last 20 years. These averages are from the NSIDC Regional Sea Ice spreadsheet for 03 Oct 2018.
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/sea-ice-tools/
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/seaice_analysis/Sea_Ice_Index_Regional_Daily_Data_G02135_v3.0.xlsx
Canadian Archipelago Sea Ice Areas in 2017 AND 2018 are substantially higher than recent years!
More than double 2015, triple the (record low) in 2012.
Of course the most essential cargo these ships provide on bulk consumables for the year-round residents is diesel fuel for their generators and heating plants, and petrol for their trucks and snowmobiles.
Perhaps they should switch over to coal, I know several companies here in PA that will happily ship them train loads at competitive prices.
There is a rather marked shortage of railways in those parts.
Who is at fault for that? Once again, “government”. Russia has shown rail lines can be run very, very far into the Arctic. Once again the 7 P Principle rears its ugly, yet magnificent head.
It has never struck your attention that northern Canada is an archipelago?
And actually there aren’t that many russian rail lines in the Arctic.
If we count “Arctic” as north of the treeline there is as a matter of fact exactly one, the 50 mile ore line from Norilsk to the port at Dudinka.
You are probably thinking of the BAM “Baikal-Amurskiy Magistrale” railway, which is completely within the taiga zone and much further south than e. g. the Anchorage-Fairbanks railway.
I thought Russia put 3 or 4 rail lines into the Arctic back in ’50s-’60s? And other temporary lines for certain projects later.
Tty,
There’s also the Kirov Railway from Murmansk to St. Petersburg, although only its northernmost stretch lies above the Arctic Circle.
Another one is planned for Norway, Finland, the Baltics and Poland:
https://www.arctictoday.com/will-europes-arctic-railway-built-depend-cargo-volumes/
Most railways north of the Arctic Circle is in Scandinavia. The oldest is the ore railway to Narvik.
“Another one is planned for Norway, Finland, the Baltics and Poland”
That is pure, 24-carat, boondoggle. There is already two railways going essentially the same way, one from Murmansk and one from Narvik (three if you count Arkhangelsk). Both have extra capacity, and neither requires a ferry like the new line, so why build a third, from Kirkenes of all places.
nteresting how much confusion there is about Arctic warming after my 2011 article “Arctic warming is not greenhouse warming” appeared’. It should have clarified the situation but I see no sign of that reading the literature. I demonstrated that the currently ongoing Arctic warming was a result of the rearrangement of North Atlantic surface stream currents at the turn of the twentieth century. . It was even stronger than now before the twenties but it was overtaken by a cold wave in the thirties. By the seventies the cold wave had played itself out and the warming now called Arctic warming had started. By late seventies its influence became obvious and attracted “Arctic experts.” They wondered how it was possible for this waning to be twice as fast as their models told them.. Just another case of wrotten modeling software. The crowd that began to study warming only in the seventies entirely missed the earlier episode and the cold wave. None of this warming ad anything to do with carbon dioxide but was the result of the rearrangement of the North Atlantic flow patterns that direct the north-flowing Gulf stream that followed the coast to send more of its warm water into the Arctic Ocean. The warming it created after the cold wave of the thirties became obvious in the late seventies and sttrated Arctic “experts” e\who did not understand how it could go twice as fast as their models told them. As to Arctic cooling now, I don’t know. I made the point that the Northwest Passage is not as secure as some of these “experts” think. To learn more, do you homework and read my paper.
nteresting how much confusion there is about Arctic warming after my 2011 article “Arctic warming is not greenhouse warming” appeared’. It should have clarified the situation but I see no sign of that reading the literature. I demonstrated that the currently ongoing Arctic warming was a result of the rearrangement of North Atlantic surface stream currents at the tirn of the twentieth century. . It was even stronger than now before the twenties but it was overtaken by a cold wave in the thirties. By the seventies the cold wave had played itself out and the warming now called Arctic warming had started. By late seventies its influence became obvious and attracted “Arctic experts.” They wondered how it was possible for this waning to be twice as fast as their models told them.. Just another case of wrotten modeling software. The crowd that began to study warming only in the seventies entirely missed the earlier episode and the cold wave. None of this warming ad anything to do with carbon dioxide but was the result of the rearrangement of the North Atlantic flow patterns that direced the north-flowung Gulf stream that folleled the coast to send more of its warm water into the Arctic Ocean. The warming it created after the cold wave of the thirties became obvious in the late seventies and attracted Arctic “experts” who did not understand how it could go twice as fast as their models told them. As to Arctic cooling now, I don’t know. I made the point that id happen once after the pre-twenties warming so it could happen again, Which means that the Northwest Passage is not as secure as some of these “experts” think. To learn more, do you homework and read my paper.
Image:
2nd try:
This is kinda related to this thread so I want to throw this out to this august audience for comment. “Where did all the water for the continental ice ice sheets come from, (the oceans..duh) but how did it get to the northern latitudes? I live in the Great Lakes region and am well aware of “Lake Effect” as it applies to snow, once the Lakes freeze over the snow stops. So there must be an analogous phenomenon in the high latitudes that would cause a lot of snow to drop: maybe an ice free arctic, which would mean if the arctic is ice free, we’re in a world of of cold……eh?
How else could thousands of cubic miles of water get UP North to form the Ice Sheets?
The NH contains the bulk of the Earth’s landmass with much of it at Arcic circle latitudes. Land gets very cold in winter, WV penetrates into the continents having been picked up by depressions within the Pacfic and Atlantic PJSs and rides over resident cold air giving snow to sea level. Once snow is covering the ground in the depths of winter in the heart of a continent it will not melt until the Spring.
If, as we”ve seen in recent Autumns, there is more open arctic waters then more warmth/WV is available to fall as snow over Eurasia in October. This has been correlated with an earlier/faster snowfield build up there, with indications that it is nore likely to result in -ve AO type winter (predominance of high latitude anticyclones) later, especially in low solar years and dependant on the ENSO regime (regarding deflection of planetary waves to disrupt the stratospheric polar vortex and pushing arctic air south and pulling tropical air north). Many things need to come together for cold NH winters in more southern latitudes, and often the eastern US and wetern europe is the target.