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Here's an interesting page on the people that live there.
http://oldharbortribal.org/ohtc/about-us/about-us.html
Shell drill spill?
It all sounds so simple: Arctic sea ice is retreating, so let's get over there and start some off-shore drilling! Unfortunately the Arctic isn't a friendly place, not to humans and not to oil executives. Commenter Lodger links to this ominous news article about the Kulluk, "a $290 million off...
Strange coincidence, but I was in that area a few years ago. I was part of a delivery crew transporting a boat from San Francisco to Kodiak. On the way we stopped in the town of Old Harbor to drop off a bunch of school supplies for the kids.
Old Harbor is a little village of mostly native Americans. It's just across a narrow channel from Sitkalidak Island. The locals are dependent on fish for subsistence. A few fishing guides are also there, but it is so remote that it doesn't really draw in a lot of tourists. We also saw a large pod of orcas and numerous whales in that region. The people were super friendly. It would be a shame to see that place ruined by a spill.
Shell drill spill?
It all sounds so simple: Arctic sea ice is retreating, so let's get over there and start some off-shore drilling! Unfortunately the Arctic isn't a friendly place, not to humans and not to oil executives. Commenter Lodger links to this ominous news article about the Kulluk, "a $290 million off...
2012 data from Jakobshavn Isbrae show that it has pretty much obliterated all previous speed records. According to the data it was briefly moving at 17000 meters/year in August.
http://congrexprojects.com/docs/12c20_docs2/1-joughinesa.pdf?sfvrsn=2
Per the authors: "Much of the speedup appears to be a response to the terminus reaching the bottom of a large overdeepening, which may mean slower speeds as the glacier continues to retreat."
Though my understanding is that the glacier retreating into the trough would be a very bad thing.
Looking for winter weirdness 4
Here's a small one, related to the previous winter weirdness post. Apparently China is also experiencing a colder winter than usual. Allow me to just copypaste the entire article from China Daily: China's cold winter linked to Arctic sea ice loss The unusually cold winter this year in China m...
We're starting to see the end of the "beer cooler effect".
As long as the cooler still has ice in it, the beer stays cold. Once the last of the ice melts, the beer gets really warm really fast.
As Sea Ice Declines, Winter Shifts in N. Alaska
As winter sets in, the Arctic Ocean freezes up. But because waters near the continental land masses warm up so much during the melting season (see for instance this image from August 11th 2012), they have to give off a lot of heat before they're cold enough to freeze. The waters warm up so muc...
Epsen,
I believe that ice is grounded on the Belgica Bank. That area was just mapped in 2004.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2005GL025131.shtml
Greenland melting breaks record 4 weeks early
There already was a suspicion that this year would become a record year for Greenland ice melt, after all the real-time information we received from Dr. Jason Box with regards to the reflectivity of the Greenland Ice Sheet (see Dark side of Greenland), the extremely high temperatures in much of...
We are witnessing the consequences of failing to act decades ago.
When I was an undergraduate student in the early 1990's anthropogenic global warming was already a recognized fact.
Now what do we do?
Peeking through the clouds 3
Clouds blocking our view of events below make the False-Colour Composite images Environment Canada makes of the LANCE-MODIS satellite images very welcome (for further explanation read the first and second blog posts with the same title), especially after they have been 'declouded' by commenter d...
Here's another one from July 19, 2003.
Perhaps not unusual, but it sure stands out.
http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/docs/rst/Sect14/Norway.jpg
Cyclone warning!
I have postponed this post until I was sure that what follows is going to happen. Remember the term 'flash melting'? That's when from one day to the next large swathes of ice disappear on the University of Bremen sea ice concentration maps. We witnessed one such instance last year when a relativ...
Absolutely crazy looking plankton bloom in the Barents Sea. I thought it was an artifact at first.
Upwelling?
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/imagery/subsets/?subset=Arctic_r02c05.2012218.terra
Cyclone warning!
I have postponed this post until I was sure that what follows is going to happen. Remember the term 'flash melting'? That's when from one day to the next large swathes of ice disappear on the University of Bremen sea ice concentration maps. We witnessed one such instance last year when a relativ...
Well, this melt may prove to be not very exceptional after all. In fact, based on the forecast it may happen again this weekend.
Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Melt
This just in from NASA (hat-tip Apocalypse4Real): Satellites See Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Melt July 24, 2012: For several days this month, Greenland's surface ice cover melted over a larger area than at any time in more than 30 years of satellite observations. Nearly the entire...
The Humboldt Glacier has been a scary looking thing for a long time. But it rests above sea level and does not move very quickly.
The thing I keep trying to emphasize is that past and current behavior of the Greenland Ice is quite meaningless. When the Arctic Sea Ice is gone that place is going to be a completely different world.
Petermann calves again
Petermann Glacier has calved another large ice island, about half the size of the calving of two years ago, which amounts to about two Manhattans. This is what it looks like: This second big calving (spotted this time by Arcticicelost80) is another spectacular event on Greenland this year, fol...
Even if a below sea level bedrock channel into the interior does not exist, that does not mean all is fine and dandy.
A slew of publications just came out in recent days describing ice sheet "saddle collapse" as a mechanism that could explain rapid sea level rise.
My personal opinion is that everything we are currently witnessing is already totally obsolete. When the sea ice goes arctic conditions are going to change very radically. Predictions need to be made with that in mind. Current thinking tries to extrapolate what the greenland ice cap will do with an ice covered arctic sea. Any realistic person knows that the arctic sea ice is now temporary.
Petermann calves again
Petermann Glacier has calved another large ice island, about half the size of the calving of two years ago, which amounts to about two Manhattans. This is what it looks like: This second big calving (spotted this time by Arcticicelost80) is another spectacular event on Greenland this year, fol...
How ironic.
I came to this site to report the calving, but obviously others beat me to it.
My understanding is that Petermann is so little studied that nobody even knows where the sill is, let alone the details of the glacier bedrock.
Petermann calves again
Petermann Glacier has calved another large ice island, about half the size of the calving of two years ago, which amounts to about two Manhattans. This is what it looks like: This second big calving (spotted this time by Arcticicelost80) is another spectacular event on Greenland this year, fol...
This year's Greenland ice melt appears to be blowing all previous records off the hinges.
I don't spend too much time focusing on a single year's Greenland melt. Once the arctic sea ice is gone that pesky "heat of fusion" thing with the ice that keeps temperatures "beer cold" will cease to exist. Then arctic temps will skyrocket, exactly as the Pliocene temperature proxies say that it will with 400ppm of co2.
The wet side of Greenland
When writing The dark side of Greenland, a recent blog post on decreasing reflectivity of the Greenland ice sheet, with images comparing the southwest of Greenland with satellite images from previous years, I of course realized that when that ice sheet becomes less reflective, it will soak up mo...
Unfortunately things in the arctic seem to be changing much more quickly then they can be modeled and predicted.
I cannot imagine anyone in the year 2002 predicting that we would observe the changes that have occurred in the last ten years.
PIOMAS July 2012
Another month has passed and so here is the updated Arctic sea ice volume graph as calculated by the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center: This year's trend line is still tracking below last year's record. In fact, the difference in volume ...
Despite claims that the "best predictor" is the physical climate models, available evidence suggests that the physical models are not accurate.
First, no climate models (to my knowledge) have been able to reproduce the ice loss that has been observed in the last few decades.
Second, no climate models (to my knowledge) have been able to reproduce the conditions of the Pliocene. That is essentially the climate forcing we have in place right now today. The models say ice in the arctic. Paleoclimate data says NOT.
Given that an important criteria for validating a model is that it should be able to reproduce observed data either the data is wrong or the models are wrong. So far the data is winning two points to one.
PIOMAS July 2012
Another month has passed and so here is the updated Arctic sea ice volume graph as calculated by the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center: This year's trend line is still tracking below last year's record. In fact, the difference in volume ...
This is not simply bad.
It really is an unqualified disaster.
PIOMAS July 2012
Another month has passed and so here is the updated Arctic sea ice volume graph as calculated by the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center: This year's trend line is still tracking below last year's record. In fact, the difference in volume ...
Aaron brings up an interesting point that almost never gets mentioned.
Ice does in fact behave like a highly viscous fluid. And as the temperature of ice changes this viscosity can vary by many orders of magnitude.
The dark side of Greenland
Last January Dr. Jason E. Box. research scientist at Byrd Polar Research Center, reported on his Meltfactor blog that the Greenland ice sheet was getting less and less reflective. Albedo, the reflecting power of a surface that is defined as the ratio of reflected radiation, is high when the ice...
Came across this just published paper which concluded that catastrophic collapse of Jakobshavn is not likely.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2011JF002110.shtml
The dark side of Greenland
Last January Dr. Jason E. Box. research scientist at Byrd Polar Research Center, reported on his Meltfactor blog that the Greenland ice sheet was getting less and less reflective. Albedo, the reflecting power of a surface that is defined as the ratio of reflected radiation, is high when the ice...
Yvan,
Luckily the vast vast majority of Greenland is not susceptible to this kind of melting. And until the experts say otherwise it is just speculation.
That said, the amount of glacier retreat in the past year is a newsworthy event in and of itself.
The dark side of Greenland
Last January Dr. Jason E. Box. research scientist at Byrd Polar Research Center, reported on his Meltfactor blog that the Greenland ice sheet was getting less and less reflective. Albedo, the reflecting power of a surface that is defined as the ratio of reflected radiation, is high when the ice...
The thing that stands out to me is that it appears Jakobshavn Isbrae has retreated beyond it's grounding line.
From: http://efdl.cims.nyu.edu/project_oisi/realistic/jakobshavn/environment/glaciology/overview.html
"The JIG flows through a deep channel eroded in the bedrock (see Fig. 4). The channel has a depth of 700 m near the ice front and drops to near 2600 m further inland (Ramamoorthy, 2004)."
And here's a great bed elevation image: https://cms.cresis.ku.edu/sites/default/files/images/Jakobshavn_Bed_Topography.jpg
This link describes the radar technology used to produce that image:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/a-nextgeneration-ice-radar/0
Looks like it's all downhill for dozens of kilometers back from here. I have to believe we'll be seeing a press release in the coming months.
The dark side of Greenland
Last January Dr. Jason E. Box. research scientist at Byrd Polar Research Center, reported on his Meltfactor blog that the Greenland ice sheet was getting less and less reflective. Albedo, the reflecting power of a surface that is defined as the ratio of reflected radiation, is high when the ice...
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