1611 replies to this topic

[Gray-Wolf]

We've been shedding 0.1 million sq km a day for some time now 4wd , why will this slow over the next 6 weeks of high summer? that's 1 million every 10 days and a finish in mid Sept. Things will get faster then slower (not that much slower if the perennial collapse cannot occur this year to bolster 'extent' in late Aug/Early Sept) so 0.1 per day seems fair. Where does that take us over the next 60 days, or so, 4wd? Do the math (V.P. will be proud of you!) and tell us what you make it.

Edited by Gray-Wolf, 29 June 2010 - 14:42 .

[Gray-Wolf]

The north pole cam now shows the melt ponds draining so the ice there cannot be very thick or an old lead has now re-opened and is allowing the water to drain off.

[4wd]

It seemed to freeze over again yesterday.
http://www.arctic.no...0629-194539.jpg
Has there been a little fresh snow too?

[Gray-Wolf]

4wd, on 30 June 2010 - 19:51 , said:

It seemed to freeze over again yesterday.
http://www.arctic.no...0629-194539.jpg
Has there been a little fresh snow too?

Each cam has an attached weather station and it looks toasty up there right now (for the pole....or 2 degrees south of it now....Boy those Buoys move!!) with -0.3c the coldest they seem to have mustered over the period. We will see over the next few days whether the ice has given way (draining the pools) but it's worth watching that big yellow buoy as it was rather drunk on Sunday and it seems to have sobered up today........it may be totally afloat tomorrow!

[Gray-Wolf]

This may sound odd but I'm now becoming concerned at the number of papers/science blogs that are echoing my concerns of the past 4 years.

The latest is the lack of ice to the north of Greenland/Canadian Archipelago and it's effect on the Arctic Basin ice. Once upon a time this area caused a log jam of ice (driven by both the Arctic Gyre and the Transarctic current) giving the perfect environment for ice to be compressed /ride over ice to build the 'old perennial'. this year there is so little ice that all is occuring is increased fragmentation of the ice as it bumps into itself.

We've now moved from having an Arctic ice 'condenser' into an Arctic ice 'grinder'.

I really do think that this is the swan song of the Old Arctic.

[badboy657]

4wd, on 30 June 2010 - 19:51 , said:

It seemed to freeze over again yesterday.
http://www.arctic.no...0629-194539.jpg
Has there been a little fresh snow too?

yep i noticed on the watts up with that site,
there has been a lil upturn easy to scream doom but not easy to predict what will happen next.

Edited by badboy657, 01 July 2010 - 16:57 .

[Gray-Wolf]

Everythings alright then B.B.?

Though June saw the records tumbling this is July (the main melt month) so everything is OK.

Remember 15% ice cover is not solid ice so we can have 5/6ths of the ice melt and it not show on the extent (which is what it continues to do) . Once we get down to very thin ice then you will see it plainly on the sat images, at the moment all you see is ever more fragmented pack and growing meltwater pools.

Far more exciting watching the NW Passage (deep channel) open up over 6 weeks earlier than it did in 07'!!!!

[4wd]

Just as 2006 and 2007 lines crossed paths but then had very different outcomes, you really can't predict half as easily as some think.
There's a certain amount of ice will melt quite easily and then it gets slower.
Some years it can start to cool significantly by August - it's mainly down to localised weather and not much to do with climate at all.

[Gray-Wolf]

4wd. Have we been loosing ice volume over the past 100yrs or so?

If so when do you figure the loss gets to critical levels?

We have less ice in the Arctic basin today than we have ever measured before. So little that IceArches/ice bridges no longer form to block the ice from bleeding out into the Atlantic and so little ice around the north of Greenland/Canadian Archipelago that the ice 'thickening' process is not occuring this year.

With even less ice will things become better or worse 4wd???

Do you think that the ice volume measure will be up or down on previous years come sept (and not 'extent' which can vary even with the same amount of ice volume year to year) and if you accept the continued downward trend how do you see a B.A.U. Arctic when it is already so broken now?

Edited by Gray-Wolf, 01 July 2010 - 19:24 .

[4wd]

Why should there be a "critical level"?
The slow decline has been going on (up and down) for decades as you point out every day.

[sunny starry skies]

Sadly 4wd it is down to climate - rather odd, isn't it that higher Arctic temperatures have corresponded to a thinning then loss of Arctic ice. There was a paper recently that attributed some of the 2007 loss to weather, but certainly not all (despite the misrepresentation of the usual websites). If it were purely down to weather then such great thinnings and losses would have been observed before - they haven't. You're right though that weather plays its part from year to year, and that 2007 would not have been quite as bad given differnt weather. But the pack this year has less volume and is weaker than in 2007, and so we'd better hope conditions are not conducive to collapse. I'm encouraged that the rapid melting rate in June has slowed over the last two days, although June still melted ice 17% faster than in 2007. We need to hope that we have a slower-than-average melt in July, just to keep the graph from tracing the 2007 curve.

EDIT: critical level 4wd - maybe when the ice gets so thin it can simply melt out? Do you think the ice on a pond ever reaches a critical level, so far as area of pond covered is concerned? Start with 6" ice evenly spread, and melt approximately 1" per day. Which day loses most area? Is it a'critical level? In the Arctic this is a large shiny white thing that will turn dark blue and absorb more heat for increasing parts of the summer when we hit that 'critical level'.

I've made two videos of the Nares strait from MODIS data, inspired by Neven's Arctic page (http://neven1.typepad.com/). One is June 2009, the other is June 2010:

 nares2009_june.wmv   873.26K   10 downloads
Nares Strait, June 2009

 nares2010_june.wmv   1.19MB   7 downloads
Nares Strait, June 2010

2009's cloudier than 2010, but you can see the intact ice bridge, with little happening down the Nares Strait (top left). Much of the ice is pretty solid, but there's a general flow towards the Fram Strait on the right-hand side as you'd expect.

2010 shows a completely different picture. The ice is visibly more fragmented and weaker, and looks distinctly susceptible to changing winds. Ice is pouring freely out of the Nares Strait like sand through an hourglass, draining this part of the Arctic of its supposedly thicker older floes. The fragmented ice makes its way (out of shot) to the warmer water of Baffin Bay, where it's doomed to melt.

I think these videos show the altered nature of the pack from last year to this year, and how it is much more susceptible to melting and out-of-basin losses than last year.
sss

Edited by sunny starry skies, 01 July 2010 - 19:56 .

[badboy657]

4wd, on 01 July 2010 - 19:42 , said:

Why should there be a "critical level"?
The slow decline has been going on (up and down) for decades as you point out every day.

no not decades for most of earth history.
and your correct in saying that every year is different of coarse different weather patterns and teleconnections dont cause more melt than others lol.
oh please gw lets not panic and critical level has anybody on earth in our life time ever experienced a critical level?
and could the arctic bounce back from a critical level?
my answer would be yes its happened before.

Edited by badboy657, 01 July 2010 - 20:01 .

[sunny starry skies]

badboy657, on 01 July 2010 - 19:57 , said:

no not decades for most of earth history.
and your correct in saying that every year is different of coarse different weather patterns and teleconnections dont cause more melt than others lol.
oh please gw lets not panic and critical level has anybody on earth in our life time ever experienced a critical level?
and could the arctic bounce back from a critical level?
my answer would be yes its happened before.

In Arctic sea ice, no they haven't, and that's the point!

Some interesting (as always) analysis from Tamino of data going back to 1970s, and a linked paper with data there back to the 1950s:
http://tamino.wordpr...-ice/#more-2908

Seeing as people spent 400 years searching for the Northwest Passage and prior to the mid-20th Century traversing it required a winter-stopover in the ice, yet in 2007 and 2008 it was essentially ice-free (navigable with no icebreaker), and 2007 saw the very first single-seaon traverse without an engine (wiki source), it''s utterly implausible that these conditions have existing during the phase of human exploration of the Arctic.

A really interesting bit of data analysis from (shock horror) WUWT.... ah, but it's from a commenter, not a poster, called Curious Yellow (comment at: July 1st, 2010 at 5:54am), which I randomly stumbled upon from a bust link - I certainly didn't read all the comments! It's from Goddard's 11th attempt at Arctic sea ice news, which are, as ever entertainingly incorrect.

Curious Yellow's comment:
"Lets have a simple pragmatic look at the situation;
For the period 2003 to 2009 the acerage daily melt from 1 July to the minimum of each year is 98,142 KM2 per day. The average end of melt date over the same period is 16 September (lowest 9 and highest 24) From 1 July to 16 September there are 47 melt days. If I use the average melt 2003-2009 of 98,142 times 47 days, then another 4.61 million KM2 will melt. Depending on the actual number for 30 June, I assume a starting point for 1 July 2010 to be near 8.80 million KM2. Deduct the average melt of 4.61 million KM2 and the result will be 4.19 million KM2, beating the 2007 record.
Hence, in order not to beat the 2007 record there would have to be unusual changes, such as; (1) an unusually early end to the melt period, (2) a daily melt well below average due to weather, or both. Keep in mind that only two melts were below average, 2006 at 75,000 KM2/day and 2003 at 80,400 KM2/day versus a 137,000 KM2/day melt in 2008 and another 3 years 2004/2005/2009 melted just over 100,000 KM2/day." [end of quote]

Let's all hope for a below-average melt from now on, and that's just to stop us matching 2007...
sss

Edited by sunny starry skies, 01 July 2010 - 21:05 .

[Gray-Wolf]

Thanks for the Nares vid's SSS! truely worrying to see ice move so freely with no floes strong enough to staunch the flow. If you want to catch the latest 'flimbsy ice' action then check out the NW Passage and all the tributaries that feed it as it flows out into Baffin too!

This area once held the toughest ,thickest old perennial but 4 years of extraordinary melt seems to have done away with this. The increased flow through Bering from the Pacific (highest ever rates last year) have a current that flows into Baffin via the NWP so the ice is not only being wind blown but also has a current to float on.


Seeing as Hudson is already near ice free (check that out for 'ahead of times'!!) there is only the ice from Nares and NW passage in there now so none of it lasts long.

If you look again at SSS 2010 vid the ice moveing into the straights is the same as the ice all along the north coast of Greenland but it is so feeble that it cannot ruck up on itself or compress itself to itself (as it used to to thicken/strengthen the pack) it is just flowing out of Fram and Nares like.......well, sand in an hour glass

Edited by Gray-Wolf, 01 July 2010 - 21:13 .

[LomondSnowstorm]

As a sceptic (of all things!) I have to say the downturn in ice extent is pretty worrying though hardly unexpected. Is it conclusive evidence of significant AGW? No. However, I'm beginning to think that perhaps the ice shelf is undergoing changes which are not explained mostly by natural forcing.......
Of course Southern Hemisphere ice extent is above average I believe (though i'm too tired to search for the charts showing this at the moment!) so in terms of overall ice extent it is maybe close to the average. That does give me some level of hope, but the situation looks pretty grim for the Arctic at least.

[Gray-Wolf]

Hi L.s.s!

I too am sceptical of most things/'claims' but this appears to go with an enquiring mind. That said I've read enough/asked enough 'experts'/seen enough to know (good enough to satisfy my mind) that we are well beyond any 'natural' variation in sea ice levels across the pole and we are warming the lands around the ocean as a result.

Had this been a 'normal' natural event then we would have records of frequent melts within the permafrosts across Canada/ Russia (evidence of bacterial/microbial activity) but we do not see this at all. What we see is the increase in melt of the permafrosts, and the associated decay, but when we take cores we find this to be a 'novel' event.

From what I have seen, heard, read the ice probably went below a critical mass in the early 90's (after over half a century of slow ice losses) and this helped accelerate the loss of ice volume through the noughties.

We are now at the 'tail end' of this period and will soon find a relatively ice free Arctic ocean over the coming Aug/sept's from now on with some years breaking the sub 1 million km2 'seasonal ice' threshold.

Over the next few days the last ice plug blocking the NW Passage will shatter and fragment so by late July even 'normal shipping' will be free to use the channel. We spent over 400 yrs looking for the fabled NW Passage and now we have 2 out of 4 yrs with so little ice that we could sail super tankers through it (and not spend over a year ,with a winter lay up, doing what will now take 4 days to do!!!!)

We all respect one another's rights to hold opinions but it doesn't make those opinions right!

[4wd]

First signs of 'Autumn' cooling with -10C reappearing on the forecast chart by 17th July.

[Gray-Wolf]

So this is how you understand things 4wd?

2m air temps rule where ice loss is concerned?

I would point you to all of the studies on Arctic ice loss as each of them accept that water temp is key in melting and does the job over 300 times better than air temps alone.

I can now see why you have such faith in ice recovery but would advise you go back over your notes, on the ways the arctic dynamic runs, before you run the real risk of discrediting your future inputs on the subject.

I'm sorry if I appear terse but surely you can (with the help of a little 'Wikki' brush up knowledge) understand how daft your previous post was?

How are the winds impacted by that forecast?(EDIT , I'd not looked at where your 'autumn' was to be seen!)

D'ya know I hadn't truely looked at your 'data' but now I do it appears even more ludicrous. You expect the highest point of an Ice Sheet to keep positive temps over summer? Is it not exceptional the amount of positive temps we have seen (over the past number of years) across the top of Greenland???? Is this not why we see mass loss from every quarter of that ice sheet????

Sorry my friend but you're just being daft to provoke folk into some wayward discussion about nothings whilst the Arctic goes to Hell in a handcart........not very astute now is it?

Edited by Gray-Wolf, 03 July 2010 - 21:35 .

[4wd]

No need for a further epic, it is worth noting that the period of strongest sun is soon waning.
I think this thread does not require a lengthy lecture every time a more positive post is made.

[Gray-Wolf]

4wd, on 03 July 2010 - 21:43 , said:

No need for a further epic, it is worth noting that the period of strongest sun is soon waning.
I think this thread does not require a lengthy lecture every time a more positive post is made.

Environmental lag.

I think you'll find that temps lag max day length by about 3 weeks?

As for water ? , well I don't know but imagine this lags the 'lag' (hence the most rapid ice melt being July/early Aug)

None of this is about positive or negative posts but a real concern for the reality in the Arctic right now. This is not a subject you can 'dip into' each summer, it dictates a long period of study of both the data and personal observation. I'm am stunned by how many of the blogs, from scientist in the field, are currently shadowing the fears I have posted over the years. Though shocked it does reassure me that I am not some lone doom monger peddling an unfeasible future.

As it is ,as it ever is ,time will tell all and maybe 'forecasting' is just a prelude to swaggering about latter if you do have it nailed today?

Edited by Gray-Wolf, 03 July 2010 - 21:56 .