Dr. Susan Crockford
Thick multiyear ice between Wrangel Island and the shore is now more than 2m thick, potentially impacting fall feeding for bears that routinely summer on Wrangel or the north coast of Chukotka.
Rapidly-forming sea ice in the Laptev and East Siberian Seas this fall – generated by cold winds from Siberia in late October despite warmer than ususal temperatures earlier in the month – has trapped a number of Russian ships that are being rescued by ice-breakers (below), according to a report in the Barents Observer earlier this week.
As I mentioned last month, much of the ice along the Russian coast of the Chukchi Sea adjacent to Wrangel Island (see map above) where Pacific walrus have hauled out in recent years remained covered in ice all summer and thus unavailable to walrus. By the middle of October, as new ice began to form in the area, that ice officially became ‘multiyear’ ice.
Progression of Sea Ice Conditions
See conditions at mid-October (18th), showing walrus haulouts (where polar bears congregate to feed on carcasses):
Below are conditions one month later (17 November):
The area both north and south of Wrangel Island is critical to ships using the Northern Sea Route to get from western Russian ports to those south of the Bering Sea but according to DMI was covered in ice 2-3.5m thick by 17 November (below).
That’s why ice-breakers have had to rescue transport ships caught in the ice. But it also will have had an impact on polar bears in the region who will have had to move onto thinner ice forming towards the Bering Strait in order not to have their important fall feeding period cut short.
Mixed walrus herds of cows and calves will already be in the northern Bering Sea waiting for adult males to join them. In the fall, males leave their summer haulout beaches in the southern Bering Sea to meet the mixed herds massing to the north. Mating takes place in the water in December/January, which is why walrus need mobile pack ice with access to open water in winter.
Yesterday Arctic sea ice was higher than every year on that date since (and including) 2009, except 2014. It is close to the 2001-10 average and liable to cross over it. Of course, it’s well above the 2011-20 mean.
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
Tsar Vladimir the Terrible: “Have nuclear ice breaker, will travel, let see colour of your greenbacks”
Vlad is laughing all the way to his Panamanian banks off the CACA folly.
Panama of Noriega and Oliver North wouldn’t have any of such financial sculduggeries.
Has nothing to do with North:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/panama-papers-money-hidden-offshore
Panama is just one of Vlad’s hidey holes.
He has ripped off Russians to such an extent that he could buy and sell Elon Musk many time over. Five years ago, his pilfered plunder was estimated at $200 billion dollars. With the surge in oil and gas prices, his pulchritude must be over $500 billion by now.
I know that I’m very familiar with long list of Pandora box cases. Just saying that Panama is such useful place for channeling through anything from ocean going tankers to illicit greenbacks.
It’s not just Vlad the Poisoner, Uncle Xi is also building a nuclear powered ice breaker.
Justin – look at my new red socks – Trudeau, not so much……….
Nick,
I thought Justine was looking for a renewable energy powered ice breaker! I guess the one powered by leprechauns and unicorn farts hasn’t materialized yet!
JT said: “Yesterday Arctic sea ice was higher than every year on that date since (and including) 2009, except 2014.”
In terms of daily extent NSIDC says 26 out of the 43 years of record were higher than 11/18/2021.
The 43 year record begins close to the high for the century.
And ignoring the decades before Arctic sea ice maximum.
All misinformation to push the CO₂ as a deity.
Are you saying that because sea ice extents were already high in the early part of the satellite record then the 25 other years you didn’t mention that were actually higher might as well have been lower thus making your statement effectively correct?
But hasn’t CO2 kept rising?
Your control knob is broken. Time to embrace and enjoy CO2.
Are you saying that because CO2 is rising the 25 other years not mentioned that were actually higher might as well have been lower thus making John Tillman’s statement effectively correct?
Your control knob is broken.
Derg,
You’re assuming that he has control over anything!
I don’t think that that is self evident!
Barely half were higher, and all of the “higher” readings were the climb down from the 1970’s when Arctic ice was setting records for it’s extent.
Are you saying that because some of the 25 other years not mentioned were only barely higher that they might as well have been lower thus making John Tillman’s statement effectively correct?
Always with the idiotic word games
If they were strictly linked they would follow each other exactly. So your claim is now they are somewhat linked but what are the other factors?
No. My claim is that 26 out of the 43 years in the satellite record had a higher Arctic sea ice extent for 11/18/2021 per NSIDC.
You do get that pure chance 50/50 odds would be 21 or 22 if you the thing you are comparing to was average. Do you know the odds of getting 26 heads when tossing a coin 43 times … look it up. This is the problem you number is less than compelling.
LdB said: “Do you know the odds of getting 26 heads when tossing a coin 43 times “
It is 4.9%. However the probability of getting 17-26 is about 88% with 21 or 22 being 12% each, 20 and 23 being 11% each, 19 and 24 being 9% each, 18 or 25 being 7% each, and 17 or 26 being 5% each. The probability getting heads only once is a statistical impossibility.
Speaks, once again, of the silliness of looking at years, or groups of them, and comparing them to other years. Using you date, in the data for the last 43 years, there is an almost 45% chance that the latter of any 2 adjacent years is larger than the year before. That goes down to an ~12.7% chance between any any 10 year separations.
But the chance of the trend being positive for the last 43 years is indeed too small to calculate. Over the 43 years, we have lost between 18.8% and 22.2% of this ice, at the 1 sigma level of the standard error of the trend. To quote the POTUS, “This is a BFD..”.
So what?
It’s just nature doing its thing.
1the satellite record only began in about 1979, the 26 years you mentioned could easily have been abnormally high.2. if you look at the last 12 years of Arctic Sea Ice extent it’s clear that ice extent has not been in decline and has reached a seasonally static phase.
It does not look like a good year there for either walrus or polar bears.
No… they risk to die from cold…
This can’t possibly be true, AlGore:The Goreacle and Lurch just explained to us peons that there is no ice or snow anywhere in the Arctic and the Antarctic is burning as we speak! 😉
So it’s global cooling, not warming, that’s endangering the Polar bears. How many more times do we have to go through this circle jerk before it’s realized that climate change is natural and doesn’t need man’s help or hindrance?
Perhaps it isn’t changing. Perhaps it is cycling.
Dr. Susan is right on top of things, as usual. If the polar bears have trouble getting to their traditional meal, the walrus and/or seal, we can start a Go Fund Me site to collect penguins and fly them to the north polar area, drop them out of airplanes and they can fly down to the ice and entertain the polar bears. Disclaimer: I borrowed this idea from the WKRP in Cincinnati “turkey drop” episode.
Pregnant polar bear sows (no trans bears) start denning from mid-October, at least in Alaska, so most of them aren’t eating anymore already. Barren sows and males do however need to find food, although they can survive between meals on their accumulated fat.
In days of Boris Yeltsin rule, there was food shortages demo in some southern city of Russia. My cousin who was there on business swears that he saw big transport helicopter dropping dry herring on the demonstrators, needless to say no one believed him.
Stories from Russia, no matter how strange, are liable to be true. Except for the peeing prosties.
Fish is actually really important in the Russian diet.
While the early transition to free market farming led to food shortages, it was Yeltsin’s experience in a Houston grocery store that allegedly led him to question Communism:
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/shows/houston-matters/2020/02/21/361467/boris-yelstins-1989-visit-to-a-houston-grocery-store-is-now-an-opera/
Now it’s an opera. No, really.
‘Dried herrings? Come to think of it our Vlad wouldn’t be so prosaic, he might be dropping colour photos of Boris Nemtsov behind bars, and perhaps one or two free samples of ‘novichok’ underpants deodorant.
That might deter protests, but wouldn’t feed the hungry.
With God as my witness I thought
turkeyspenguins could fly.They can, but only under water!
One problem, penguins can’t fly. Of course, neither could those turkeys….
Turkeys can fly. Sort of.
Nice picture of a wild turkey in flight. Broad-breasted Whites grow so fast and get so huge that flight is just a distant memory for them. Apparently this was the kind of bird the station owner bought for his Thanksgiving promotion. They were supposed to glide gracefully down amongst the watching crowd. Instead they splatted…Oh, the humanity!
Good to eat, though.
Wild turkey, not the drink, is not that great to eat. Give me a chemical hormones laced one any day.
Depends upon how you cook them.
That’s true of all wild meat. If you add enough bacon fat, olive oil, butter, cooking time, marinate, rub, seasoning, and frying oil, you can make a worn out tennis shoe taste OK. Me? I prefer Prime Ribeye.
Not true.
It’s not our fault or the animals fault if you shoot a ten to fifteen year old turkeys or bucks.
A Wildfowl magazine posts little maps charting where birds were banded and where they were harvested.
One bird sticks in my mind because the gander was over twenty years old when harvested…
There are reasons some old cows are termed hamburger cows. They’re too tough to eat without double grinding.
With bucks, if they’ve been in rut for weeks and then ran long distances before finally expiring, that is not prime meat any way you consider it.
The secret is brining them properly. Also very mush depends on their local diet.
But Wild Turkey (the drink) is the essential ingredient in Ice Fishing, if you want to eschew a tough old bird and instead get some fresh fish in the winter.
That doesn’t stop them from trying to fly.
Unfortunately, even shallow falls causes them to damage their breastbone which then gets infected. They do not have the ability to soften their landings.
It’s why farmers or growers who have anywhere where a turkey can try to fly, cut back the pinion feathers. As the birds can fly high enough to harm their breastbones when they fall.
It is necessary to keep the “Butterball” type birds in low pens so they can’t damage themselves. We used to raise Bourbon Reds and Royal Palms, heritage turkey breeds close to the wild type. The Shenandoah Valley in Virginia is home to many large turkey operations.
Ah, that episode was perhaps the funniest thing ever on TV. I nearly had a stroke laughing as Les Nessman described the turkey drop in tones reminiscent of the Hindenburg disaster. RIP, WKRP!
For those who missed it or need further explanation:
Not to worry, the Federal Reserve bankers will soon be there to help the bears out….
Top White House adviser: Climate policies ‘number one’ factor in Fed chair pick
The Chukchi Sea has already frozen over. Now the shores of the Bering Sea are freezing. By the time icebreakers from Siberia get there, the ice will already be thick.
An update on shipping locations and status
http://www.nsra.ru/en/grafik_dvijeniya_po_smp.html?date=2021-11-19
Arctic sea ice in general has faired pretty well this year so far. The 1991-2020 average mean extent from Jan 1st to Nov 18th is 10.97e6 km2. In 2021 we are at 10.36e6 km2 and is only 9th lowest in the 43 year satellite record.
Weather top trumps again?
When you have a warming trend that reverses ( not saying that it is ) would not the temperature begin to decline over the course of several years to decades, and have a 9th coldest, then a 12th coldest then 6 coldest, then a 14th coldest then another 9th coldest etc? As you do with most oscillation?
413.93 ppm CO2 .. October 2021
Don’t worry we should hit 450 soon as a new point on the correlation graph.
“Mating takes place in the water in December/January, which is why walrus need mobile pack ice with access to open water in winter.”
The very thought of it makes me shrivel.
Blubber and thick hide.
Their adaptations aren’t like ours, for life on the East African savannah.
Shrinkage!
Oh dear! Another scary Climate Mafia prediction ruined by a big ugly fact. Didn’t Gore’s award winning fakumentary tell us that all Arctic sea ice would be melted by 2014? It’s just as well they have the Media propping up their stories.
There may be more ice on the way. There’s a blizzard alert for the area around the Chukchi Sea right now.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/500hPa/orthographic=-173.95,54.12,304/loc=-174.894,53.176
Increasingly strong freezing. The low will not reach the Bering Strait.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/11/25/0000Z/wind/isobaric/500hPa/overlay=temp/orthographic=-136.15,58.72,483
The low will reach northern British Columbia.
Some impressive snowfall totals forecasted along the coast of BC, Canada over the next 10 days !
Attenborough should be up north of the Bering Strait filming those ships getting frozen in the ice.
Then they can look for polar bears starving on the thick ice.
and how long since this last happened?
Why don’t you tell us as you appear to be the resident arctic ice and bear expert. Go on, tell us. I dare you!
You told me there was going to be no ice and bears and I took your word and stopped looking.
Please no polar bear alarmism on this weblog. Polar bears are doing just fine and if populations decline the most likely will bounce back. Polar bears have been around for ten thousands of years and ge on just fine.
Snowfall is forecast for 10 days.
The front is already reaching British Columbia.
It is very clear how the circulation over the Bering Sea is blocked due to excess ozone in the stratosphere in this region.
You can see, by the isobars, how the jet currents in the lower stratosphere skirt the “ozone island” on two sides.
Here is an URL regarding arctic and antarctic sea ice, for information.
https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/seaice/characteristics/difference.html
A look at the Chukchi Sea.
Where’s Griff to argue against reality and indisputable facts when we need him? (sarc off)
Very much snow and rain will still fall in British Columbia. The situation is grave as floodwalls are breaking.
Lows move along the jet stream current. This is a fairly persistent pattern.
https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/sat/satlooper.php?region=ak&product=ir
The climate alarmist do realize that resistance is futile, don’t they? Russia has huge NUCLEAR powered icebreakers , whilst building more, so they can transport natural gas through some of the thickest of ice all year long . BTW what does all cutting of channels through the ice by massive ice breakers and the exhaust and other emissions from the non nuclear vessels do to the arctic. HMMMMM