About four kilometres thick? We left it here, near the South Pole somewhere)
or
(An essay on the propagation of climates on small damp planets entirely without using greenhouses, carbon dioxide or guilt trips. This lot is about some of the fine print as to why Al Gore, Dr Tom Foolery, Penny Wong, Kevin the U-boat Captain and Old Oily are in dreamland about climate change being driven by carbon dioxide.. If that sort of thing is not your bag, skip it, so we can still remain friends)
Where have all the snowflakes gone, long time passing/?
Where have all the snowflakes gone, long time ago?
Stop Press; Where is all of Antarctica's Early Pleistocene Ice? All the ice from 800,000 years ago to 1.8 million years ago? It was there and it has bloody vanished. All or almost all of it/ Gone! Maybe 4,000 feet of very good ice. Nicked. .
When the magnetic poles flip, at least the great southern icy-pole, the Antarctic icecap,melts.. It seems. To me anyway, just now. It was either not there at all or not much there, somewhere between 730,0000 and 790,000 years ago, when last the earth's magnetic poles flipped. Estimates for the date of the flip vary a fair bit, partly because they take time, partly because folk do not know exactly and anyway measure different things, But the ice ages started 1.8 million years ago (or 2.5 million years ago, ditto for an explanation) . Whatever, the Case of the Missing Icecap has Scotland Yard utterly baffled. Who stole it? Where is it now that we so desperately need it? Enter Watson and Holmes and their tame puppy here.
In one of his adventures Sherlock Holmes tells Watson that the most curious aspect of the case they are investigating is what the dog did during the night. “But,” objects Watson,“the dog did nothing during the night.” “That was what I found so curious,” Holmes replies. That's from the story Silver Blaze by Arthur Conan Doyle, not from The Hound of the Baskervilles, as almost everyone who has ever heard of the matter thinks. Just thought you might like to know.
Here, one of the most curious aspects of the case is the Early Pleistocene ice of Antarctica. "But," objects Watson, "there is no Early Pleistocene ice in Antarctica." That is what I find so curious.
First I should perhaps describe the disturbed times during which the crime was committed. The great magnetic reversal was when, if you had been around and looking at your compass, in the blink of an eye it would suddenly have swung around and insisted that the north pole was now where you perfectly well knew the south pole had just been. And never mind what you thought of the matter. The blink of a geological eye that is; just a couple of tens of thousands of years. If you had been the skipper of some early Pleistocene Titanic, you would have had just enough time to head south a way, before the ocean filled with rapidly-melting icebergs, jamming up the seaway from horizon to horizon.
Just some minor housekeeping work, before we get to how I know (or to be more truthful, how think I know) all this. The last magnetic flip -, the one 730,000 or maybe 780,000 years ago, presently has the excruciating title of being officially called the "Brunhes-Matuyama Magnetic Reversal," All credit to those two scientific gentlemen, who found it under a rock or something, but that label is too much. I propose here a new and slightly simpler name - Magflip One.
The system will work a bit like dates AD and BC.
Magflip One, 780,000 or whatever years ago, is given primacy because it is the one we talk about most, apart from the next one, and as that has not happened yet, numbering it one does not seem apt. That will be Magflip Zero, which neatly evokes ground zero and scenes of dread. No ice on the ground in Antarctica. Nowhere for emperor penguins to go. Maybe. No ice anywhere else maybe, unless you have your beer fridge on the ground under the house and want to count the watery contents of its freezer. Magflip Two is the one before that, MF Minus One is the one after the one that will bother us ever so slightly next. And so on. It is like a rocket launch, you count down to zero. All the failed magflips, those that got close to the brink but whimped out, can have fractions stuck on, So a flip that occurred three-quarters of the way across the gap between MF2 and MF3, but then flunked it, would be MFP2.75. The "P" is for "partial." OK?
This keyboard tapping, can't call it writing, uses ordinary English where I can remember that language, but do not be fooled. In the remote possibility that fifteen other folk have not said all this before and with far greater clarity and attention to detail, this may be an OSP - an Original Scientific Paper. If I can get the old printer here to work, it will be a paper rather than a series of virtual dots in hyperspace. You saw it first on ABC Pool, part of the thriving ABC Learning network - buy shares now. If someone will just email back and say they have peered at it, I will cheerfully claim it is peer-reviewed paper. That will get right up the noses of the carbmoles.
Now for the technicals.
Folk sometimes go to Antarctica to drill holes in the ice. See, it's best not to say "go down to Antarctica" any more, as we are not quite sure what will be up or down, shortly. Why they do that is a deep mystery but anyway, the Russians, who have now been drilling Antarctic ice for fifty-three years, went to a place called Vostok, and there drilled a very deep hole. That hole helped cause the global panic about the climate changing in public. They measured the oxygen isotope ratios and the methane and the carbon dioxide and then thought they found the trace gas at the end of that list, CO2, had never been as high in the atmosphere over Antarctica as it now is all over the planet. Maybe that guess is rong, for reason I have described somewhere in hyperspace.
Other folk, for curious reasons of their own, had decided that the minor amount of carbon dioxide that humans contribute to the minute amount of carbon dioxide that is in the air, (as opposed to the vast amount that is locked up in rocks and the far smaller but still huge amount hiding in the seas), is changing the earth's climate in dangerous ways. Please put your money into this recycled collection tincan, made entirely from organically grown banana skins and mined by small solar-powered marsupial rodents etc. Ask Al Gore or Dr Tom Foolery, they will explain. But I digress.
As soon as the people who believe we are about to fry the sky saw the Vostok CO2 graphs, they became quite certain in their minds that the present CO2 levels are a disaster waiting to happen. This is odd because a couple of times long ago, CO2 levels went way up, maybe ten or maybe fifty times higher than now. And back then, life was great. All sorts of curious animals frolicked in lush tropical swamps. The first time, in the Carboniferous and in the Permian, it was mostly the molluscs that had a ball. The next time the CO2 levels got enthusiastic, in the Cretaceous, the animals said what the hell, threw caution to the winds and turned into huge mollusc-eating factories like the brontosaurus and into huge brontosaurus-eating factories like the tyrannosaurus. A good time was had by all, and we should not be grumpy about missing either party, as we live well on the wreckage. As everyone knows, Cretaceous coal is simply fossil brontosaurus poo, while Permian coal (the spell-checker wants Persian coal, but I think I will stick with my first guess) , which is what pays all the bills in Australia (or did till last week) is the poo of all the small things the dinosaurs would have eaten if they had not themselves missed that party through not evolving quick enough. And oil is simply what oozed out of all the dinosaurs when that huge rock from outer space fell on them. I told you this was a serious scientific paper and that you would learn a whole lot. Stick with me, kids.
Back to the icy regions.
After Vostok, some other folk, Europeans, (Europia is apparently somewhere to the west of Mongolia and east of Salt Lake City) went to Dome Concordia, also in Antarctica, to drill an even deeper hole. That was the first EPICA hole. EPICA stands for European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica. It is very famous, and second only to a Dutch gothic metal band of that name. Google can find the band, but you best add ice if you want the drilling project. The drilling is funded by the EU and by national contributions from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. The band presumably funds itself and looks on enviously. Anyway, they got right to the bottom of the icecap, the drlllers' bits, that is, and that took the ice record back to 801,000 years before the present, by the drillers' own calculations, That is just just 11,000 to 71,000 years before MF1, depending on which date you like best for that event. So if they made any slight error, it could be spot on. Or, some ice survived from the early Pleistocene, just 29 bag samples at the very bottom of the hole, out of 5,800 bags .Not critical. They got to the water under the ice, that is probably kept melted by pressure from the ice overhead and/or by the ice acting as an insulating blanket and trapping the heat that escapes through rocks everywhere, from deep down in the earth. Anyway, the critical point to notice is that 801,000 years ago is not that far off 730,000 - 790,000 years ago, as geological time goes.
Time to start sniffing for rats, Wearing carbon caps and shaking collection tins?
Situation. Ther isvVery little or perhaps even no ice at Dome Concordia at least, just after Mag Flip1. And a build-up of 3,000 metres of ice there, since then? So where is all the Early Pleistocene ice? There is a million years of it missing. Maybe 4,000 metres of it! Gone!
For the Early Pleistocene is firmly believed, on evidence from other continents and from the sea floor, to have had plenty of ice ages and icecaps of its own. As 1.8 million years is a short yawn in geology, Antarctica was parked, doing nothing real in the drifting department, over the geographic pole for all of that time.
So why no icy parking ticket? The Early Pleistocene formally ends exactly at MF1, by definition, not by coincidence. But not a skerrick of an Early Pleistocene icecap has survived at Dome C, and that site was chosen precisely because it has some of the thickest ice in Antarctica. You do not, by the way, need deep drill holes to tell you how thick the Antarctic icecap is at any point. Radar and seismic profiling do that very well.
Something tore up that parking ticket, that is, melted all or almost all the ice with a blowtorch. So, what was behaving suspiciously at just the right time to be the criminal, or at least the vandal,, is MF1.
Next question. Do magflips melt ice? Dunno, but, ....
A junior one, a magflip that is still a nipper, but is rapidly learning the joys of vandalism, lives deep down, under and just west of the Antarctic Peninsula, right now. And the land and the sea is warming more there than anywhere else on the planet. It's competition is the largest deep magnetic trend shifting on the planet, in the northern hemisphere, which is also linked persistently to the region of warming with the largest extent on earth. It wanders, the heating in the north, but i keeps coming back to the magnetic trend change bullseye near the middle reaches of the Lena River, in Eastern Siberia. So the kids of that tribe, the magflippers are known to play with blowtorches, and the suspicion is, they picked up the habit from their unruly Dad, MF1.
But, two drill holes do not a planetary climate system prove. Unless you are from the Church of the Holy Molecule.
Next stage in this gripping yarn. Tail-end Charlie here has just found out that other folk have drilled very deep ice cores in Antarctica. There are not just two deep drill holes. There are lots, and between them they have (very sparsely, I accept) tested most of the regions where thick and hence old ice is known to reside . It is just that those drillers are not very good at publicising their work -. tThey should ask that gothic metal band how it i done. And that I cannot read Russian, German or Japanese.
The Russians reported in October 2007 that five major holes have been drilled at Vostok, the last one stopped in 2006 (RAE 51) at a depth of 3650 m, 100 m above Lake Vostok. The maximum dates for that hole may not be in yet .
Then there is the drilling at the German station. Kohnen. That is where the other EPCA hole as drilled. Here is a summary:
"Kohnen Station (Location: 74º 7’ S, 1º 36’ E) The station was built by the German polar and oceanographic institute, the Alfred Wegener Institut (AWI), in 2001, and named after the geophysicist Heinz Kohnen (1938-1997). The station is constructed of containers from the previous Filchner Station; eleven of them put together on an elevated platform, and with auxiliary modules in the vicinity, among them an automatic installation for weather and air quality monitoring. As Antarctic stations go, it is a humble structure, but it was intended for summer operations only, and accommodates up to 20 persons in relative comfort. The ice core drilling operation started during the 2001/2002 season and was completed in 2006 when bedrock was hit at a depth of 2774 meters.
The comfort is probably relative to Scott's tent. And maybe Germany does not want to claim as its Antarctic flagship a huddle of old shipping containers, filchnered nearby .That, do not forget, is a country that once had the world's second-best sailor-drowning navy, a very proud tradition.
Anyway, they did splendid work in and next to and deep beneath their containers. The deep core they got there is one of two retrieved by EPICA, the other one being the Dome C (Concordia) core in the Indian Ocean sector of East Antarctica. Alfie Wegener or one of his offsiders had this to say: "The Dome C core is (was) the longest ice core ever retrieved, providing a history of detailed climate and atmospheric changes over the last 900,000 years (that should have read 801,000 years - PSR) . The Kohnen core is shorter, but it is taken in an area with higher snow accumulation, thus allowing the reconstruction of a high resolution climate record for the past 160,000 years (the upper part of the core). Kohnen sits in an area predominantly influenced by Atlantic air masses, so the core from this location allows for more direct comparison with the ice core records from central Greenland. Key scientific objectives have been to study:"
The Kohnen ice core is almost forgotten. But it went to bedrock at 2774 metres. And got no Early Pleistocene ice.
And then, there is the Herculean effort by the Japanese at Dome Fuji, which till yesterday, despite looking at stuff on Antarctic ice on the net for several years now, I must shamefacedly admit I had never heard of. In their second deep hole they drilled for four years, to 3,035 metres. They got down, with enormous effort, just 6.7 metres in their entire last year. Epic stuff.
Two deep ice cores were drilled near the Dome Fuji summit ( locations 77°19′S 39°42′E / 77.317°S 39.7°E / -77.317; 39.7 (Dome F), altitude 3,810 m). The first drilling started in August 1995, reached a depth of 2503 m in December 1996 and covers a period back to 320,000 years. The second drilling started in 2003, was carried out during four subsequent austral summers from 2003/2004 until 2006/2007, and by then a depth of 3,035.22 m was reached. This core greatly extends the climatic record of the first core, and, according to a first, preliminary dating, it reaches back until 720,000 years.
Here, with some repetition of the above, is part of what Dr Hideaki Motoyama had to report:
"The Second Deep Ice Coring Project at Dome Fuji, Antarctica
With an elevation of 3810 m, Dome Fuji (39˚42’E, 77˚19’S) is the second highest dome summit on the Antarctic ice sheet and might be one of the locations holding the oldest ice in Antarctica. The base of the ice underneath Dome Fuji is estimated to have formed at the beginning of the glacial cycle in the Quaternary era. Analysis of this ice can shed light on the mechanism of Quaternary glacial cycles. The second deep ice coring project at Dome Fuji, Antarctica reached a depth of 3028.52 m (from 3810 m above sea level) during the austral summer season in 2005/2006 ...The recovered ice cores contain records of global environmental changes going back about 720,000 years. During the recent 2006/2007 season the Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition (JARE) team finally reached a depth of 3035.22 m at the Dome Fuji station on 26 January 2007.
The critical thing to note, for our purposes here, is this:
The Japanese picked the site of Dome Fuji because they thought it might be one of the locations holding the oldest ice in Antarctica. (The Quaternary, by the way, starts with the start of the Early Pleistocene, about 1.8 million years ago, although debate rages in august committees about the number, with some experts wishing to push it back to 2.5 million years ago. Either way, there is a lot of time in the Early Pleistocene and a devil of a lot of icecap is missing.
And it very likely Dome Fuji really is one of the locations holding the oldest ice in Antarctica. But,where Dome C got minimal Early Pleistocene ice if any, the Japanese drillers got exactly zip.So, just maybe, there is none? Or, there is very little, which for our purposes here, see below, is much the same thing.
So, what does it matter?
If the last geomagnetic reversal melted all, or almost all, the ice in Antarctica, since geomagnetic shifts seem to be right now warming both the Antarctic Peninsula and Siberia, there goes anthropogenic CO2 -driven greenhouse warming. We have it geomagnetically bracketed.
And you are going to be taxed to within an inch of your life for a furphy.
PS: It follows from the above that there should be a sea level high stand about 60 metres up, on every coastline in the world. About, because the coastline rock a bit. I have my personal version, with an otherwise inexplicable small alluvial fan or delta, at about 55 metres above sea level, on the edge of the bottom paddock here, where the small side creek enters the valley of the larger one (Cedar Creek) .The valley must have been underwater for that delta to form, and there is I think no chance of a fresh water lake forming here, the creek is very energetic when it rains, and is armed with large rocks, which would rip out any temporary blockage, in the first big flood. So it was probably the sea. But it should be absolutely everywhere.
The Case of the Missing Coastline? Why have we not found it? I have no date for the "delta", to back this wild guess, sorry, that should have read "evidence-based geological hypothesis. If you will just be kind enough to peer at this PS also, and lthen let me know you have, I can claim it is also peer-reviewed.
Hear ye, hear ye, bring out your guilt trips. You are hereby found to be innocent.
Have fun, all,
Peter