The Amery Zig-Zags



Antarctica ice shelves
image courtesy NSIDC.
Something is wrong in the Arctic

Sea ice hits record lows

"What area on Mars is the most interesting for us?". My answer to this question isn’t an impressive geological feature like Olympus Mons or Valles Marineres. For me, it’s a rather unremarkable seeming crater, Richardson crater near the south pole. Let me explain why.

First this shows where it is. It is close to the south pole - this is an elevation map and I’ve trimmed it down to the southern hemisphere. You can see Olympus Mons as the obvious large mountain just right of middle, and Hellas Basin as the big depression middle left. Richardson crater is about half way between them and much further south.

Postglacial rebound, uplift in Greenland blamed on global warming, has actually made it harder to measure ice loss due to global warming, according to a new paper in Science Advances.

Declining Antarctic sea ice extents were a cornerstone of climate models - unless they began increasing. It may be that both are just natural fluctuation according to a new paper which shows that the negative phase of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO), which is characterized by cooler-than-average sea surface temperatures in the tropical eastern Pacific, has created favorable conditions for additional Antarctic sea ice growth since 2000.

Obviously that could mean that sea ice may begin to shrink as the IPO switches to a positive phase. Climate models have done a poor job of accounting for nature, they have tended to take a trend and made it linear into the future. Nature is not that predictable. 


A new paper in American Journal of Geophysics, Geochemistry and Geosystems criticizes alarming projections of up to 2 meters in sea level rise due to increasing anthropogenic CO2 emissions - and implicitly media that acts as cheerleaders by foregoing critical thinking - because those claims are not based on data. 

Instead of noting that tide gauges with enough information to infer a trend don't show increased relative rate of rise, but instead show small positive negative and positive fluctuations, papers with claims of up to 2 meters in sea level rise are heavily promoted, including by groups who insist policy makers need to include those claims in flood maps. 

SAR11 are the most abundant plankton in the world's oceans. They are also a massive source of two sulfur gases that play important roles in the Earth's atmosphere.





Researchers have discovered how a particular type of cyanobacteria, a photosynthetic microbe, is able to bore into and live within solid carbonates, the main mineral that makes up coral skeletons and seashells -- hastening their erosion and causing trouble for shellfish farmers.  
