Oceanography

Arctic Ice July 2011- Update

Arctic Ice July 2011- Update Are we headed for another 2007 style crash? In my Arctic Ice March 2011- Update #1,  I gave these figures for September minimum- an extent below 4 million km 2 is highly probable. an extent below 3 million km 2 is entirely pos ...

Article - Patrick Lockerby - Jul 22 2011 - 6:51pm

Arctic Ice August 2011

Arctic Ice August 2011 In the days of sailing ships and the early days of steam, even into the early years of the 20th century, much of the Arctic remained inaccessible due to the extensive pack ice. When explorers attempted to penetrate the ice, it is of ...

Article - Patrick Lockerby - Aug 4 2011 - 1:21am

Arctic Ocean Ice: During The Recent Holocene Climate Optimum, It Was Half What It Is Today

If you are worried about big changes in Arctic sea ice, you are not alone- but it is hard to know how much is worth worrying about.  If you are worried, there is some slightly good news- even if we lose half, it will not be a 'point of no return' ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 4 2011 - 2:09pm

Arctic Ice September 2011

Arctic Ice September 2011 My March 2011 forecasts were quite wide of the mark.  For the first part of the Arctic summer much of the western Arctic saw lower than expected temperatures.  Despite the low temperature start-off, the Arctic is about to see eit ...

Article - Patrick Lockerby - Sep 2 2011 - 12:06pm

Arctic Ice October 2011

Arctic Ice October 2011 Ice extent, as measured down to 15% concentration, was only slightly above 2007 levels at the end of this year's melt season.  The ice is now about as thin as in 2007, or thinner, and the age of remaining ice continues to decl ...

Article - Patrick Lockerby - Nov 5 2011 - 10:05am

Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier Loss May Speed Up

An underwater ridge may be the only thing holding back the retreat of Antarctica's fast-flowing Thwaites Glacier, which drains into west Antarctica's Amundsen Sea, and it could speed up within 20 years, says a new study in Geophysical Research L ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 28 2011 - 10:15pm

Forensic Astronomy- Maybe The Moon Sank The Titanic

With the hundredth anniversary of the maiden voyage, and subsequent sinking, of the RMS Titanic (covering April 14th-April 15th, 2012) fast approaching, you probably expect someone in the world of 2012 to implicate global warming. Donald Olson, a physics p ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Mar 7 2012 - 12:24pm

Acidification Acceleration: The 300-Million-Year Upward Curve In Oceans

In the cultural war over climate change, which is mostly about drivers but looks like politics, other aspects of earth science get lost, like that pollution is plain bad.  The oceans may be acidifying faster today than they have in the last 300 million ye ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 8 2012 - 6:01am

Sediment Sleuth Tracks Radioactive Medicine Through Rivers

Christopher Sommerfield, associate professor of oceanography at the University of Delaware, h as found a new way to study local waterways: radioactive iodine.   That's bad, right? Maybe not. Radioactive iodine is used in medical treatments and trace a ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 22 2012 - 4:42pm

Global Warming In 12,000 B.C.

A dramatic sea-level rise occurred at the onset of the first warm period of the last deglaciation, known as the Bølling warming, approximately 14,600 years ago. This event, referred to as Melt-Water Pulse 1A (MWP-1A), corresponds to a rapid collapse of mas ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 6 2012 - 5:00pm