A new toy for the Arctic tourist and a very scary thought
From athopolis an Arctic map that provides weather reports when you click on the stations (you have to click on the link, not the map, to access the weather stations.
The scary thought is that if you look at the ice maps NOT only are the Northwest passage and the passage near the Siberian coast open but the ice in a narrow band on the north shore of Greenland is opening and it is NOT impossible that the globe could be circumnavigated at latitudes higher 70 well inside the Arctic circle.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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20 comments:
I’ve got two colleagues that just passed the most northern part of Russia without any bigger problems... they do have help from ice breakers though...
http://www.nrm.se/frontpage/researchandcollections/geology/laboratoryforisotopegeology/researchprojects/isss2008.5845_en.html
http://isss08.wordpress.com/2008/08/22/passing-the-northernmost-tip-of-eurasia/
http://eng.expert.ru/news/2008/08/27/atomflot/
So what? Now the fuel consumption required to transport goods by sea between east and west will radically drop, thus sending less carbon into the atmosphere. Maybe Siberia will warm up some too, and they'll consume fewer megatons of fossil fuels keeping that god-forsaken place habitable.
Scary thoughts are all the faith warmers can offer, hey Rabett. A week or so back, it was the end of the Antarctic,a couple of months back it was the tissue thin Arctic ice would be all gone.
Old Gia, she just doesn't read the correct warmers script, does she Rabett.
JohnS
There's no melting, and in any case melting is good! Oh, and it's caused by the sun.
I'm so disappointed with you John S. You used to be truly hilarious. Were you wits stuck in the single year ice and melted away with it? Come on, snap out of it, we need some laughs, talking about sea ice is getting to be like talking about a dead person, cheer us up.
Quite an ice "recovery" from this time last year, eh John S?
It's already at the second lowest coverage on record and the summer melt season is not over yet.
But regardless of whether it surpasses last year's record low, you do realize that more ice has already melted this summer than melted last summer, right?
There is an irony here, of course. It is your alleged "recovery" (last winter) that has set things up for the huge melt this summer.
Much of the ice that melted was new (thin) ice. Imagine that. Just what people here were saying last winter in response to your "recovery" nonsense.
no body ignores the expected carbon contribution from the warming permafrost...
Just what people here were saying last winter in response to your "recovery" nonsense.
Hey now. If they can't grasp at straw, what are they going to grasp? Facts? The facts don't line up with their ideology, so give them a break, eh?
Best,
D
bi, ...and Al Gore remains fat.
:wq
Dr. Rabett,
I'd like to use your advice for incoming students for my freshman Biodiversity class at UMass, Amherst. Can I cut and paste it into my course website? I'll give you full credit and introduce your website to 240 bushy-eared freshpersons.
Thanks, Peter Houlihan
Prof. Houlihan, please feel free, and I would recommend incorporating some of the comments.
And apparently they found more methane released from the bottom then they thought they would.... no report in English yet though... try to learn some Swedish ;)
http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=597&a=822169
Gareth saw this and found an English translation. Eli OTOP can read Swedish badly by pretending it is bad German with funny symbols, and by doing so get it wrong. Google is odd sounding, but looks about right.
Eli can hear the cries of VOLCANO, VOLCANO rising from the shores of Lake Denial. If it's volcanoes, where is the SOx? Bag that.
(Hint, if you can read a language and have to translate something, run it through one of the on line translators, and then correct it by reading the original and the translation in parallel. It goes much faster)
Teh Google:
-- The lid of perpetual frost has had small holes in itself. We have found increased levels of methane out of the water and even more in the water just below. It is quite clear that the source is the bottom of the sea, "says Örjan Gustafsson in a satphones to DN.
He is a chemist at the University of Stockholm and the Swedish leader of the expedition International Siberian Shelf Study, ISSS08, the vessel "Smirnitskyi." It is now at eastern Siberia's north coast after just over two weeks' journey from the Norwegian Kirkenes.
The purpose of the expedition is to explore the extent to which greenhouse gas methane avsöndras from Siberia frozen tundra and from the sediments along the coast.
Siberia contains a very large proportion of the world's coal. There are, including in the form of methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas - more than twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide. So far, Siberia methane remained infruset in permafrost and in the cold coastal waters of several thousand years.
But a climate of the worst fears is that the methane to thaw when the earth is getting warmer. The warming strikes very uneven, and it is most dramatically, just in this part of the world. The average increase for all the earth is less than a degree in the last hundred years, but in Siberia's temperature has increased by about four degrees.
The Russian head of expedition ISSS08 is Igor Semiletov. He is linked to both the Russian Academy of Sciences and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks in the United States. Semiletov has carried out expeditions in the area almost every summer since the mid-1990s.
Since 2003, he has registered elevated levels of methane in a growing number of places. But his performance has not received a major international impact, as it has been about individual measurements of a single research group. They are not, for example, in the latest compilation by the UN Climate Change IPCC.
Now, the Swedish group, with much better equipment, confirm that Semiletovs observations really show a trend.
-- This expedition is the best equipped ever has been in the area. We have many advanced instruments to measure in air, water and seabed, "says Örjan Gustafsson.
This year's Swedish-Russian expedition has found three new areas in western and eastern Laptev Sea where the concentration of methane is clearly increased, both in water and in the air. In addition, the scientists could measure up significantly elevated in the vicinity of Lenaflodens outflow, which Semiletov past have made similar observations.
The Swede is impressed :)
Dano: "If they can't grasp at straw, what are they going to grasp? Facts? The facts don't line up with their ideology, so give them a break, eh?"
I think the primary problem in this case is that the facts don't line up with the straws.
If they did, there would at least be some chance that these folks would grasp a fact now and again -- in the process of grasping straws (which they actually seem to be quite good at).
Just another data point:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Arctic-Ice-Shelf.html
Ice area is a hair's breadth from setting a new record low.
It will almost certainly happen some time this week.
looks like all those ice scientists who were talking about how thin ice is more likely to melt actually knew what they were talking about, unlike John S and the other denialist quacks who post here.
Ice are is now within just 50,000 square km (about 1.6%) of last year's record low. ( a single pixel on the image!)
I wonder the error bar is on this measurement.
Oil and gas exploration puts a huge amount of pressure on an extremely stressed ecosystem. The Arctic is like a canary in a coal mine: we see the effects of global warming there earlier than anywhere else.
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