Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal

The Eemian was the warm period before the last ice age. Scientists had never recovered ice that old from Greenland until this past July. I was there to witness some real history. (This trace is from an ice core at Vostok, Antarctica. NOAA)

Back in July I spent 9 days and (at that latitude) no nights at the top of the world.

Scientists from over a dozen nations made history by recovering the oldest ice ever obtained from Greenland. Year after year the snow piles up in Greenland, and as it gets buried and compressed it eventually forms a hard clear ice.

That ice is 2 km thick across most of Greenland. It’s one of three icecaps on Earth. The other two are in Antarctica.

Scientists are drilling cores of ice in all of them and are getting a look at out past climate in a resolution thought impossible a few decades ago. They can see year by year for thousands of years into the past!

NEEM folks take 1 night a week off and open the "ice bar".

The North Greenland Eemian Ice Core project (NEEM) was the first to scan the ice core as it came up for a host of scientific measurements. By counting the oxygen atoms in the ice they can derive the temperature of the planet, when that ice was snow falling from the sky. Most oxygen atoms have 16 neutrons but some have  18 neutrons. The ratio of one to the other is a natural thermometer.

This amazing fact was discovered by Willi Dansgaard from Denmark and the Danes have been leaders in climate research ever since.

I was lucky enough to be the guest of Dr. Jim White. He is the Lead U.S. Scientist at NEEM.  In spite of the difficulties in dealing with one of the harshest environments on Earth, it was an amazing adventure.

Now I can share it with you.

A big thank you to Dave Jones at Storm Center Comm. for arranging it and to David Wood the best photojournalist in Alabama for turning my shaky camera work into TV.

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Here are some out takes you may enjoy

Some more from the scientists at NEEM in the next post.

Dan

Me on the ice runway at NEEM in Northern Greenland.

I love ice and snow and I have had a lifetime’s dose of it this year. January saw me set foot at the South Pole and in late July, I found myself at the top of the world. Antarctica was thanks to the National Science Foundation. Greenland was thanks to Dave Jones at Storm Center Communications.

Some of the most critical and urgent science in the world right now is the connected with obtaining ancient cores of ice at the top and bottom of the world. Thanks to Dave (President of Storm Center), I was asked to be part of a three person team that spent 9 days at the NEEM ice core drill site.

We were the guests of lead U.S. scientist James White at the Univ. of Colorado and Danish Scientists J.P.  Steffensen and  Dorthe Dahl-Jensen.

J.P. and Dorthe are the amazing field leaders at NEEM. To Dave, Jim, J.P. and Dorthe, a sincere thank you from the heart for an amazing science adventure.

Now, let me share it with you! Here is part one. Music by Holst courtesy of incompetech.com.

From the National Snow and Ice Data Center

The melt season is just about over North of 60 and the NSIDC announced today that the surface ice  coverage is now the second lowest on record.

Keep in mind that the more important figure to watch is the overall volume of sea ice. Those numbers continue to show a precipitous decline…

Welcome to the new normal…

UPDATE:

The ice drop has accelerated over the past two days. Mark Serreze of the Snow Ice Data Center in Colorado has a quote in the Vancouver Sun that is worth an update to this post:

later,

Dan

Lee Hotz at the South Pole. Dan's photo

My trip to Antarctica last January was an amazing adventure but not just for what I saw and experienced. The people I met and those selected to go like I was made it unforgettable.

One of those people was Lee Hotz of the wall Street Journal. He has been a science journalist for many years. This was not his first trip to the ice, but it would be his first trip the ice core drilling site called WAIS Divide.

Lee is a fountain of knowledge and careful reasoned thought. I always looked for him at meal time, and enjoyed hearing his thoughts on everything from history to science. I am envious beyond any shade of green at his writing ability.

We were both scheduled to go to WAIS Divide after our trip to the Pole but the weather turned bad and it was cancelled. This is not only a common circumstance in Antarctica but an almost expected one. Lee had traveled all the way just for the trip to to WAIS and he stayed on a few days and finally got there.

We Both Lucked Out

I lucked out a few months later by getting to go o the other ice core drill site. This one at the top of the world in Northern Greenland. I spent 9 days there and am busy preparing presentations for TV and the web on what I saw at NEEM.

You can get a good idea of why it’s important from Lee in a recent TED talk at Oxford. I can assure you his deep voice and writing skills will far surpass mine.

Glaciologist Jim White at NEEM in Greenland. He's the director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the Univ. of Colorado.

Data from the Univ. of Illinois shows the NW Passage is now mainly clear of ice.

Meteorologist Jeff Masters has a lot more about it, but the NW Passage is now mainly free of ice and is navigable. You can see a cool 30 day animation of the melt here. It looks like the NE Passage from Europe to Alaska is almost free as well. Masters says this is the 4th consecutive year that the passage has opened. It’s also the 4th time in recorded history.

The sea ice will continue to melt for a couple of more weeks but the big freeze is already starting above 80 degrees. There were already signs of summer’s end when I was in Greenland three weeks ago.

The real story is not so much the amount of ice on the surface but the overall volume of the ice. This too is dropping very rapidly.  Look at the graphic below from the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington.

Dr. Masters has an excellent detailed writeup on this with a commentary that is spot on.

The surface sea ice melt will not reach a new record this year but it will be close.

The great melt off at the top of the World continues.

Predictions made 20 years ago by Hansen and others that climate change would show up first and most strongly in the Arctic have certainly been proven true…