ANTARCTICA’S LATEST -60C (-76F) READING EVER RECORDED
After logging its coldest ‘coreless winter’ (April-Sept) on record in 2021, and routinely suffering colder-than-average months ever since, Antarctica is at it yet again.
Defying AGW Party orders, the mercury across Antarctica has been holding astonishingly low in recent years, and 2022 is proving no different.
“For the second day, Concordia measured a new cold record,” writes Stefano Di Battista on Twitter, a journalist who regularly follows the goings-on at the ‘bottom of the world’: “This fact is extraordinary.”
On Nov 10, the Italian-French station Concordia, located 3,200 meters (10,500 feet) above sea level in the middle of Dome C, on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, touched -59.7C (-75.5F). This comfortably usurped the previous record for the day (the -57C (-70.6F) set just last year), and also, more impressively, it turns out that Antarctica has never before been this cold so late into the season.
Moreover, just as day later the station sank even colder, reaching a minimum of -60.2C (-76.4F) on Nov 11. This was the latest sub -60C registered in Antarctica since at least 1978, when records began–but likely far longer, states Battista in a thread:
NOAA: ‘COLD POOL’ RETURNS IN BERING SEA
Traversing north, to the Arctic region — anomalous chills have been transpiring here, too.
The Bering Sea’s cold pool, a critical part of the seafloor ecosystem, had shrunk in recent years. This, predictably, sent those jittery, coffee-spitting climate alarmists-types into full-blown panic mode.
However, with some patience and a little trust in Earth’s naturally waxing-and-waning climate system, the pool is now returning to multidecadal norms, as shown by NOAA’s bottom trawl survey which gathers temperature readings via a trawl net dropped to the bottom 6 to 10 feet of the water column.
Panic over.
Duane Stevenson, senior lead for the Bering Sea bottom trawl survey for NOAA Fisheries, presented the results in a Strait Science presentation in early November: “This year, we had a relatively cold pool of water in the northern Bering Sea and actually extending south of St. Matthew Island onto the central part of the Bering Sea shelf,” he said.
“This is interesting, because over the past several years, we haven’t really seen much of a cold pool, certainly not extending down into the eastern Bering Sea survey area. This year, we definitely saw more of a cold pool than we have in recent years.”
These colder-than-average conditions manifested above the surface, too. The coldest July airmass of the past 70 years bloew through the Bering Strait this summer, bringing rare –and at times unprecedented– summer snow to the Diomede islands, Ear Mountain near Shishmaref and the mountains near Dexter and Banner Creek, too.
For more:
Largest Summer Sea Ice Extent Since 2008 Traps Arctic Ships; + Coldest July Airmass In 70 Years Blows Through The Bering Strait
Rare Summer Snow Hits Alaska; Bering Strait Sea Ice Refuses To Melt; + NASA/NOAA Erase The Arctic’s 1940s “Warming Blip”
When seasonal sea ice melts, very cold water sinks, creating a persistently frigid layer at the seafloor that tends to stay under 2C (35.6F) throughout the majority of the summer. It is believed that this cold pool acts as a barrier that keeps some species from crossing into the eastern Bering Sea shelf and northward toward the Bering Strait.
But declining sea ice in and around the Bering Sea was said to be disrupting this phenomenon.
“2019 was the year that we saw the smallest cold pool of any year that we’ve done these surveys,” added Stevenson. “However, we saw a little bit more cold water in 2021, and even more so in 2022 … it looks like temperatures are moving back to the long-term mean.”
As a result, Stevenson reported that species showed encouraging signs that they might be increasing in numbers in the northern Bering Sea. Saffron cod, for example, also called tomcod, seems to be bouncing back after a few bad years. Their biomass was estimated to be 27,738 metric tons this year—a whopping 178% increase estimated last summer.
The researchers saw a similar pattern with Arctic cod, too: “It looks like the colder water is allowing them to come back into the Northern Bering Sea,” said Stevenson. The biomass of Arctic cod was estimated to be 387 metric tons, up 367% from 2021.
Similarly with blue king crabs, the researchers only recorded about 50 individuals last year, but collected about 150 this year.
The numbers are moving in the right direction, Stevenson concluded.
SUN
A fast-moving stream of solar wind is expected to hit Earth’s magnetic field on Nov 19 or 20.
It is flowing from an emerging hole in the sun’s atmosphere:
Sunspot AR3141 has a ‘beta-gamma’ magnetic field that harbors energy for M-class solar flares
[SDO/HMI].
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