Record Ice Loss in Arctic 2008

Fiddlerdave · Heavy Crude Joined: Mar 18, 2007 Posts: 276

Man! Those pictures and reports of melting ice made me a little worried, but the comforting scientific and unbiased "words of reason" from the WSJ and the Cato Institute have restored my sense of calm. Whatever is happening in the world, buring a cubic mile of oil per year along with country-sized swaths of forests obviously can't have anything to do with it!

Why do these tree-huggers have to be so hysterical about ice? I have plenty in my walk-in freezer! If there is no winter sometime, I'll just leave the door to it open for a while to restore the natural balance!

dorlomin · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Aug 05, 2007 Posts: 1062

skeptik

dorlomin · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Aug 05, 2007 Posts: 1062

GregWatson · Heavy Crude Joined: Jun 07, 2008 Posts: 129

GregWatson · Heavy Crude Joined: Jun 07, 2008 Posts: 129

Here are real US Navy images of the tri surfacing event. They seem to have found a small hole in the ice which allowed them to surface. However the pole is no way ice free as the photos clearly show. Also the ice in 1987 was much thicker than it is currently.

http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/08676.htm

Greg

skeptik

GregWatson · Heavy Crude Joined: Jun 07, 2008 Posts: 129

Hi Skeptik,

You will notice they surfaced in a hole in the ice and that the North pole is no way "Ice Free" as is predicted to happen this year.

Additionally the recorded data shows how the ice mass of the ice cap is shrinking. So three points:

1) Total mass and average depth of the North polar ice cap ice is decreasing

2) Total Arctic Ocean area with NO ICE is increasing.

3) These are measured results and not some theory.

Greg

xironman · Tar Sands Joined: Mar 13, 2007 Posts: 36

I guess I am missing the point on the picture of the sub. We all know that there are cracks and pools in the ice cap all the time, we are discussing vast amounts of open water here. It would be like someone showing me a picture of a few wells in Cantarell producing, and from that I am to believe the whole field is ok. I don't think anyone here is that stupid, but I am sure there are plenty of sites on the internet where people are that stupid.

Smudger

its just a photo chaps....

its i). interesting, ii). reminds us that saying no ice at the north pole rather than no ice in the arctic could get us glib responses; and iii). reminds us not to grab one set of results that could prove our case but rather wait for a build up of data.

the photo certainly doesn't put even a scratch in any human global warming theory/fact and as such we should be pretty relaxed about it and indeed thank the poster for effectively reminding us of the three points above.

xironman · Tar Sands Joined: Mar 13, 2007 Posts: 36

Sorry Smudger,

If someone posts BS it needs to have BS called on it. The modus operandi of the denialist is to confuse and change the discussion since they can't win a factual argument.

GregWatson · Heavy Crude Joined: Jun 07, 2008 Posts: 129

Here is a new blinker

http://www.greenandgoldenergy.com.au/images/noaa1_20080706_2117.gif

showing interesting differences at the North polar weather station, with the web cam, over the period 01 July and 06 July. What I see is:

1) The features on the horizon change quite a lot. I assume this means the sea ice around the weather station is breaking up into smaller sections and the changing background shows the station is changing position relative to other adjacent sea ice floes.

2) The melt pool seem to be getting deeper. This is interesting as I see that when a melting surface water pool melts the ice at the bottom of the pool, the water level in the melt pool should drop as the bottom melted ice (now water) occupies less space than the frozen ice. Thus the melt pools are melting their way downward and eventually will cause the ice floe that the weather station is sitting on to break-up.

If you watch the video of web cam #1

http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/np2008/cam1-2008web.mov

you will see the horizon feature line did not change. That is after they moved the cam to the current position (last 15% of the video). So the break-up of the web cam sea ice floe is recent.

Comments on the above most welcome.

Greg

GregWatson · Heavy Crude Joined: Jun 07, 2008 Posts: 129

Flushing of multi-year sea ice from the Arctic basin

http://www.homerdixon.com/download/arctic_flushing.html

This amazing video shows the dynamics of the North polar ice cap movement. Note the North pole ends up covered with first year ice as the older multi year ice, which was at the North pole during the 2007 record melt, moves toward the Atlantic. The video of this year in full will be interesting to watch.

Greg

GregWatson · Heavy Crude Joined: Jun 07, 2008 Posts: 129

North polar web cam is a long way from the North pole

http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/images/weatherdata/2008/pos_2008.gif

As of 27 June 2008 the web cam weather station had drifted to about 84.9 N latitude and 0 longitude. It is now probably further south than that fix.

From the melt video above, the web cam weather station seems to have been built on relatively thick multi year ice and thus may not melt until it is flushed out into the warmer North Atlantic waters.

Greg

sjn · Last edited by sjn on Mon Jul 07, 2008 5:29 am; edited 1 time in total