Historic Variation in Arctic Ice

Historic Variation in Arctic Ice

Guest post from the Air Vent by Tony B


I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

I placed most of the images in myself from Tony’s references.



NOAA Photo Library Image - libr0454

Image ID: libr0454, Treasures of the NOAA Library Collection

Image of Parry's ships in the ice with sailors playing cricket

Northwest Passage Attempt 1821







(see additional*)


President of the Royal Society, London, to the Admiralty, 20th November, 1817, Minutes of Council, Volume 8. pp.149-153, Royal Society, London. 20th November, 1817.(from) http://www.john-daly.com/polar/arctic.htm






Arctic RegionArctic Region


Sir Joseph Banks










(See third expedition from p61)






From Wikipedia;









(There is a second volume covering subsequent years).








Source Wikipedia





Contemporary reports from the time include the following 1817 book;





This extract here;


Note; This illustration of arctic Sea Islands comes from 1818.









































Extract one



Second extract


third extract










living at Jakohshavn whose grandfather was born there. The Tessi-




thought of. The Tessiusak must be reached by a laborious journey



memory of any one now living, reached.




Fifth extract


Sixth extract

“For three centuries and a half the Norman colonies of Greenland

continued to flourish ; upwards of 300 small farms and villages



During the whole of this period no indigenous race was


Greenland with the Norman colony. A curious account of a

voyage is extant, during which the Normans reached a latitude


strange race. The Normans continued to be the sole tenants of




















This is a map of their journey;

amundsen.map2[1]Northwest passage crossing. Princeton Edu Files

This is a picture of their tiny ship

Amundsen  Ship Used in Northwest Passage CrossingAmundsen Ship Used in Northwest Passage Crossing








A new book contains the following extract;




Comment by author:










This is an additional study;
















2 This lists all known arctic expeditions


3 This is a map of known routes the expeditions took






40 thoughts on “Historic Variation in Arctic Ice

  1. Thanks for the article, a refreshing summary of historic variability of the Arctic.
    Reduced ice coverage has happened before and it will happen again in the future.
    No reason for alarmism.
    Humanity does not influence our climate at a level where ice extend is influenced.

  2. Tony, thanks for your insightful input. You always have some historical data to interject at WUWT. I appreciate the effort it took to put this together.

  3. Anthony and Tony B,
    Here is an abundance of evidence that the Arctic was warmer in the mid-Holocene than it is today.
    Best Regards,

  4. Cargo Cult Science!
    That’s what current climatology is. Richard Feynman defined clearly what real science is, and that some “science”s are just going through the motions.

    It’s a kind of scientific integrity,
    a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of
    you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you
    it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and
    things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other
    tell they have been eliminated.

    I’ve posted this before, but I think it’s really important that people are aware what real science is, compared to the AGW voodoo.

  5. TonyB’s piece is, to me, one of the best I have seen in a long time. I added a note to an entry on my blog stating….

    “the Air Vent” has a guest entry by TonyB titled:
    Historic Variation in Arctic Ice –
    I strongly suggest clicking on that title and reading an excellent presentation. As Jeff said…
    It is a FANTASTIC read.

    As I noted over at “the Air Vent”:

    Something missing? There seems to be no predicate.

  7. I’ll read this later. Interesting to nbot that the Arctic was thought to be melting in 1817 – and it’s still there.

  8. Thanks for the article, it is both informative and entertaining. And for those who haven’t read such old reports of exploration, you should try one. There are recent reprints of some books. They’re an interesting mix of exploration and travel dramas. I suspect such tales are the reason we still know of Livingston & Stanley, because they were a widely reported variant of the form.

  9. Very good article. Thank-you.
    I am somewhat of an ameture student of history and have come across several journals and diaries by simply searching the web for unrelated items. As an example while researching a war of 1812 fort, Willow Creek Depot, near Barrie Ontario I found that the Franklin Expedition went through there on one of his expeditons while the fort was still in service and it was still on a military route before it fell into disuse. Then when searching further found lots of first person accounts from settlers. How does this relate you ask? Settlers in the Barrie area, and probably elsewhere, seemed to keep very detailed daily diaries which recount the weather every day over several decades. So this I am trying to suggest is another avenue for reseach on past trends. Sorry I don’t have any links but several geneology sites have family members posting these diaries.
    Thanx again for this article and this website in general.

  10. Very interesting. Such rich history. I’m always amazed at mankind’s intrepid pushing back at ignorance and the quest for knowledge undertaken in the face of great hardship and peril.
    Yes. Two thumbs up!

  11. Magnificent!
    What an odessey of research. I was fascinated, I read the article through from beginning to end and then went back and followed the ‘diversions’ which were as entrancing as the article. And thus my Saturday afternoon was completely taken.
    I do not regret one second of the time I spent learning about the early Arctic explorers, their lives, adventures, failures and successes. Their exploits and tenacity make the Catlin Arctic Survey pale into insignificance.
    Congratulations on a great article and a very fine blog.

  12. The second ship to navigate the North West Passage was the RCMP schooner the ST ROCH in 1940-42 and it was the first to go west to east. It then returned east to west in 1944 in a single season . That say’s something about the extent of arctic ice in the mid 40’s.

  13. The following comment posted on American Thinker’s summary of the Catlin Expedition
    challenges the baseline for all current Arctic Ice calcualations –
    according to a PBS documentary referenced by this reader, when satellite records started in the 1970s Arctic Ice was at a 125 year high!
    Posted by: Patrick49 May 16, 03:56 AM
    The use by global warming alarmists of the 1970s as the baseline for Arctic ‘normal’ sea ice conditions is in fact either, deliberate or a through ignorance a unique maximum event, a once in 125 year occurrence as documented in the PBS documentary “NOVA Arctic Passage: Prisoners of the Ice”
    The following is a partial transcript on ice core studies that confirmed the sea ice conditions which cased the loss of Captain Franklin and his crew in 1845-1847 were not duplicated for 125+ years, the 1970s.
    “NOVA Arctic Passage: Prisoners of the Ice
    Sir John Franklin, and 133 officers and crew set off to conquer the most perilous waterway in the world. Their mission: to be the first to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific through Canada’s icy Northwest Passage May 1845.
    Transcript of the NOVA program.
    Dated 1848—more than a year after the original note was written, Francis Crozier, the captain of the Terror added in the margin that the ships were still trapped in the ice in the same location.
    They hadn’t moved in nearly two years. What had gone wrong? Usually the polar ice melts during the summer. Could it be that this time, the ice simply didn’t melt?
    JOHN FALKINGHAM: The nightmare scenario is that I’m never going to get out of this ice. I’m facing another long winter. It’s going to get dark. It’s going to get very cold. And here I am out on this ice that’s still moving around. I don’t know where this ice is carrying me.
    NARRATOR: No previous polar expedition had ever reported a summer so cold that the ice didn’t break up.
    That anomaly puzzled polar scientist Roy Koerner. Recently, he set out to learn just what kind of weather Franklin had to contend with during that fateful year. Koerner and his team regularly drill down into the Arctic ice cap, retrieving samples that they can use to understand temperature patterns from other eras.
    At most latitudes, ice is impermanent. But north of the Arctic circle, it tends to hang around. Even for thousands of years.
    Koerner retrieved a sample from more than 100 meters below the surface. By counting ice layers and by analyzing the chemical content of the core, he zeroed in on a section that he could date back to the late 1840s. He hoped it might be able to tell him more about the conditions that Franklin’s men faced.
    ROY KOERNER: The reason ice cores give the history of the climate in the past is that everything that happens on the surface is preserved as the ice gets buried. If the surface of the snow melts, the water percolates down and it forms these ice layers. The more it melts the more ice layers and the thicker the ice layers.
    NARRATOR: Koerner found that within the 1840s ice core there was simply no sign of the transparent ice layers that form when snow melts.
    Koerner had once before seen another ice core like this, dated from the early 1970s. In that case he had actual weather reports to compare it to and he learned that the ice from the ’70s had formed during a very cold period of almost permanent winter.
    ROY KOERNER: The point to make on this core is the absolute near absence of any signs of melting whatsoever, none of those clear layers at all. Just bubbly ice that is formed from compression of snow that doesn’t melt in the summer.
    NARRATOR: The finding convinced him that Franklin faced similar conditions when much of the sea ice had not melted at all.
    For an expedition hoping to sail the passage with 19th century technology, the conditions would have been deadly.
    ROY KOERNER: If it’s a cold summer that ice isn’t going to go out and open up. The channels are ice-infested still. The ships that they used in those days; they don’t have the power to get through even modest ice.
    NARRATOR: Koerner’s evidence confirmed that Franklin and his men had encountered freak weather conditions—more severe than previous explorers had ever reported. Worse than that, Koerner’s ice core showed that this period of extreme cold likely lasted for five long years.”

    I have formatted the comment slightly to make it easier to read but left the rest unchanged.
    Has anybody seen this documentary? Or heard of this researcher? If this is true, does it not demand a very different interpretation of the measurements?

  14. Humbled by such work/knowledge/effort/clarity. But will it make the slightest bit of difference?

  15. Even if the poles thawed two centuries ago, It was still Bush’s fault (despite not being born) and the US was even then destroying the planet.
    Also anyone who disagrees with a whole raft of new taxes and bureaucracies is a holocaust denier yada yada yada…
    The facts don’t matter to L. Ron Gore and the Fry-N-Tology global warming religion crowd.

  16. This is engorossing. I still am only half way through.
    But those Frobisher boys: the Frobisher expedition is a very Canadian unexplained mystery. There is currently yet another expedition being sent out to find out what happened. It seems to me that, when their leader died, they panicked, split into factions or otherwise became disorganized and proceeded to behave irrationaly.

  17. All good stuff but what of the little ice age – didn’t it reach to the arctic?

  18. Great article!
    Regarding the Franklin expedition, I recall reading a book about them..They apparently died of lead poisoning, due to the lead solder in the tinned food they carried. Someone found the graves in northern Canada, exhumed the bodies, and analysed them for various problems–lead levels were very high. Apparently lead poisoning in adults leads to mental problems and difficulties in making good judgments—if they did not die of the lead poisoning directly, they died because they made a series of bad decisions and ended up dying of the cold and starvation.
    Thanks for a good read.

  19. There is a lot of ethnographic evidence that the Arctic was nearly ice free 3-4K years ago. The legends of the Eskimos about Indian raids and the herding they used to do.
    Closer to today are the oral legends of the Vikings and the Irish.

    That’s a typo. It should be Iceland.

  21. Thanks, Tony B, there’s nothing like hearing from some well-written first hand, unbiased observers.
    starzmom (18:31:41) :
    Great article!

    Yes, I was wondering if this expedition was the one I read about in a “throwaway” medical journal ~20 years ago and it probably is. As I recall, the expeditioneers dragged their life boats behind them for some distance after they abandoned their frozen-in ships.
    The article was essentially quite well done “color” for the journal, which also contained many very useful medical articles, free, and NOT Peer Reviewed. I received dozens of such journals, and many were very good sources of info.

  22. One summer when I was in the Arctic I met a fellow who was working on trying to trace the route that some members of the Franklin Expedition took south in an attempt to return to civilization after their ships had frozen in. The route was traceable from various items like life boats, guns, sheets of lead (for making bullets) and other things that these men carried with them and dropped along the way. The fellow I met remarked that the most obvious marker of the route were human leg bones. He theorized that as these men were surviving by engaging in canabalism when a man died the others dined on their dead companion and then hacked off the legs which they carried with them to be eaten at a later date. Pretty gruesome stuff.
    Somewhat less gruesome is Stan Rogers song The Northwest Passage,

  23. >>>if you’re doing an experiment, you should report
    >>>everything that you think might make it invalid–not
    >>>only what you think is right about it
    Trouble is, we have become too commercial, too results-based. A failure in your experiment may be deemed to be a detriment to funding and therefore a possible failure of your career, so the temptation is to skew the results (especially if those results agree with government thinking).
    Thus the potential for scientific fraud is becoming ever more likely.

  24. I was a participant in the documentary you mention, and had a chance to talk with Roy Koerner inbetween takes as we were standing on the ice out on Resolute Bay. Koerner, who died last year, was probably the most experienced glaciologist in Canada, besides having been a member of Sir Wally Herbert’s trans-polar trek in 1968-69 and therefore among the first men ever to reach the Pole on foot. While the documentary doesn’t misquote him, it does take his work out of context; Roy told me that the kinds of cores he studied from the 1840’s were very compact ones (that is, ones in which the years are quite close together) and that his conclusions about Franklin should taken with a possible error rate of +/- 5 years. Overall, however, the glacial climate record does show a generally colder period then.
    Dr. Russell A. Potter

  25. Hi Tony, fantastic and useful work! ! !
    I promised to tell how it went with the television take for Danish Television:
    I made one argument come through: CO2 comes after temp and not vice versa.
    Then Danish television tried to have i professor at DanishTechincalUniversity respond to this little problem. The professor respondet that the Vostok data is “old data”, which is nonsence. Ín other words, the professot could not answer and came up with the first the best answer.
    But i was not allowed to say much more. But it was OK!!
    K.R. Frank

  26. And as an added bonus I have just discovered the music of Stan Rogers. Just maxed out my ITunes budget for the month.

  27. Ice core rings are like tree rings. Once you find out that tree rings have a pattern of slow years of growth and then fast years of growth, you can begin to look at other similar patterned oscillations, like salmon, algae blooms, and the PDO. The PDO was inadvertently discovered when salmon catch was correlated to ship’s logs about sea temperature. Algae blooms and tree rings match PDO oscillations. What else might show a match? Because measured PDO temps match measured tree rings, a proxy for PDO became available that when far back in modern time. Tree rings now allow a proxy PDO back to the 17th century. What would ice rings say if they were to be compared against this proxy PDO?

  28. Of course, sea ice is a time-limited item. But not ice sheet core rings nearby. I wonder if there would be a match.

  29. Thanks for the many kind comments about my article. I am working on the next article which is a look back in time from 1750 through the Vikings and Ipatuk to the ‘virtually ice free’ arctic of 5000 years or so ago.
    In that connection there were some very interesting links including from Tommoriarty that will help
    Bill; The period from around 1715 to 1735 had many similarities to today in as much there was a considerable period of warmth. It may be possible to pick it up from historic records as an arctic oscillation to match the 1817-1860 warming and the 1920-1940 warming.
    Dr Potter: I mentioned there were some great books on the Arctic and if anyone would care to click on his name they will find much fantastic material
    Frank; Glad it went well with your interview
    Pamela; Fascinating idea. Have you got access to a couple of million in funds so we can do a joint study? 🙂
    Roger Carr. Apparently each bow head whale contained the equivalent of 100 barrels of oil. I saw a defunct whale fishery in Iceland once and it is extraordinary as to the effort we placed on harvesting these magnificent creatures.

  30. Outstanding historical data Tony, my deepest thanks for your efforts in affirming seasonal shifts in ice concentrations. I had the opportunity to work at the U.S. Navy Polar Oceanography Center for 6 years. Maybe you remember “DIFAS”? In that time, each Friday the Scientists provided a brief that seasonal ice expansion and contraction was within historical “Mean”. I often wondered why and how cyclical events never seem to make into the minds of the alarmist who would use “Global Warming” or “Climate Change” as a weapon of fear. By the way, I know first hand that those Scientist considered Al Gore to be a “Moron” of epic proportion.

  31. TonyB , I have just come across this thread. I do not know how I missed it. I may have been traveling. An amazing read . Superlative. I thoroughly enjoy your writing, and the subject matter speaks to me. Just so you know, I have had the opportunity to read the actual documents in the Hudson’s Bay archive. Can you imagine wintering over in Fort York in the late 1600’s? People whine when their house is not 70 f ! It is too bad that more people don’t appreciate history. Great stuff!!

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