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Polar mission: Ice floes and 'warm' water found in high ArcticA 12,000-mile scientific research cruise that traversed the North Pole and sampled conditions across the Arctic Ocean found some of the thinnest floes yet observed at such high latitudes — offering a unique reality check on the diminished polar pack during one of the most severe seasonal melts on record. “In the central Arctic, the proportion of old, thick sea ice has declined significantly,” according to this report posted last week by the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. “Instead, the ice cover now largely consists of thin, one-year-old floes.” These latest observations from researchers aboard the German icebreaker Polarstern come only a few weeks after U.S. and European scientists declared the summer loss of sea ice put 2011 on par with the previous record minimum extent seen in 2007. Satellite monitoring by the National Snow & Ice Data Center found sea ice cover shrank to the second smallest area yet observed during the age of satellites. But other measurements using rival satellites found the ocean-wide surface footprint of floes did dip into record territory, according to this dispatch by the European Space Agency. Scientists say it’s important not to get hung up on the differences — a reflection of trying to measure conditions across millions of square miles with satellites of slightly different capabilities. Both methods unveiled the same, unrelenting trend of sea ice destruction that has accelerated during the past 10 years. Estimates of the total volume of sea ice — size of the surface footprint plus all the ice hidden beneath the surface — were 66 percent lower than the 30-year average and 75 percent lower than the maximum seen in 1979, according to the September analysis posted by the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington. Now comes the eyewitness measurements taken during the institute’s “TransArc” mission to document changes in water, air and ice across the polar sea. With 150 scientists from six countries, the 387-foot Polarstern spent 16 weeks cruising the Arctic this summer and fall — traveling along a 11,800-nautical-mile-long route from Franz Josef Land to the western Canadian Basin. The vessel drove through floes at the geographic North Pole at exactly 11:42 p.m. ADT on Aug. 21 — its third visit to Earth’s most northern spot. “One of the most important research questions was: Did sea ice melt to a greater extent this summer, making it thinner than in past years?” explained this story about the trip.
More rubbish from the Church of Climatology. Fraudulent liar scientists who want to keep their bohemian lifestyle and grant money by crafting up lies for the oligarchical collectivists who want to bring about a new world order and tax every human for breathing air. The Church of Climatology, despite being totally discredited, caught in lies, and well over half the peer-reviewed published scientists who disagree with the Church of Climatology the political and propaganda war the Church of Climatology rages on. Despite being disproven, caught in fraud, proven to be frauds, liars, political hacks and propagandists, we are still bombarded with half baked lies. In this study, the "researchers" threw out NINTEY FIVE percent of the datapoints to make it look like its a bad ice situation. They cheery pick the outliers and bad data points, average those, and call it AGW. Frauds caught red handed. Wow, the climatologist police come out to SILENCE all OPINIONS which DISSENT. New World Order Police State. Thats what they want, and they want to charge you to BREATHE. They might as well drill some more holes and use some dynamite, that will really help them figure out why the ice is breaking up Clean, high-altitude nukes should be very effective. By properly coordinating sealane traffic with pressure-wave ice breaking detonations, we might even keep the Arctic Ocean open all winter. And warm it a little further, too. Well lets just keep on running a bunch of icebreakers around up there and keep it all in a constant churn, that should really help matters. More crap from the liars at the Church of Climatology. What they did is they go to measure during the warmest possible time, take a TON of measurements and throw out the 95% of the samples that would average to a reasonable or even COLDER than normal summer. These people are proven FRUADS and LIARS doing this scam for grant money and selling out to the NWO globalists bent on charging us all to breathe air. LIARS. "More crap from the liars at the Church of Climatology." There really is a serious "faith" & "belief" thing going on, very widely & prevalently among environmentalists & Co. Fundamentally (e.g., as "Fundamentalists"), they see humans as Evil. Mankind, and Civilization, should be ... well, yeah, 'destroyed'. Anthropogenic Global Warming is just another excuse for them to 'indict' people & modern culture. Especially those at the other end of the political spectrum from themselves. ;-) Yeah ... this is largely a case of the old chicken-and-egg question. 'Whoa! The ice is thin! And allowed the water to warm!' More likely, the water warmed, and thinned the ice. The temperature of the waters entering the Arctic Ocean is obviously going to have a lot to do with the formation, thickness and maintenance of the ice-cover. And the effect will be accentuated, because warmer entering water-masses will more-strongly float on top of the lower, colder water, and thus preferentially warm the ice. The flip-side of that, is that the warming/melting patterns are based on thin thermal reservoirs from which heat can be readily removed by radiation (into the atmosphere & space), conduction (contact with the air), and wind (transporting heat elsewhere), allowing the Arctic airmass to radiate down to lower temps again, more quickly than if the whole ocean had warmed. It's nice to put a ship on the ocean and have a good tour around, but we primarily monitor surface and near-surface parameters of the Arctic by satellite, and less-so, aircraft. Have had the instruments for it, for over half a century. Remote sensing gives us profoundly higher resolution data and drastically improved coverage, over anything a ship can provide. And if we want to get a good 3D picture of the Arctic Ocean, we send a submarine ... which of course we do, several times every year if not continuously ... as do the Russians as well. “Ground truthing” is necessary to maintain calibration. Yes, satellites are critical for the big picture but in themselves aren’t sufficient. This is a huge part of “science” – constantly checking and cross checking. The European Space Agency's Cryosat-2 went up in April of last year, but I’ve yet to see anything more from them since their PR presentation at this year’s Paris Air Show. They wrapped up their 2011 validation mission in May of this year. http://blogs.esa.int/cryosat-ice-blog/arctic-campaign/ The ASMER-E instrument, producing the data for most of the Arctic Ocean ice graphics I’ve been following since the big summer loss of 2007, sent up by NASA in 2002 on the Aqua Satellite, apparently just failed on the 4th of this month. http://wwwghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/AMSR/ |
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