Credit: coolantarctica.com
Natural climate variation is and always has been an ongoing process in Antarctica, just like everywhere else. Research suggests conditions similar to recent years prevailed about 850 years ago in at least one region.
– – –
Mosses, one of the few types of plants living in Antarctica, have a tenuous existence, threatened by advancing glaciers, says the U.S. National Science Foundation.
When glaciers move, they can entomb or cover a plant — starving it of light and warmth. Scientists have discovered that the timing of when a glacier killed a moss, the kill date, provides an archive of glacier history.
The date the plant died coincides with the time the glacier advanced over that location. As glaciers recede, the previously entombed mosses are exposed, now dead and black.
In U.S. National Science Foundation-supported research published in the Geological Society of America journal Geology, Dulcinea Groff of the University of Wyoming and colleagues determined kill dates by using radiocarbon dating of previously ice-entombed, dead black mosses to reveal that glaciers advanced during three distinct phases in the northern Antarctic Peninsula over the past 1,500 years.
“What’s so valuable about these kill dates compared to other records [such as the ages of glacial erratics or penguin remains] is their accuracy,” says Groff. They provide a clear picture of climate history.
“This study is important because it allows for a better understanding of climate history and the timing of glacier advance and retreat in the past by the novel application of precisely dating entombed mosses,” says Michael Jackson of NSF’s Office of Polar Programs.
Groff and colleagues collected black mosses around the northern Antarctic Peninsula by exploring the edges of glaciers at several locations. Then, by radiocarbon dating the mosses, they determined the phases of glacier advance. The finding is evidence for phases of cooler and potentially wetter conditions than today.
On Anvers Island, they learned that the last time the glacier was at its 2019 position was about 850 years ago. “We found that the glacier front with the fastest advance also had the fastest retreat, suggesting that hotspots of rapid coastal glacier dynamics occur in the Antarctic Peninsula,” says Groff.
Source here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
This was written:
to reveal that glaciers advanced during three distinct phases in the northern Antarctic Peninsula over the past 1,500 years.
Also, this was written:
On Anvers Island, they learned that the last time the glacier was at its 2019 position was about 850 years ago.
We know the height of the Medieval warm period was about a thousand years ago and that the Roman warm period was about two thousand years ago.
This shows the Arctic and the Antarctic have alternating warm and cold periods, but the alternating warm and cold periods have different lengths.
This shows the Arctic and the Antarctic have self-correcting, internal responses, that regulate the temperatures around a middle point, the same middle point, with the same results, but with different magnitudes.
To understand this, you must understand that this is all about ice, but ice is not included in your Climate Energy Balance diagrams or theory, not on any side of the debates. The theory is that the climate is in energy balance, such that, the incoming energy equals the outgoing IR, every day and any mismatch is an Energy Imbalance. The theory is that evaporation and snowfall and ice thawing happens inside the climate system, under the greenhouse umbrella and it can be disregarded. Most people on all sides of the debates accept this.
These studies about the mosses and Antarctic ice advance and retreat, combined with ice core records and history, all show that in warmest times the ice accumulations on the older sequestered ice is maximized during the warmest times and minimized during the coldest times. This indicates the thermostat setting is the temperature that the polar sea ice freezes and thaws and the control is the evaporation and snowfall. The result is more ice forming in warmest times and advancing and causing colder times which causes the formation of sea ice which stops the evaporation and snowfall. The result that follows is the ice continues to flow and keep the climate colder until the ice is depleted and the flow rate becomes less than the ice lost at the edges of ice sheets and glaciers. Ice then retreats and the sea ice is removed, then the cycle repeats.
Over this whole cycle the energy in and the IR out are dynamically balanced, but the IR out in the Warmest Times causes Cooling by Thawing Ice during the Coldest Times, this is not in daily static balance.
Cooling from ice thawing has occurred recently from ice that was formed using IR out 800 thousand years ago, the age of the oldest Antarctica ice core measurements.
These are very, very, long term balanced dynamic energy cycles. The long-term energy in, minus long-term albedo out, is equal to the long-term IR out.
To state this simple, it snows more in warmest times until more ice makes it colder and then it snows less in coldest times until less ice lets it get warmer.
In large major warm and cold times, the Arctic and Antarctic are in major phase because they share the same sea level. There were smaller cycles of warm and cold in the Arctic that did not show up in Antarctic during the long cold ice ages.
In the modern ten thousand years, the Arctic and Antarctic have smaller cycles that are independently regulated because the ratios of land to water is different, and the Arctic Ocean is surrounded by land, the Antarctic Ocean surrounds the land.
We need to “follow the science”, but long before these climate debates started, much of the science was settled before enough was known and all the sides on these debates have used:
“BAD, INCORRECT, SETTLED SCIENCE THAT DOES NOT INCLUDE THE ICE AND DOES NOT CONSIDER INTERNAL, THERMOSTAT CONTROLED TEMPERATURE REGULATION”
This does not address the tropics, which also has self-correcting internal regulation with thunderstorms and tropical storms that are constantly cooling, but the tropics have excess energy, which is sent in ocean currents to the polar regions to power the ice machines and the polar regions then send cooled water, actually near freezing water back to cool the tropics.
There is a lot of good science, but climate science cannot ever be right until ice is correctly understood.
Due to weather variability and variability in location and size, glaciers and ice sheets on the same land masses are not all in phase with each other.
There is no greenhouse blanket that causes worldwide correlations of all the different ice sheets and glaciers.
Look at the different advances and retreats, they are each controlled by evaporation and snowfall on their own ice sources, on the heads and tops of glaciers and tops of ice sheets, that cause the differences in advance and retreats that follow, “follow”, the phases of ice accumulations and losses that occur latter. The climate responds immediately to every change in energy input but much of the most significant results occur years, or even tens or hundreds or thousands of years later.
Snowfall uncertainties in the Antarctic…
New way to measure Antarctic snowfall helps predict the ice sheet’s survival
A new satellite finds a surprise: Atmospheric rivers of moisture can dump huge amounts of snow over Antarctica, and now we can track it incredibly closely.
PUBLISHED 4 MAR 2021
“What we don’t know is which effect will be more important as atmospheric rivers bring both extra heat and moisture to Antarctica. Will they cause more surface melt and possibly add to the ice shelf hydrofracturing? Or will they bring more extreme snowfall events” that add mass to the ice sheet? To learn more “we need more measurements at high precision”
https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conservation/2021/03/new-way-to-measure-antarctic-snowfall-helps-predict-the-ice
See also:
Antarctic Atmospheric River Climatology and Precipitation Impacts
First published: 27 March 2021
Key Points
Atmospheric rivers in Antarctica are rare events but are a key contributor to the ice sheet’s surface mass balance
Their impact on precipitation is most pronounced in East Antarctica where they are responsible for a majority of extreme precipitation events
Atmospheric rivers are contributing to modern snowfall trends and controlling overall precipitation variability across Antarctica
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2020jd033788
In other words, “give us more money because global warming”, right oldbrew?
In other words, “give us more money…”
You may think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment 😎
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
Oldbrew wrote:
“What we don’t know is which effect will be more important as atmospheric rivers bring both extra heat and moisture to Antarctica. Will they cause more surface melt and possibly add to the ice shelf hydrofracturing? Or will they bring more extreme snowfall events” that add mass to the ice sheet? To learn more “we need more measurements at high precision”
It may be true that some don’t know if warmer thaws more ice or rebuilds more ice.
I know, we have the Antarctic Ice Core Records with oldest ice at 800 thousand years old. The records indicate the age and depth of the tested samples. Subtract the depths and get ice increase and plot that with temperature on the time scale. The really oldest ice layers have thinned because most of that ice has thawed and cooled the climate for 800 thousand years. Not considered in climate theory or models, this is a dynamic system with cooling from IR out long ago, the climate is in dynamic balance over the long term but never in static balance, static balance only counts what happens every day and ice is not included.
Ice core records show that the ice on Antarctica, that is inside the ice cores, most of the ice was put there in warmest times and much less of the ice was put there in coldest times. Clearly, Antarctica would not be the largest store of ice on the Planet Earth without the warmest times when the Antarctic was thawed, when evaporation and most massive snowfall was possible.
One more wonderful thing, ice on Antarctica increased more and more in each warmer time period in the ice core records and Antarctica did not give ice back other than enough to form sea ice when it was satisfied for a while. The ice has gained over millions of years. When we came out of the last major ice age something different happened, something different from all the changes for millions, billions of years. As we came out of the ice age 20 thousand years ago, the warming into another major warm time with sea levels much deeper than now, the warming stopped 10 thousand years ago, and the climate did not continue into major warming.
For 10 thousand years we have had alternating warm and cold periods with much tighter bounds and sea level changes with much tighter bounds.
Major ice ages and warm periods changed with huge volumes of ocean water becoming ice on land in the Northern Hemisphere, alternating with most of that ice thawing and going back into the oceans. That last part stopped, yes, the northern hemisphere ice went back into the oceans, but not Greenland and many other places in the northern hemisphere, many places kept a lot of ice. This was different from ever before.
Antarctica had finally accumulated enough ice to prevent another major warm time, therefore another major ice age is also prevented. A huge volume of water that became ice and returned to the oceans during previous major cycles, has been removed from the northern hemisphere and sequestered safely on Antarctica.
This is the new normal, no more major warm periods, no more major ice ages, what has been happening for ten thousand years will continue for many thousands, maybe millions of years into the future.
[…] Tallbloke’s Talkshop […]
One of the most significant outcomes of this study was that there is an alternating warm and cold cycle in Antarctica that has a shorter time period between cycles.
That information has been available since the ice core records were first published.
They published it as a new discovery, makes headlines!
The fact that it confirms ice core records would not make headlines, and it appears they never even studied ice core records.
One of the most significant outcomes of this study was that there is an alternating warm and cold cycle in Antarctica that has a shorter time period between cycles than alternating warm and cold cycles in the polar north, actually, they had not even noticed that, watch for a retraction, that disputes global greenhouse uniform control of the climate.
Paper: Introducing CRYOWRF v1.0: multiscale atmospheric flow simulations with advanced snow cover modelling
Published: 30 Jan 2023
Abstract
Accurately simulating snow cover dynamics and the snow–atmosphere coupling is of major importance for topics as wide-ranging as water resources, natural hazards, and climate change impacts with consequences for sea level rise. We present a new modelling framework for atmospheric flow simulations for cryospheric regions called CRYOWRF.
https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/16/719/2023/
It has been much colder and much warmer than now in Antarctica, recorded in ice core records. What has happened will happen. Any untested and unproven model that forecasts different is wrong. Warmer will increase ice accumulation and colder will decrease ice accumulation.