After six weeks of darkness unbroken by so much as a single ray of golden sunlight, global warming threw a monkey into the wrench of tradition in Ilulissat, Greenland.
Beginning December 22 (the day after the date of winter solstice) Greenlanders look forward with steadily building anticipation to January 13 when the first rays of sunshine have historically come to spend a few minutes in their company.
Imagine their astonishment this year when, at approximately noon January 11, a full two days early, a few feeble photons illuminated the unsuspecting denizens of daytime darkness. Never mind that celebrations of the return of the big guy in the golden chariot were now going to be two days lateÂ… ignore the humiliation of politicians welcoming the first light two days after it arrivedÂ… forget that building excitement short-circuited is the let-down of the agesÂ… the true issue is: how did this happen?
Has axial precession taken a sudden lurch eastward? Was the EarthÂ’s crust swollen by the heat of global warming, raising the Greenlanders above the horizon? Did the earthÂ’s magnetic field wander afield and move the planetÂ’s axis center-ward? Did the peripatetic wanderings of the EarthÂ’s continents reach a tipping point, and suddenly leave too much mass on one side of the planet, causing irregularity in its rotation? No, none of those things happened.
However, in a different way global warming does appear to be the culprit (but it didnÂ’t expand the EarthÂ’s crust; itÂ’s the oceans that expand in the presence of heat, not the crust). What it did do was to raise GreenlandÂ’s mean temperature by three degrees centigrade (aka Celsius).
The upshot has been a melting of its glaciers severe enough that sunlight generally blocked from the western half of Greenland until January 13 can now reach those previously darkened climes two days earlier.
A useful graphic can be found in the linked Gizmodo article.
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Comments: 62 ( 9 removed by Chuck Larlham )
The Chinese have a saying, "May you live in exciting times." The only problem is the the Chinese character that means exciting also means dangerous.
If someone gives me a bottle of blended Scotch, I generally use it in my Scotch based cocktails.
Chuck and Norman
Lagavulin, 16 years is a really, peaty brand, but it is a bit pricey. If you are ever in New Zealand or if you find a liquor store that is unusual, Try Milford Sound Scotch whiskey. Several generations ago, a Scottish family moved to New Zealand. They found that there was everything there to distill Scotch whiskey, and it is a very mellow, single malt.
McClelland's is another distillery that is reasonably priced and quite good. It produces 6 different varieties, but if a liquor store carries it, they usually only carry 2 varieties (Isley and Speyside). The only other variety that I remember is Highlands, and as I recall, it is the most peaty. If you find a story that carries all of them, they are all good, and they are quite inexpensive.
(Laphroaig is too smoky for me)
I keep 7 or 8 different Scotches, and I select according to my mood. Laphroaig is one of my favorites when I want a peaty, smoky Scotch.
Funny thing, years ago there was an unexpected break at a convention I was attending, and six of us guys were standing around chatting. I said, "Why don't we have a beer tasting?" They said, "What do you mean, a beer tasting?" My reply was, "There is a liquor store just down the block. We all go down together, and each one buys 2 beers. There can't be any over-laps, and there can't be any "major near-beer."
We also bought a package of small paper cups, and every beer had to be poured out for 6 people. We took notes and graded each beer. Some of them have never had anything but Bud, Millers, Coors, etc., so they were tasting real beer for the first time. Four of them will only drink real beer since then.
My beer snob joke --
There is a brewers convention and in the afternoon there is a break. The CEO of Coors goes in and orders a Coors Lite, the CEO of Millers goes in and orders a Millers Lite, and the CEO of Bud goes in and orders a Bud Lite. The CEO of the Sierra Nevada Brewery goes in, looks around, and orders a Diet Pepsi. Everyone says, "Hey, what are you doing?" He said, "Well, I figured if you guys weren't going to drink beer, I wouldn't either."
"May we live in interesting times" indeed.
although i agree that this is awkward and needs to be looked into some more, i am skeptical that global warming may have been a trigger in its occurrence.
And yet... it did.
Are we getting warmer? Yuppers! Pass the Cuervo. Time to party some, and then go to the protest rally.
W
I can't speak for why this particular event with the early light occurred, but the issue with melting is that the Arctic has been in what some are calling a "death spiral." The total volume of ice has been decreasing for the last 15+ years. The explanation of the reduced height of the horizon is certainly plausible. I suspect there are quite a few scientists very interested in studying this further.
Even with warm air blowing on it, it would take forever to even look like it was doing anything - with the huge ice build up. But then once it all started to crumble, boy did it all go fast, in the end!
Everything between your first comment and this is gone.
I've told you to stay away from me, and I'm telling you again. DO NOT come back to my posts.
As for the "Martian ice caps melting", I found reference to this in National Geographic referring to a three year decline in the size of the polar CO2 caps of Mars. (They are not ice, but frozen carbon dioxide.) I don't pretend to understand the climate of another planet, but it's my understanding that this has only been observed for the last few years (three in the article). Such changes are thus at a completely different scale than Earth's, and are most probably unrelated.
Mars is a completely different planet with different physical dynamics. As I said in a recent post, correlation does not prove causation.
Even if everyone changes what they do now, in this modern world, it will not stop what is occurring. What do we do to help ourselves?
1. What do we do to identify those, forwhich it will be a crisis (or is already) and how do we get them out of the crisis zones?
2. How do we keep this action from becoming a crisis for those not in the crisis zone, but will be affected by the upsurge, possably in local populations due to the movement of people away from the zones of crisis?
3. What other possable effects will be encountered, and what are some ideas, and actions to take, or to avoid taking to either avert harm, or cushion blows of various sorts?
okay, it is not an absolute mathematical certainty that GW reducing the thickness of the ice sheet is the explanation of sunlight coming 2 days earlier at the little town in Greenland than ever before. But for GW to be the WRONG explanation, there has to be another explanation that makes sense. So far, no such explanation. GW has the "high ground" here as the correct explanation.
You can see the sun because the ice sheet is not there to be in the way anymore. I like it, it's simple. The simple explanation is indeed generally preferable.
Graham, it has not. The axis is exactly as it is supposed to be. And, the obvious question NO one seems to be asking is Why did the sun not set late in December. Any axis shift would have had to occur during the roughly 40 days that the sun does not rise above the horizon.
One other thing, according to the charts I found there is never a time of total darkness at 69 degrees 13 minutes north latitude. There is always at least 5 hours of twilight. That period runs from Early December to mid January. The other issue raised by the Astronomer was in regards to elevation changes in the ice cap allowing the sun to clear a lower horizon.
Hi
I live on Greenland, teach physics in a high scool. The early sunrise was reported on the national government television news on the 11th, the only tvchannel uphere. Its not a viral.
here is the webpage with the original picture:
http://knr.gl/index.php?id=183&tx_ttnewstt_news=63716&tx_ttnewsbackPid=143&cHash=f69d0f034b
I have found coordinates for google maps for you:
69.199976,-51.132116
I believe this is the exact point the picture was taken from, a hilltop south of town where everybody goes to sing songs, welcoming the sun on the 13th of january. The reason you cant find ilulissat on google is because its registered under the danish colonial name: Jacobshavn.
However be carefull when looking at the pics on google earth/maps cos the glacier(in-land-ice) has retreated a lot since those satellite pics where taken. I found a map on this website that is a bit more up to date:
http://www.33igc.org/coco/entrypage.aspx?t=programme&containerid=11169&parentid=11162&objectid=10883&guid=1&lnodeid=1&pageid=5026
The mountains seen on the famous picture are rock-formations on the other side of the fjord.
The sun rises almost due south. There are no glaciers in the way, at most there will be a few floating icebergs on the fjord. So the theory about shrinking glaciers falls.
I dont think the ground is rising soo much that it could cause the change. One of the places where the ground lifts the most because of a melted glacier is around the great lakes in north America. Here the lift is about 2,5 mm a year. So if you stand on your toes it would have a greater effect.
On the 13th when about 1000 people where gathered to sing the sun welcome (everyone that can walk out there from the town!), it was half an hour late!! Nearly everybody had gone home but at 13.35 it came up over the horizon. It was not seen on the 12th.
Thats gotta play a little trick on you mind if you are from a nation of natives where very few even get a high school education. Especially if the sun has come up there at the same time for countless generations.
I wish i could explain it with all my education..
Illulissat has been populated for more than 4000 years.
here is a picture from the 13th:
http://sermitsiaq.ag/indland/article70720.ece
from the same place.
I dont buy your theory on ice crystals since there should be fewer of them in the atmosphere as the temperature rises. If ice crystals would be the reason it would have been seen before.
A spike of methane seems more likely to me, since the permafrost meting over Russias tundras emits a lot of that into the atmosphere but i would very much like a better explanation than that..
Look forward to solving this mystery.
Like, if the ice has been slowly melting, wouldn't this have happened gradually? Since the sun didn't rise any earlier last year, that would leave a literal metric ton of ice to melt in one year.
I might have believed the global warming answer, if the last few years hadn't been so cold. We've gotten a record amount of snow, and everywhere in the US is getting record low temperatures. Since the snow would have needed to melt in one year, shouldn't the cold temperatures have kept it from melting? Also, glaciers take a LONG time to melt.
It seems just as unlikely that global warming is the cause of this strange event, and until someone measures the level of ice and provides irrefutable proof, I'm still remaining skeptical of this answer. It just seems wrong. There's no supporting proof, and even more questions.