Update on antartica rescue

Yep, we sure have learned a lot in the last 150 years . . .

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Thank you DB that vid has brightened my day immensely.

Got that right TG. I thought they were retracing Mawson, but seems it was Shackleton.

All the flap about rescuing these fleas must make the 'real' Antarctic scientists and explorers of the past cringe in their coffins.
I'd like to see them do what Shackleton did. He's my hero.

... and Frank Hurley is my hero photographer. For those who may not have seen it this picture is real. Taken in 1914, the hard way!
Endurance, crushed by sea ice, Shackleton expedition. http://www.shackleton-endurance.com/joomla/index.php/the-story-in-pictures
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This photo taken very much at in the middle of winter is probably the most iconic image from the expedition. Frank Hurley had to take 20 flash images using flash powder to illuminate the ship.
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Frank Hurley was the Australian photographer who was selected for Shackleton's Trans-Antarctic expedition of 1914. He had previously made his name on the Douglas Mawson expedition to Antarctic in 1911. Frank Hurley took with him over 600 glass plates most of those would have been about A5 about ( 6inch x 9inch ), Some 120 film for a compact camera, some motion picture film, and a recently developed, colour film process. Mostly his time was taken up with taking still photographs with the large plate camera or filming using the film camera that he subsequently made into a silent feature film.

Hurley was a tireless worker, incredible technician, perfectionist.

When the ship's fate was decided, Hurley had to leave his precious cameras behind, but Shackleton allowed him to keep a selection of photographs and motion-picture footage. Stripped to the waist, Hurley dove into the icy waters to retrieve his treasured images from the sinking wreck of the ship. Together, Shackleton and Hurley chose 120 glass plates to keep and smashed about 400; Shackleton feared that Hurley would endanger himself to return for them later.

Hurley sealed the plates in metal tins with improvised solder, along with prints he had developed on board the ship. Hurley documented the remainder of their odyssey with only a handheld Vest Pocket Kodak camera and three rolls of film.

The photographs you see on this site are from the large plate camera. As a consequence because of the large negative they are technically exceptional and are of far greater quality than most people realize, that was possible for the day .Hurley was a master, to take and process these images in the conditions that he did.


The End of Endurance.
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Frank Hurley and Ernest Shackleton. That's how Antarctica was done! No icebreakers and smart phone selfies for them.
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But.... was it perhaps a luckily warmer season than usual? Could they have survived a full on Antarctic winter? Was there perhaps a bit of GW going on back in 1914? Surely not.
 
Ice Age!! Ice Age !!!! Doomed! ... all gonna die.

Seriously though, if they were howling Ice Age instead of dithering with a 2C rise I'd be worried too. That would be a far more dire outlook for the future than Global Warming.
 
An ice age is characterised by huge glaciers that cover all or most of the continental masses. As I remember my geology lessons from half a century ago, ice ages in the NH were not necessarily matched by ice ages in the SH. SH coal deposits are younger (Permian) than NH coal (Carboniferous) due to the different timings of the glacial advances from the poles. In other words, when Europe, Asia and Nth America were covered in ice, the SH was lush and green with enough swampy vegetation to lay down heavy layers of peat. And vice versa. It is unlikely that ice sheets would spread out from both poles simultaneously. The so-called Little Ice Age was not a global phenomenon.

At most there was modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during the period.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
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I don't think that earth as a snowball is likely until the sun starts to fail but since the result of that will be a massive expansion of the sun's radius, it will more likely be earth as a charred meat ball.
 
Warrigal said:
The so-called Little Ice Age was not a global phenomenon.
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Warrigal, maybe Wikipedia isn't right all the time ..... :)

Antarctica: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2012GL051260/abstractGlobal phenomenon

WAIS ice core reveals connection to Little Ice Age in Northern Hemisphere



Photo Credit: Chad Naughton/Antarctic Photo Library
Researchers prepare ice cores for transport from the WAIS Divide
field camp. Analysis of the borehole revealed that Europe's Little
Ice Age was felt all the way down in Antarctic

Orsi et al (Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA) .....
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2012GL051260/abstract

..... This result is consistent with the idea that the LIA was a global event, ....
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South American Andes: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1008146122074

Paleohydrology of Andean saline lakes from sedimentological and isotopic records, Northwestern Argentina
.... Although there are local differences, the Little Ice Age stands as a significant climatic event in the Andean Altiplano.
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There is more research indicating the same.
 
Well, I read both abstracts and didn't quite understand what they were saying.
What did you get from them?
W
ere they saying that during the LIA the whole world was cooler?
Or were they saying that the LIA in one part of the world had some effects further afield?

The latter I can understand.
The former would need more evidence than ice cores in one part of Antarctica to convince me.
 
when Europe, Asia and Nth America were covered in ice, the SH was lush and green with enough swampy vegetation to lay down heavy layers of peat.
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That may be due to continental drift.

At the time the NH was icebound, the SH landmasses, the remains of Gondwana, including Antarctica, were still moving south. They would have been closer to the equator back then, if you get my 'drift.' (sorry) There is fossilized vegetation and probably coal down there and that didn't grow where it is now.

It depends on which Ice Age you're looking at too, there have been a lot of them. And I seem to recall a doco that indicated that the world indeed was almost a total ice ball at one time, but I'll have to hunt for that, 'too many docos overload' so I'm not sure about it.
 
Veteran explorer claims tourists stranded for eight days in Antarctica had lives needlessly risked by planners opting for budget ship that cannot break ice


  • Akademik Shokalskiy was 'ice-strengthened', which cannot break ice
  • Expert claims the situation was 'easily predictable' and 'avoidable'
  • Team got stuck on Christmas and freed on Thursday. Team still there
An experienced polar explorer has accused climate scientists who hired a ship now trapped in Antarctic ice of endangering passengers and crew – by carrying out the expedition ‘on the cheap’.
Dozens of scientists, journalists and tourists were evacuated by helicopter from the stricken Russian vessel Akademik Shokalskiy on Thursday after it became stuck on Christmas Eve.
The ship was being used by the expedition to follow the route taken by Australian explorer Douglas Mawson in 1912.
The team intended to repeat measurements taken by Mawson and so study environmental change over the past century.
But their ship is classed as ‘ice-strengthened’, which means it cannot break ice sheets and can operate only in light ice.
Robert Headland, of Cambridge University’s Scott Polar Research Institute, blamed the team for not investing in a ship suitable to the ‘easily predictable’ sea ice.
Mr Headland, who has completed successful missions to where the ship was going, said: ‘The expedition was hopelessly optimistic in trying to carry out this mission on the cheap and has needlessly taken many risks.
‘The team were in an area where it is common for ice to suddenly build up and instead of using an icebreaker, they used an ice-strengthened ship, which is totally unsuitable.’
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ed-planners-opting-budget-ship-break-ice.html
 
Diwundrin said:
That may be due to continental drift.

At the time the NH was icebound, the SH landmasses, the remains of Gondwana, including Antarctica, were still moving south. They would have been closer to the equator back then, if you get my 'drift.' (sorry) There is fossilized vegetation and probably coal down there and that didn't grow where it is now.

It depends on which Ice Age you're looking at too, there have been a lot of them. And I seem to recall a doco that indicated that the world indeed was almost a total ice ball at one time, but I'll have to hunt for that, 'too many docos overload' so I'm not sure about it.
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There's a huge difference between the rate of change due to continental drift and most climate change movements. What ever is going on in the NH right now is not due to any geological movements. Something is interfering with the usual atmospheric currents, creating this polar vortex phenomenon. Don't ask me what it is because I don't know.
 
Something is interfering with the usual atmospheric currents, creating this polar vortex phenomenon
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There is no "interfering" going on Warrigal.

The polar vortex is a natural and common phenomenon at both poles here and on other planets. This one is unusual ONLY for the cold it's bringing and the explanations coming from some sectors: For example, it is being claimed that the current extreme cold is caused because the Arctic sea ice is melting.
 
Warri, locals are quoted as saying "worst we've seen for 20 years".... hardly a sign that the sky is falling. It's not the first time it's ever occurred or anything, just more severe than usual. A perfect storm scenario, just our droughts, heatwaves, bushfire "record" outbreaks are. They're worse when they coincide.

I didn't say anything about continental drift having to do with climate change, just mooted it as a possible reason the coal deposits in the different hemispheres were laid down at different times.
 
The final re-cap from best-selling author Mark Steyn ....

Global warming's glorious ship of fools

Has there ever been a better story? It's like a version of Titanic where first class cheers for the iceberg


Yes, yes, just to get the obligatory ‘of courses’ out of the way up front: of course ‘weather’ is not the same as ‘climate’; and of course the thickest iciest ice on record could well be evidence of ‘global warming’, just as 40-and-sunny and a 35-below blizzard and 12 degrees and partly cloudy with occasional showers are all apparently manifestations of ‘climate change’; and of course the global warm-mongers are entirely sincere in their belief that the massive carbon footprint of their rescue operation can be offset by the planting of wall-to-wall trees the length and breadth of Australia, Britain, America and continental Europe.

But still: you’d have to have a heart as cold and unmovable as Commonwealth Bay ice not to be howling with laughter at the exquisite symbolic perfection of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition ‘stuck in our own experiment’, as they put it. I confess I was hoping it might all drag on a bit longer and the cultists of the ecopalypse would find themselves drawing straws as to which of their number would be first on the roasting spit. On Douglas Mawson’s original voyage, he and his surviving comrade wound up having to eat their dogs. I’m not sure there were any on this expedition, so they’d probably have to make do with the Guardian reporters. Forced to wait a year to be rescued, Sir Douglas later recalled, ‘Several of my toes commenced to blacken and fester near the tips.’ Now there’s a man who’s serious about reducing his footprint.

But alas, eating one’s shipmates and watching one’s extremities drop off one by one is not a part of today’s high-end eco-doom tourism. Instead, the ice-locked warmists uploaded chipper selfies to YouTube, as well as a self-composed New Year singalong of such hearty un-self-awareness that it enraged even such party-line climate alarmists as Andrew Revkin, the plonkingly earnest enviro-blogger of the New York Times. A mere six weeks ago, pumping out the usual boosterism, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that, had Captain Scott picked his team as carefully as Professor Chris Turney, he would have survived. Sadly, we’ll never know — although I’ll bet Captain Oates would have been doing his ‘I am going out. I may be some time’ line about eight bars into that New Year number.

Unlike Scott, Amundsen and Mawson, Professor Turney took his wife and kids along for the ride. And his scientists were outnumbered by wealthy tourists paying top dollar for the privilege of cruising the end of the world. In today’s niche-market travel industry, the Antarctic is a veritable Club Dread for upscale ecopalyptics: think globally, cruise icily. The year before the Akademik Shokalskiy set sail, as part of Al Gore’s ‘Living On Thin Ice’ campaign (please, no tittering; it’s so puerile; every professor of climatology knows that the thickest ice ever is a clear sign of thin ice, because as the oceans warm, glaciers break off the Himalayas and are carried by El Ninja down the Gore Stream past the Cape of Good Horn where they merge into the melting ice sheet, named after the awareness-raising rapper Ice Sheet…

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Where was I? Oh, yeah. Anyway, as part of his ‘Living On Thin Ice’ campaign, Al Gore’s own luxury Antarctic vessel boasted a line-up of celebrity cruisers unseen since the 1979 season finale of The Love Boat — among them the actor Tommy Lee Jones, the pop star Jason Mraz, the airline entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, the director of Titanic James Cameron, and the Bangladeshi minister of forests Somebody Wossname. If Voyage of the Gored had been a conventional disaster movie like The Poseidon Adventure, the Bangladeshi guy would have been the first to drown, leaving only the Nobel-winning climatologist (Miley Cyrus) and the maverick tree-ring researcher (Ben Affleck) to twerk their way through the ice to safety. Instead, and very regrettably, the SS Gore made it safely home, and it fell to Professor Turney’s ship to play the role of our generation’s Titanic. Unlike the original, this time round the chaps in the first-class staterooms were rooting for the iceberg: as the expedition’s marine ecologist Tracy Rogers told the BBC, ‘I love it when the ice wins and we don’t.’ Up to a point. Like James Cameron’s Titanic toffs, the warm-mongers stampeded for the first fossil-fuelled choppers off the ice, while the Russian crew were left to go down with the ship, or at any rate sit around playing cards in the hold for another month or two.

But unlike you flying off to visit your Auntie Mabel for a week, it’s all absolutely vital and necessary. In the interests of saving the planet, IPCC honcho Rajendra Pachauri demands the introduction of punitive aviation taxes and hotel electricity allowances to deter the masses from travelling, while he flies 300,000 miles a year on official ‘business’ and research for his recent warmographic novel in which a climate activist travels the world bedding big-breasted women who are amazed by his sustainable growth. (Seriously: ‘He removed his clothes and began to feel Sajni’s body, caressing her voluptuous breasts.’ But don’t worry; every sex scene is peer-reviewed.) No doubt his next one will boast an Antarctic scene: Is that an ice core in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

The AAE is right: the warm-mongers are indeed ‘stuck in our own experiment’. Frozen to their doomsday narrative like Jeff Daniels with his tongue stuck to the ski lift in Dumb and Dumber, the Big Climate enforcers will still not brook anyone rocking their boat. In December 2008 Al Gore predicted the ‘entire North Polar ice cap will be gone in five years’. That would be December last year. Oh, sure, it’s still here, but he got the general trend-line correct, didn’t he? Arctic sea ice, December 2008: 12.5 million square kilometres; Arctic sea ice, December 2013: 12.5 million square kilometres.

Big Climate is slowly being crushed by a hard, icy reality: if you’re heading off to university this year, there has been no global warming since before you were in kindergarten. That’s to say, the story of the early 21st century is that the climate declined to follow the climate ‘models’. (Full disclosure: I’m currently being sued by Dr Michael Mann, creator of the most famously alarming graph, the ‘hockey stick’.) You would think that might occasion a little circumspection. But instead the cultists up the ante: having evolved from ‘global warming’ to the more flexible ‘climate change’, they’re now moving on to ‘climate collapse’. Total collapse. No climate at all. No sun, no ice. No warm fronts, except for the heaving bosoms in Rajendra Pachauri’s bodice-rippers. Nothing except the graphs and charts of ‘settled science’. In the Antarctic wastes of your mind, it’s easier just to ice yourself in.
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http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9112201/ship-of-fools-2/
 
:lofl:

global warm-mongers - ecopalypse - high-end eco-doom tourism. -
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I hereby nominate Mark Steyn for the Nobel Pun Prize!

....The year before the Akademik Shokalskiy set sail, as part of Al Gore’s ‘Living On Thin Ice’ campaign (please, no tittering; it’s so puerile; every professor of climatology knows that the thickest ice ever is a clear sign of thin ice, because as the oceans warm, glaciers break off the Himalayas and are carried by El Ninja down the Gore Stream past the Cape of Good Horn where they merge into the melting ice sheet, named after the awareness-raising rapper Ice Sheet ,,,
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Seems you were right all along then Warri.

....Is that an ice core in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?.....

......But instead the cultists up the ante: having evolved from ‘global warming’ to the more flexible ‘climate change’, they’re now moving on to ‘climate collapse’. Total collapse. No climate at all. No sun, no ice. No warm fronts, except for the heaving bosoms in Rajendra Pachauri’s bodice-rippers. Nothing except the graphs and charts of ‘settled science’. In the Antarctic wastes of your mind, it’s easier just to ice yourself in.
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If there was ever an ambition I aspired to it was to be able to write stuff like this. Mr Steyn has styyyyyle!
 
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