Chilly seawater may slow ice loss on the island until 2050, then warming and melting may acceleratePeer-Reviewed Publication
AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION
American Geophysical Union
15 February 2022
AGU Release No. 22-11
For Immediate Release
This press release and accompanying multimedia are available online at: https://news.agu.org/press-release/blue-blob-near-iceland-could-slow-glacial-melting/
“Blue Blob” near Iceland could slow glacial melting
Chilly seawater may slow ice loss on the island until 2050, then warming and melting may accelerate
AGU press office:
Rebecca Dzombak, +1 (202) 777-7492, news@agu.org (UTC-5 hours)
Contact information for the researchers:
Brice Noël, Utrecht University, b.p.y.noel@uu.nl (UTC+1 hour)
WASHINGTON — A region of cooling water in the North Atlantic Ocean near Iceland, nicknamed the “Blue Blob,” has likely slowed the melting of the island’s glaciers since 2011 and may continue to stymie ice loss until about 2050, according to new research.
The origin and cause of the Blue Blob, which is located south of Iceland and Greenland, is still being investigated. The cold patch was most prominent during the winter of 2014-2015 when the sea surface temperature was about 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.52 degrees Fahrenheit) colder than normal.
The new study uses climate models and field observations to show that the cold water patch chilled the air over Iceland sufficiently to slow ice loss starting in 2011. The model predicts cooler water will persist in the North Atlantic, sparing Iceland’s glaciers until about 2050. Ocean and air temperatures are predicted to increase between 2050 and 2100, leading to accelerated melting.
While cooler water in the North Atlantic offers a temporary respite for Iceland’s glaciers, the authors estimate that without steps to mitigate climate change, the glaciers could lose a third of their current ice volume by 2100 and be gone by 2300. If the country’s 3,400 cubic kilometers (about 816 cubic miles) of ice melt, sea level will rise by 9 millimeters (0.35 inches).
“In the end, the message is still clear,” said lead author Brice Noël, a climate modeler who specializes in polar ice sheets and glaciers at Utrecht University. “The Arctic is warming fast. If we wish to see glaciers in Iceland, then we have to curb the warming.”
The paper is published in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters, which publishes high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences. Its findings may help scientists to better understand the indirect effects of the ocean on glaciers.
“It’s crucial to have an idea of the possible feedbacks in the Arctic because it’s a region that is changing so fast,” Noël said. “It’s important to know what we can expect in a future warmer climate.”
The warming Arctic
Nowhere on Earth has warmed as quickly as the Arctic. Recent studies report the area is warming four times faster than the global average. Iceland’s glaciers steadily shrank from 1995 to 2010, losing an average of 11 gigatons of ice per year. Starting in 2011, however, the speed of Iceland’s melting slowed, resulting in about half as much ice loss, or about 5 gigatons annually. This trend was not seen in nearby, larger glaciers across Greenland and Svalbard.
Noël and his colleagues investigated the cause of this slowdown by estimating the glaciers’ mass balance — how much they grew or melted annually from 1958 to 2019. They used a high-resolution regional climate model that works at the small scale of Iceland’s glaciers to estimate how much snow the glaciers received in winter and how much ice was lost from meltwater runoff in summer. The researchers found that cooler waters near the Blue Blob are linked to observations of lower air temperatures over Iceland’s glaciers and coincide with the slowdown of glacial melting since 2011.
Several researchers have proposed that the Blue Blob is part of the normal sea surface temperature variability in the Arctic. Notably, especially cold winters in 2014 and 2015 led to record cooling, which caused upwelling of cold, deep water, even as ocean temperatures around the region warmed due to climate change.
Before the Blue Blob, a long-term cooling trend in the same region, called the Atlantic Warming Hole, reduced sea surface temperatures by about 0.4 to 0.8 degrees Celsius (0.72 to 1.44 degrees Fahrenheit) during the last century and may continue to cool the region in the future. A possible explanation for the Warming Hole is that climate change has slowed the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, an ocean current that brings warm water up from the tropics to the Arctic, thus reducing the amount of heat delivered to the region.
The end of Iceland’s glaciers?
Noël projected the future climate of Iceland by combining the same regional climate model with a global climate model to predict how North Atlantic ocean temperatures would affect the glaciers’ fate until 2100, under a scenario of rapid warming. The models predicted that the North Atlantic near Iceland will stay cool, slowing — and perhaps even temporarily stopping — ice loss from the glaciers by the mid-2050s.
The authors verified that the models accurately reconstructed the mass of the glaciers using almost 1,200 measurements of snow depth collected between 1991 and 2019 by colleagues at the University of Iceland and satellite measurements of the elevation and extent of glaciers taken from 2002 to 2019 by co-authors at the Delft University of Technology.
“I think their analysis is very thorough,” said Fiamma Straneo, a physical oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who was not involved in the study. “They have a really state-of-the-art regional atmospheric model for looking at the variability of glaciers.” Straneo thinks this approach could be used to understand changes in other glaciers that occur over land, such as in the Himalayas and Patagonia. “There is very active research in land terminating glaciers because they are one of the largest contributors to sea level rise right now.”
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This research study is published with open access and is freely available. Download a PDF copy of the paper here. Neither the paper nor this press release is under embargo.
Paper title:
“North Atlantic Cooling is Slowing Down Mass Loss of Icelandic Glaciers”
Author information:
- Brice Noël (corresponding author), Michiel R. van den Broeke, Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands,
- Guðfinna Aðalgeirsdóttir, Finnur Pálsson, Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Iceland, Reykjavìk, Iceland
- Bert Wouters, Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht, Utrecht University, Utrecht; Department of Geoscience & Remote Sensing, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
- Stef Lhermitte, Jan M. Haacker, Department of Geoscience & Remote Sensing, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
JOURNAL
Geophysical Research Letters
DOI
ARTICLE TITLE
North Atlantic Cooling is Slowing Down Mass Loss of Icelandic Glaciers
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
24-Jan-2022
So, 30 years (2020 to 2050) of unusually cold seawater is normal, but any years of unusually warm seawater are Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming? How can a once legitimate group, the American Geophysical Union, present this report, along with other similar modelled feelings (as opposed to actual research with scientific data) and not expect persons to notice?
The tea leaves tell me that something you lost will turn up soon and a secret admirer will send you a sign. Please make checks to climate science clowns and soothsayers, Inc.
corrections: “…may turn up…”, “… may send you…”
everything must be weasly speculation
The North Icelandic Jet is a deep-reaching current that flows along the continental slope of Iceland. North Icelandic Jet advects overflow water into the Denmark Straits and constitutes a pathway that is distinct from the East Greenland Current. It is a cold current that runs west across the top of Iceland, then southwest between Greenland and Iceland at a depth of about 600 meters (almost 2,000 feet).
North Icelandic Jet (NIJ), contributes to a key component of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), also known as the “great ocean conveyor belt,” which is critically important for regulating Earth’s climate. As part of the planet’s reciprocal relationship between ocean circulation and climate, this conveyor belt transports warm surface water to high latitudes where the water warms the air, then cools, sinks, and returns towards the equator as a deep flow.
Yes, and the fish and other critters go back and forth with it. One example –Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) modulates dynamics of small pelagic fishes and ecosystem regime shifts in the eastern North and Central Atlantic. Journal of Marine Systems 131, March 2014, Pages 21-35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmarsys.2013.11.002
In other words, the AMO, which will soon switch to cold phase for the next 30 yrs
Iceland was just as warm in the 1930s as now, before getting much colder during the sea ice years of the 1960s to 80s
Sometimes it’s just to easy to pull back the curtain. Add ‘blue blob’ to ‘warming hole’ in the “he who must not be named” COOLING cycle in the cyclical oceans and cyclical global.
That is the real emergency for the agenda pushers.
More “mays” and “coulds”. From the people whose track records from more than 30 years of climate catastrophe predictions is significantly worse than chimps throwing darts at a wall plastered with random newspaper articles.
Meanwhile in the real world, a nearly new £20 million wind turbine crashed to the ground in the UK’s blustery weather yesterday showing how to urinate away vast amounts of money on useless vanity projects.
Waiting for someone in the UK governmental bureaucracy to blame that wind turbine collapse on “climate change” . . . that would be just soooooo fitting!
OT.
Some good news in the Guardian for once!
https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiEO8qWV5agU1geIijRo5PmJsqFwgEKg4IACoGCAowl6p7MN-zCTDJ4PsF?hl=en-GB&gl=GB&ceid=GB%3Aen
Camilla writes a children’s book. “The cow says, ” moo.” The wind mill says, “blow me over.” The end.
And the Big Bad Wolf said “I’ll huff and I’ll puff, and your lights will go out,” But this little piggy had foundations made of Uranium, which were simply too heavy to be blown away by the Big Bad Wolf, so he and his nuclear famility lived happily ever after.
“when the sea surface temperature was about 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.52 degrees Fahrenheit) colder than normal.”
please define normal.
They mean average, but that doesn’t sound scary enough. Or at all.
Is your “mean” the same as your “average”?
“The Arctic is warming fast. If we wish to see glaciers in Iceland, then we have to curb the warming.”
It’s at the top of the wish list of 97% of all humans. We’d all be emotionally crushed if there was less ice in Iceland. /s
“The origin and cause of the Blue Blob, which is located south of Iceland and Greenland, is still being investigated”
…
“the glaciers could lose a third of their current ice volume by 2100 and be gone by 2300.“
So, they,re ok predicting out to 2300 but couldn’t predict and don’t know he origins of the current “Blue Blob”. Hmmmm
They are ice dancing with terms on thin agenda ice.
The don’t know the origin and cause, but they do know that it will be gone by 2030.
Whatever happens in 2300 will not be decided by today’s Net Zero fanaticism.
I don’t know how scientists can look at themselves in the mirror after making a prediction for 50+ years into the future when he/she does not know what caused the ‘Blue Blob’ the last 10 years. Shouldn’t the first step be: What caused the ‘Blob’? ie the cause will affect the future!!!!
Bob even worse than the mirror, is the Russians were measuring it, found the cause and reported on it. From 2012
Drastic cooling all over the Northern Hemisphere. The thing is that according to their calculations, “a great salinity anomaly” is coming, which will cause the fall of average temperature and bring about frosty winters in the coming years. The oceanologist and doctor of physical and mathematical sciences Nikolai Diansky has for years compared data about change of salinity of waters of the Arctic regions with weather changes on the planet. He took reference data from his colleagues in every corner of the globe. The scientist’s diagram prove that the global warming leads to massive melting of glaciers and increase in spillover of the Siberian rivers. As a result the Arctic Ocean has collected a lot of fresh water, which is will soon start pouring out through the Canadian and Greenland straits to the Northern Atlantic.This is where Gulf Stream, the main “bed warmer” of Europe flows. Its warm salty water is going to be covered with cold fresh water. Thus, the heat will not be let out and thus the climate in Europe and entire Northern hemisphere is going to cool down.
– See more at: http://russia-ic.com/news/show/13458#.Vo15ZkOBqPw
Something … ” … Could Slow Glacial Melting … ”
That magic trigger word: “could“.
Stopperd reading rifght there.
“The model predicts…” Don’t they all.
Never mind the modern climate astrological charts (the bollox) here’s the nub of it – stasis. It’s the climate equivalent of Ursa Minor Beta, where it’s always Saturday afternoon, just right before the beach bars close. (Lookout Zaphod)
“The Arctic is warming fast. If we wish to see glaciers in Iceland, then we have to curb the warming.”
Did the Vikings wish to abandon Greenland in the 15th century? Probably not.
“Could”, “may”. Didn’t read any further.
From the article: “Nowhere on Earth has warmed as quickly as the Arctic. Recent studies report the area is warming four times faster than the global average.”
–
–
–
Now just hold on there a minute. I thought everywhere is warming twice as fast as everywhere else. And now they tell me that there’s a place that’s warming four times faster than the average of everywhere else?
It’s worse than we thought!
However, the joke is on the Russians. They’re spending a bundle on new nuclear ice breakers when they should be building cruise ships to take tourists to see the Arctic palm trees.
Ha
It’s worse than you think. About 15 months ago they said the Arctic was warming twice as fast as anywhere else, 8 months ago it was three times as fast, now it’s four times as fast. HELP!
Russians are not dumb. They offer tourists trips to the North Pole for $18,000 on their ice breakers.
HR – Should you forget – Per NOAA, tracks temperature changes since 1950 at seven Arctic city weather stations for winter (December-January) and spring (April).1
Area north of the Arctic Circle is about 7,700,000 sq mi, and Seven long term stations.
They get to ‘In-fill’ a lot.
And if the stations are in even small towns like Barrow, AK they can have Heat Island effects.
Based on spatial averages for the period 1 December 2001 to 31 March 2002, the urban area is 2.2 °C warmer than the rural area.
In winter, the daily UHIM (1Td, u−r) increases with decreasing temperature, reaching a peak value of around 6 °C in January–February. This likely reflects higher energy usage for residential and commercial space heating.
UHI spread all over.
Funnily enough in the Grauniad they’re hyping the South pole warming faster than evah.
“Flourishing plants show warming Antarctica undergoing ‘major change’
Dramatic spread of native plants over past decade is evidence of accelerating shifts in fragile polar ecosystem, study finds
Antarctica’s two native flowering plants are spreading rapidly as temperatures warm
…
The increase in plants since 2009 has been greater than the previous 50 years combined, coinciding with rapidly rising air temperatures and a reduction in the number of fur seals
…
The spread of these species will cause changes in soil acidity, the bacteria and fungi in the soil, and in how organic matter decomposes. Changes in soil chemistry, as well as degradation of permafrost, will cause a cascade of changes, with “consequences on all components of terrestrial ecosystems”, said Cannone.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/14/flourishing-plants-show-warming-antarctica-undergoing-major-change-aoe
An increase in plants is… a catastrophe.
Antarctica isn’t warming
After a record cold winter only the delusional would believe otherwise.
And according to the Guardian that never happened.
Agreed, but I wonder where the plants they mentioned were? Let me guess – West Antarctica? Where there are over 100 active volcanoes under the ice?
Signy Island
Half way between South Georgia and Antarctica Well offshore…
60 degrees S. Is that in the Antarctic? Is Shetland in the Arctic?
Signy Island is tiny. I strongly doubt that the summer temperature there has risen – it must be entirely dependent on the surrounding ocean temperature. The winter temperature might have done, if it is less icebound than 40 years ago.
“coinciding with rapidly rising air temperatures and a reduction in fur seals”
That’s funny because according to the Australian Antarctic Program the conservation status of fur seals is ” least concern”
https://www.antarctica.gov.au/about-antarctica/animals/seals/antarctic-fur-seals.
And the previous melting was presumably caused by a red blob of warm water. All natural
Some increase in flow of surface warmer water to Antarctica is happening but is not what it might seem. It is drawn toward Antarctica in response to increasing downwelling and formation of deep cold water at the margin of Antarctica, from whence it descends via canyons to the ocean floor and moves north to join the global ocean circulation system. It’s about cooling, not warming.
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2020/09/12/widespread-signals-of-southern-hemisphere-ocean-cooling-as-well-as-the-amoc/
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2022/01/13/antarctic-formation-of-cold-saline-deep-water-is-accelerating/
This is where the term climate communications expert comes from.
Mighty darn convenient this “ blue blob “, one wonders if this is the Global Elites hidey hole and they’re all going there as their COVID/ Great Reset dryads unravel ?
one can always hope.
Every forecast of catastrophe is for 30-years away. Panic now and forget the failed forecast in 30 years.
Yeah, this is the era of instant gratification, Dan.
“Your 30-year out panic will be delivered to your door tomorrow, between 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm.”
Oh goody….
Science is only science when the scientists are sufficiently diverse and inclusive.
/s
Do the models involve examining the entrails of a sheep?
That would seem to have the same rigor.
Dear AGU,
Please get back to me when you can re-issue the above PR fluff piece without using the words “could”, “may”, and “has likely” and without using the phrases “the new study uses climate models” and “the authors estimate”.
Using such terminology makes a farce of lead author and climate modeler Brice Noël’s claim, as quoted in the above article, that “In the end, the message is still clear.”
When the message is as wishy-washy as that given in the PR above, it definitely is not clear; rather, it deserves to be categorized as speculative.
And, BTW, your peer-review process needs some work.
Hmm…It just happens to coincide with the expected Grand Solar Minimum through 2050.
They need to talk to older people in Iceland. My Icelandic friends father, who is in his eighties, can walk you to the tongues of numerous glaciers and point out where the tongue was in the past. Most glaciers have been expanding over the last thirty years.
Dont be silly, wherever your friends father has walked is only a local exception, he cant possibly know the icelandic average, like wot they do…
“Chilly seawater may slow ice loss on the island until 2050, then warming and melting may accelerate” and I may be hit by a bus here in the marina but I don’t think so.
So earlier climate models were wrong – lacking the required detail.
Now the climate model has finer detail it is right.
There is a virtuous circle (maybe viscous circle) here where governments and climate prognosticators play a game with public funds. The government pays the prognosticators to come up with alarming reports based on their latest modelling; the government echo the most alarming of the report and feed it to a woke press who alarm the wider public in order to justify the government sequestering tax dollars into their favoured climate fixing scheme.
No wonder Trump was viewed as the enemy – he did not want to participate in this virtuous circle.
Presumably a viscous circle is made up of very thick people?
If their models failed to predict the “Blue Blob” so – as always – we’re only hearing about it after the fact, then how do they think their models predict its demise?
Or as Anton Chigur once put it,
“If the rule you followed brought you to this – of what use was the rule?”
https://youtu.be/p93w7MpbZRw
The warming, it is like a ninja, always hiding and then attacking when you do not expect it.
Stymie ice loss until 2050? They mean global warming ain’t happening?
Sure don’t hear National Snow and Ice Data Center speaking so honestly.
Just in case, I visited https://nsidc.org/ and searched.
NSIDC links to an Arctic Sea Ice Extent graph; https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
A graph that lacks historical observations.
On their “news” page they listed this:
Now that sea ice extent is increasing, NSIDC is moving the goal posts and basically minimizing winter sea ice levels.
Again, no global warming to see here! /s
I’m still not sure what the fuss is about.
From the article: Recent studies report the area is warming four times faster than the global average. Iceland’s glaciers steadily shrank from 1995 to 2010, losing an average of 11 gigatons of ice per year. Starting in 2011, however, the speed of Iceland’s melting slowed, resulting in about half as much ice loss, or about 5 gigatons annually. This trend was not seen in nearby, larger glaciers across Greenland and Svalbard. – article
There is plenty of evidence, including what is appearing nowadays, that at some time in the distant past, Greenland was green, grew grasses and trees, and was part of a warm and toasty planet. What’s the problem there? At some point in the distant past, the entire British Isles were full of volcanoes spitting up lava into an active ocean, which produced some incredibly beautiful formations of six-sided columns, meaning that the lava cooled under water. There are places like this in Romania, too, and I’m guessing that the likelihood of these formations can be found in many places if we just look. Just as deserts take over a green and growing continent (northenr Africa and the Saudi peninsula) and turn them into what seem like wastelands, the cycles of weather that cause such things constantly change. Black Rock Mesa in the USA west is like that, as is what is politely called the Salton Sea.
And so what? It’s part of what the planet does, isn’t it? It is completely out of our control, period. If these people had the common sense to admit that they can’t control anything the planet does, I might pay attention, but this is just a scramble after cash grants and nothing else.
I don’t get the scramble to make a prediction about something that these prognosticators will never see, but I would really like to live long enough to find that they are not very good at forecasting anything. For quite a while, I really did think this was about making forecasts, but it isn’t: it’s nothing but a scramble for cash.
I have seldom been so disappointed.
So, it’s a lot less worse than we thought now, but later it’s going to be a lot worse than we thought.
How many of these folks are going to be around in 2050 to see if there predictions (ooops, projections) turn out to be true?