TheSnowpit.com News Blog

Return from India, Denial that Spring has Sprung

• National Snow and Ice Data Center Discovers Sensor Drift Error in Ice Estimation (Ooops)
• Microbes under Antarctic glacier discovered
• International Polar Year spawns snowflake tracking project
• Reindeer herders obtain high-tech snow tracking abilities

Well, I return from the heat of India only to discover winter is over and spring in Canada has begun. Wah! My first Canadian winter was great, I hope for many more.

But, to remain in denial, let's talk about some ice. First of all, our friend Slashdot reports that the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who are essentially at the forefront of depicting the effects of global warming on ice recession, have discovered an error due to sensor drift in their calculations.

Essentially, by using older SSM/I data to track sea ice, the researchers overestimated the direness of the sea ice melting situation. And, they had people calling them asking why they were showing open ocean at areas in which the newer AMSR-E data showed healthy sea ice. By using the older data, NSIDC can track ice over longer periods, but by doing so they missed that 2009 sea ice extent is actually bigger than 2005-2008.

Go figure.

Speaking of actually receding ice, reindeer herders are having a tough time finding adequate climate for their charges. Help has come, however, in the form of an organization called Polar View, supported from groups like the European Commission and the European and Canadian Space Agencies. Polar View, quite simply, provides useful maps and other information to reindeer herders to help predict where the snow line will be.

The International Polar Year (yes, that just ended in March, for all of you who've been in the closet) has not only inspired projects -- like the reindeer herding maps -- for tracking snow on a global scale, but also for tracking snow on a micro scale...

...For that, NASA has started a program called HOW (the History of Winter) which, among other educational things, contains the Global Snowflake Network. You too can discover cool snowflakes out there, record them, and sent them in to be immortalized for a NASA-scale eternity.

And finally, microbes have been discovered in the water flowing out from the base of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica. We've already been over why ice is important to life, particularly for exposed harsh areas like Mars and the Poles.

This discovery of microbes under a glacier is cool for two reasons. First, it is a pretty primitive environment, and can give clues about how life thrived before good oxygen supplies existed, much less highways and Coca-Cola. Second, as researcher Jill Mikucki says about glaciers:

“People said there wasn’t life,” she said. “The paradigm has shifted. People now see glaciers as ecosystems.”

And that's it, folks, the beginning-of-not-spring news roundup. Get it while it's cold.