Russian Science Team Finds 0.4C Increase In Arctic Current In Single Day

[hatrack]

"Late last summer, Igor Dmitrenko and a few other scientists returned to Alaska from the top of the world with information about an immense pulse of warm water that had entered the Arctic Ocean. The scientists believe the warm stream of Atlantic water visiting the Arctic might affect the entire planet. Dmitrenko, a Russian oceanographer working in Alaska as a visiting scientist at the University of Alaska's International Arctic Research Center, was aboard a Russian icebreaker in September 2004. One of his tasks was to retrieve information from instruments anchored in the vast Arctic Ocean. The moorings, tethered to a plastic-coated metal line as thin as a pencil, record the temperature of ocean water at different depths as well as the water's salinity and ocean currents.

One of those instruments, located north of the Laptev Sea a few hundred miles off the coast of Siberia and about 150 meters (492 feet) below the ocean surface, recorded a jump in water temperature of 0.4 degrees Celsius on a February day as a column of warm water flooded past the instrument. A rise in water temperature from 0.4 to 0.8 degrees Celsius (32.7 to 33.4 degrees Fahrenheit) is a big change in the stable environment of the Arctic Ocean, said Dmitrenko's colleague, Igor Polyakov, who also works at the International Arctic Research Center in Fairbanks. "It's as if the planet became warmer in a single day," Polyakov said.

Interested in the pulse of warm water, Polyakov contacted oceanographers from around the world to backtrack the water on its path to the high Arctic. Norwegian scientists have moored stations in the Norwegian Sea, and German scientists monitor stations in Fram Strait, between Greenland and Svalbard. Using information from those stations and others, Polyakov and his coworkers found that the warm water passed Norway in 1998 and took about six years to reach the mooring station north of the Laptev Sea. That warmer water now resides in the Arctic Ocean, where it will remain for years caught up in currents that swirl counterclockwise in several giant basins north of the world's landmasses.

The warm, salty Atlantic water lies beneath fresher, colder water that touches sea ice. The ice remains over the North Pole all summer and grows to reach northern coasts in winter. The buffer of colder water insulates the ice, but Polyakov said the persistence of Atlantic water may cause some sea ice to melt."

EDIT

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, 0.4C in a single day is absolutely huge.

http://www.sitnews.us/0605news/061205/061205_ak_science.html

[Roland99]

1. Ok...who peed?

[kedrys]

2. We're doomed

Christ on a bicycle with two flat tires...in ONE DAY? That really doesn't bode well for the Atlantic Conveyor... :scared:

[phantom power]

3. Have you seen this?

The powerful ocean current system, often known as the ocean conveyor, creates a flow of warm surface water towards the North Atlantic, where it is cooled and sinks to start the circulation of cool deep-sea water throughout the world's oceans. As part of this process, large "chimneys" of very cold water spiral to the ocean floor, playing a key role in ocean flows.

But Cambridge University ocean physicist and Polar Ocean Physics Group head Professor Peter Wadhams has released research showing the number of these chimneys has declined from about 12 to two as a result of global warming. Releasing the research to a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna last month, Professor Wadhams said the disappearance of the chimneys, reducing the circulation of the oceans, would cool the climate of Northern Europe as less warm water flowed to the region. Other oceanographers have stressed that Professor Wadhams' findings are only one piece of a complex puzzle."

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=1&ObjectID=10328565

[kedrys]

4. I had not - thanks for the link!

Methinks it's time to send this on to my dad, who drank the koolaid and is convinced that global warming/climate changes are fairy tales.

I like the planet the way it is, dammit! I don't want to live on an ice floe the rest of my life. :grr:

[phantom power]

5. I believe that choice is no longer available to us.

It's no longer about preventing the chaos, the chaos is coming. It's now just a matter of what resources we'll have available to ride it out. In my mind, developing alternatives to coal and oil are now more about having as much energy as possible at our command, in order to salvage as much civilization as we can.

My optimism grows weaker each year. London is burning, and our fearless leaders are still proudly proclaiming that fire is just a theory that requires more study.