Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Sorry, wasn't clear.

"His methods are the equivalent of ice core data for sea ice extent",

Ice core data are not useful to study variation in sea ice extent. Ice core data are for long lived continental ice, sea ice is ephemeral, it comes and goes every year, gets covered by snow, melts and refreezes, or breaks off and floats away. Sea ice is much more significant as a climate driver. Half of Greenland's or Antarctica's glaciers could melt away and their albedo would remain unchanged.

If ice core studies work as they're advertised , they give us long, continuous records of temperatures over extended periods of time. How they work is not clear to me, something to do with dissolved gases in the bubbles, isotopic variation, seasonal layering, etc. I know they use multiple techniques.

How you would go about determining ancient sea ice extent is beyond me. It may not even be possible, I can't think of any way to go about it, although the abstract alludes to "sea ice proxies".

Besides, the two are only indirectly related. For example, the melting of continental Antarctic ice actually ADDS to surrounding sea ice, by cooling the sea water and calving of massive bergs. In the Arctic, the only continental ice sheets are in Greenland, sea ice doesn't flow off the glaciers, it freezes on salt water. The Titanic didn't run into sea ice, it hit a piece of the Greenland glacier.

http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2010/312/0/5/thoreau__s_trout_in_the_milk_by_queen_mouldy-d32gupm.png

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