Category Archives: Oceanography

Greenland Glacier-Driven Ocean Circulation

Posted on November 16, 2022 by | Leave a comment

Greenland’s coastal glaciers melt, shrink, and add to globally rising sealevel. They also drive local ocean currents that move icebergs around unless they are stuck on the bottom. The glaciers’ melt is cold fresh water while the adjacent ocean is both salty and warm. Checking on what we may expect against observations, I here use data from NASA’s Ocean Melts Greenland initiative that dropped ocean probes from an airplane into the ice waters off coastal Greenland to measure ocean temperature and salinity.

For six years these data show how the coastal ocean off Greenland varies from location to location next to glaciers as well as from year to year. More specifically, I picked Melville Bay in North-West Greenland for both its many glaciers and many dropped NASA ocean sensors. The ocean data allow me to estimate ocean currents by using a 100 year old physics method. I just taught this to a small class of undergraduate science students at the University of Delaware. My students are strong in biology, but weak on ocean physics. This essay is for them.

Melville Bay is a coastal area off north-west Greenland between the town of Upernavik (Kalaallisut in Greenlandic) near 73 N latitude where 1100 people live and the village of Savissivik (Havighivik in Inuktun) at 76 N latitude where 60 Inuit live. There are no other towns or settlements between these two villages that are about as far apart as Boston is from Philadelphia, PA. Imagine there were no roads from Boston to New York to Philadelphia but only one large glacier next to another large glacier. This is Melville Bay.

Below I show an excellent set of photos of Savissivik by a French husband and wife team who visited in 2013/14. Their photographic gallery captures elements of contemporary subsistence living in remote Greenland where animals like seals, birds, fish, narwhal, and polar bears provide food, fuel, clothing, and income.

NASA dropped some 50 ocean sensors into Melville Bay froma plane during the short summer seasons each year 2016 through 2021. I met NASA pilots, engineers, and scientists doing their experiments when I was doing mine from a snowmobile in April of 2017 and again with Danish friends from a Navy ship in August of 2021, but these are stories for another day.

Let me start with a map of where NASA dropped their ocean profiling floats into Melville Bay and thus introduce the data. While the surface waters are usually near the freezing point, waters 300-400 meters deep down are much warmer. They originate from the Atlantic Ocean to the south and one of the goals of NASA’s “Ocean Melts Greenland” campaigns was to determine if and how these Atlantic waters reach the coastal glaciers. Most glaciers of Melville extend into this warm ocean layer and thus are melted by the ocean.

In the map above I paint the maximal temperatures in red and the bottom depths in blue tones. The profile on the right shows data for all depths at one station. As salinity increases uniformly (red curve) the temperature increases to a maximum near 300-m depth (black curve). It is this maximal subsurface temperature that I extract for each station and then put on the contour and station map on the left. The straight blue line connects Upernavik in the south with Sassivik in the north. It is an arbitrary line, coast-to-coast cutting across Melville Bay.

The warmest warm waters we find near Upernavik in the south and within a broad submarine canyon that brings even warmer waters from Baffin Bay towards the coast. Temperatures here exceed 2.4 or even 2.7 degrees Celsius. Most coastal waters along Melville Bay have a temperature maximum of about 1.5 to 1.8 degrees Celcius (about 35 Fahrenheit) and this “warm Atlantic” ocean water melts the coastal glaciers. The ocean melts the glaciers summer and winter while the warm air melts it only in summer.

There is more, because the glaciers’ melt also discharge fresh water into the ocean where it mixes to to form a layer of less dense or buoyant water. The buoyant waters create a local sealevel that is a little higher along the coast than farther offshore. The map above indicates that this “little higher sealevel” comes to about 4 cm or 2 inches. If this pressure difference across the shore is balanced by the Coriolis force, as it often does, then an along-shore coastal current results. This coastal current would move all icebergs from south to north unless they get stuck on the bottom. Along the northern coastline of Melville Bay the surface flow is from east to west. The coastal current is strongest near Savissivik where we find a (geostrophic) surface current larger than 40 cm/s. At that speed an iceberg would move more than 21 miles per day. Such strong surface flows are exceptional and diminish rapidly with depth. Hence a freely floating iceberg with a draft of several hundred meters would move much slower than the surface current.

I met a hunter from Savissivik in April of 2017 and for a fast-moving night we discussed the state of local fishing, hunting, living, traveling, and working on the sea ice next to the glaciers of Melville Bay. He invited me to become his apprentice. As such I would now ask him about the surface currents outside his home. Which way does he observe the icebergs to move in summer or winter? Has hunting on the sea ice in winter changed over his life time? When is it safe to travel there with a dog-sled? Could he and I perhaps work together during the spring to deploy ocean sensors through the sea ice? I am dreaming again …

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Posted in Arctic Glacier, Greenland, Oceanography, Thule

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Ice, ocean, and glacier change in northern Greenland

Posted on April 7, 2022 by | Leave a comment

Steffen Olsen is a Danish physical oceanographer with a skill to present beauty to an artist like my wife and a scientist like me. Three days ago he posted a photo on Twitter with these words

“Local hunters from Qaanaaq navigating our CTD system in the frozen ice mélange in front of Tracy Galcier 66W 77N to measure the ocean below. Heat loss to melting of glacial ice leaves the ocean at sub-zero temperatures down to 400m @arctic_passion @dmidk @ruth_mottram“

Photo: Dogsled from Qaanaaq near the northern edge of Tracy Gletscher in Inglefield Fjord April 2022. [Credit: Dr. Steffen Olsen, Danish Meteorological Institute.]

Steffen’s photo shows his study area, research platform, and mode of transportation. There is a glacier in the background between the rocks on the left (north) and unseen mountains to the right (south). Equally unseen is the ocean under all this crushed and broken and piled up sea ice covered by fresh snow. We see tracks of people walking to the vantage point from where the photo is taken. The dogs rest on a small patch of level sea ice perhaps 3-5 feet (1 to 1.5 meters) thick.

There are boxes on the sled that contain gear to drill through the sea ice and then to send a probe down towards the ocean bottom to measure ocean temperature, saltiness, and oxygen during its decent. I did similar work with a snowmobile in 2017 based at Thule Air Base for 6 weeks. Steffen and I work together on such data. He collected these every year since 2011 both adjacent to Tracy Gletscher and along most of the ~120 km long and ~1000 meter deep fjord. I am grateful to Steffen to share this photo: It helps me to focus on my passions rather than my outrage at soldiers and leaders of the Russian Federation in their war to destroy Ukraine and its people building a free, vibrant, and democratic country for themselves. There is more, but I stop here now.

Let me start with a map of where in Greenland the photo was taken and where Steffen collected his data each since 2011. The red star in the insert top-right shows the location of the map between Canada and Greenland. I color ocean bottom depths in blue shades and land heights in green, yellow, and brown shades. The glacier in Steffen’s photo is at the north-eastern end of Inglefield Fjord where I placed the label Tracy. The label Qaanaaq shows where about 650 Inughuit live along the coast near the center of the fjord. It probaby took the dogs about 2-3 days to travel with their cargo from Qaanaaq to Tracy Gletscher. Red dots are stations served by a Danish Navy ship in the summer of 2015, but I here only talk about the blue dots.

Figure: Map of the study area with ocean sampling stations in Inglefield Fjord (blue dots) and adjacent northern Baffin Bay. [Unpublished own work.]

The blue dots are stations where Steffen and his companions drilled through the sea ice in 2018. Note that some of those ocean stations appear on land. This cannot be, but the glacier has retreated between the time the topographic data was collected and 2018 when Steffen collected the ocean data. Three LandSat satellite images below show how the glacier changed from 1973 to July and August of 2021. Icebergs are visible, too. A citizen scientist with the handle “Espen” at the Arctic Sea Ice Forum extracted these satellite photos from public U.S. databases. He is part of an online international community of Greenland and sea ice enthusiasts who posts at this forum for over a decade making daily discovers. These are people with regular jobs that in their spare time post satellite imagery and open data they found which they share openly often with insightful interpretations. It is citizen science at its very best. I go there often to read, ask, and learn. I even met a prominent member once for lunch when visiting Copenhagen on my way to Greenland. He gifted me LandSat imagery of my favorite glaciers printed on cloth that I framed for its scientific and artistic beauty. Thank you, Espen 😉

Gallery: Space photography (LandSat) of glaciers terminating from the Greenland ice sheet in Inglefield Fjord in 1973 (right), July 2021 (center), and August 2021 showing the retreat of Tracy but not Heilprin Gletscher. [Credit: Espen Olsen at Arctic Sea Ice Forum.]

So how does the ocean below all this ice next to a glacier look? Well, lets look at a set of station from Qaanaaq to Tracy Gletscher that shows how temperature, salinity, and oxygen of the water changes both with depth and along the fjord. We always find very cold, somewhat fresher, and highly oxygenated water near the ocean surface about 40 m (near glacier) to 100 m (near Qaanaaq) below the sea ice and warmer, saltier, and less oxygenated water below with a temperature maximum of 1 degree Celsius near 300 m depth. It is this warm water that melts the adjacent glacier. As Dr. Olsen says “… Heat loss to melting of glacial ice leaves the ocean at sub-zero temperatures …” In other words, the deeper waters 1. enter the fjord at temperatures above zero degrees Centigrade, 2. reach the glacier, 3. cool down as they melt the glacier, and 4. leave the fjord at temperatures below zero degrees Centigrade. This is why the two stations near the glacier show slightly fresher and cooler waters between 300 and 500 m depth. This water contains the glacial melt. The section represents the 10 year average from 2011 through 2020.

Figure: Section of salinity (bottom), temperature (center), and dissolved oxygen (top) along Inglefield Fjord as an average of data collected annually between 2011 and 2020. [Unpublished own work.]

Earlier this year I tried to visit Copenhagen to finish this work that places this emerging story into both a historical and spatial context, but Covid restrictions derailed this and other plans. Nevertheless, have excellent data from 1928 when this fjord was first surveyed by Danish oceanographers. At that time the waters had dramatically different temperatures (much colder) and salinities (a little fresher) both inside the fjord and in Baffin Bay adjacent to it. The changes are probably related to a much changed sea ice cover and perhaps ocean circulation that relates how the winds impact the ocean with and without sea ice. For the 1979 to present satellite record, we can quantify how much sea ice covers both the fjord and adjacent ocean. I made the graph below last week from 14073 almost daily satellite images whose data the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center distributes freely. I show annual averages for each of the 42 years that these SSM/I satellites have been measuring sea areal coverage from space.

Figure: Annual averages of sea ice cover 1979 through 2021 with linear trend lines for two 21-year subsets (blue) and the entire 42-year record (red). [Unpublished own work.]

Before the year 2000 the sea ice cover fluctuated between 26,000 and 39,000 km2 and if one for how these changes are trending between 1979 and 2002, one finds a slight increase in the blue line, however, this increase is not significantly different from zero at a high 95% level of confidence. For the second period after 2002, the ice covered area fluctuates much less, from about 22,000 to 28,000 km2 and the trend line in blue now indicates decreasing sea ice cover. As before, however, this blue trend line is no different from zero at the same high level of confidence. We also notice that there is a red trend line that I derive from using all 42 years of data. This line is very different and statistically significant, but it does not quiet do justice to the almost step-like change that appears to happen around 2000 through 2005. What happened then? I do not know, yet, but this is the fun of doing science: There is always more to discover. The sea ice cover in northern Greenland does not always follow a straight line. This is not different from our climate or life. Expect the unexpected, adjust, and keep moving. Or in Dr. Olsen’s words:

“… you have a number of years where conditions don’t follow the more linear track of (predicted) scenarios,” explained Dr. Olsen. “A warming tendency can be reversed for some years, for example.” [From https://phys.org, Oct.-13, 2021]

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Waves Across the Pacific

Posted on January 11, 2021 by | 2 comments

Claudia Schreier is a sophomore at the University of Delaware. She majors in Chemical Engineering with a minor in Marine Sciences. Ms. Schreier’s essay emerged from an assignment in an undergraduate “Introduction to Ocean Science” class taught by Drs. K. Billups and A. Muenchow in the fall of 2020. ~A. Muenchow, Editor

The 1967 documentary “Waves Across the Pacific” highlights some of the first uses of high-tech measuring tools and novel techniques to discover how waves move across the Pacific Ocean. Dr. Walter Munk and his research team studied how wave energy from storms off Antarctica is lost as waves move across the equator towards Alaska. This was the first time that anyone collected and reported data for wave processes on a global scale.

Dr. Munk in 1963 (UC San Diego Library)

The vessel that the team used for this expedition was fascinating; it is called FLIP, and it is a mobile floating instrument platform standing 355 feet tall, providing both the space and stability for the laboratory and its equipment. Waves originating from Antarctica reached New Zealand, and then moved farther in every direction within the Pacific Ocean. Recording stations were located in New Zealand, Samoa, Palmyra (an uninhabited equatorial atoll), Hawaii, and Alaska. In the North Pacific without suitable islands between Hawaii and Alaska, FLIP was used for wave measurements. Dr. Munk’s headquarters and central wave station for the experiment was in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The Floating Instrument Platform (Smithsonian Ocean)

Dr. Munk originally hypothesized that most of the wave energy coming from Antarctica would be scattered in the equatorial Trade Wind regions, therefore preventing most Antarctic waves from reaching the North Pacific. However, the data revealed little energy loss as the waves crossed the equator. The team discovered, though, that wave attenuation, or the loss of energy, results from interactions of waves from the same storm near its generation region off Antarctica only. Furthermore, the interactions between such waves weakened as they traveled away from the generation region through wave dispersion. This means that waves of different frequencies can travel at different speeds, therefore sorting them, because long waves move faster than shorter ones. Because of this data and new understanding, Dr. Munk could predict surfing conditions in Hawaii from prior observations off Samoa! The data and methodology from this experiment became the cornerstone of many subsequent studies to predict waves.

Recording stations from the study (Munk 2013)

The documentary film captured not only research methods but also life in the 1960s. I appreciated this look back in time, and it got me thinking about women in ocean sciences. In the film, all of the research scientists were men, and no women participated in the project whatsoever. The scientific community has come a long way since then, with more women participating and leading in both science and technology, as well as leading their fields, than ever before. The film helped me to realize that my interest in science and the opportunities to pursue a career within it has been aided by the efforts of countless women who have come before me.

This documentary also made me hopeful in a curious way that I did not expect from a marine science documentary. Dr. Munk was unsure about many things in this study, including the novel technology, remote measuring locations, and even the validity of the experiment itself. Amassing over 10 million data points, he found both the purpose and the results he was seeking for this research in the face of uncertainty. This documentary gave me a fresh take on ocean sciences, and it does more than just explain the brilliant research done in the 1960s: there are still many things we do not know about the world, but with the spirit and drive of Dr. Munk, there is no limit to what can be discovered.

A link to the film: https://waltermunkfoundation.org/uncategorized/waves-across-the-pacific/

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Posted in History, Oceanography, waves

Rotations, Spin, and People

Posted on August 23, 2020 by | Leave a comment

I hate to rotate. It makes me sick. And yet, every day I spin at 800 miles per hour, because living on a spinning earth does this to me. Why does the earth spin at all? [CalTech answer.] Did it always spin the way it does now? [No.] Could it spin in the other direction that would make the sun rise above the horizon in the West rather than the East? [No.] If not, why not? [Not sure yet.] I am pondering these questions as I will teach my first undergraduate class in ten days:

I plan to introduce how oceans and atmospheres circulate to distribute heat, water, and “stuff” like food and plastics across the globe. There is lots of rotation, lots of angular momentum, lots of torque and I am unsure, if a text book and lecture via Zoom will make much sense. So, today I discovered several fun and smart and insightful videos that I may even pose to my students as Homework or Exam questions 😉

The first set of videos I discovered today is Derek Muller’s Veritasium channel on YouTube. He covers a range of physics, math, and even biology topics, but I here focus on his wing nut problem. He entertains by explaining a strange and even bizarre observation made in space some 30 years ago. A Russian engineering astronaut noticed a rotating wing nut change its rotational axis repeatedly. Russia kept the observation top secret for over 10 years for reasons not entirely clear, but here is a modern attempt to explain what happened. It also applies to how tennis rackets rotate:

Now this reminded me of a problem that I encountered during my third year studying physics in Germany. I never solved or understood this so-called spinning-hard-boiled-egg problem that the Physics Girl describes so well. Her real name is Dianne Cowern and I use her videos in my graduate statistics class where her voice and physics shatters wine glasses via resonance. Today I discovered many more of her PBS Digital videos that all are filled with fun, beauty, and smart explanations. She plays with vortices in air and water and in between.

Now how does this relate to oceanography and meteorology? Well, we all live somewhere on the spinning top or egg or peanut that we call earth. Gravity keeps us grounded, but rotating objects can do strange things as the above two videos show. And when rotation becomes important we are not just dealing with linear momentum, but also angular momentum. When rotation becomes important, we must consider torques that generate angular momentum in ways similar to how forces generate linear momentum.

Rotation adds a strong and often counter-intuitive element because unlike a force that accelerates a car in the same direction that the force is applied, a force applied to a rotating system generates a torque perpendicular to both the force and the direction to the rotational axis. This can be confusing and one has to either watch the movies or go through advanced vector calculus. Furthermore, a rotating sphere acts differently than a rotating spheroid which acts differently from a rotating triaxial spheriod. Our peanut earth is the latter and thus has at least three axes of orientation (a and b and c) that all have different kinetic energy and angular momentum states. This makes for wobbly rotations which are sensitive to changes in both force balances and the distribution of masses like ice and water that can move to different locations at different times and stay there for a while.

For a perfect sphere three perpendicular lines from the center to the surface all have the same distance a (top) while for a spheriod only two of the three perpendicular lines have the same distance from the center (bottom right). If all three perpendiculars are different then we have something called a triaxial spheroid [Adapted from WikiPedia].

And how does this relate to climate science and my beloved glaciers in Greenland? Well, there is the “global wobbling” that caused ice ages and warm periods as the earth’s principal axis or rotation changes or wobbles. The “global wobble” was discussed in hilarious way a few years ago by the United States House of Representative’s “Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.” Closing this essay, I let Jon Steward of the Comedy Channel speak and hope you find his commentary and live experiment as funny as I do:

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Posted in Global Warming, Greenland, Oceanography, Uncategorized

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Scoresby Sund – Greenland’s Longest Fjord

Posted on July 12, 2019 by | 3 comments

Fog, fog, and more fog is all we saw as we approached Scoresby Sund aboard the German research ship Maria S. Merian from Denmark Strait to the south-east. The fog lifted as soon as we passed Kap Brewster and began work on ocean currents and waters at the entrance of this massive fjord system. My artist friend and wife Dragonfly Leathrum posted a wonderful travel essay with many photos that did not include these:

Marine layer at the entrance of Scoresby Sund on Aug.-20, 2018. Photo by Dragonfly Leathrum]
Fog at noon on Aug.-20, 2018 to the south of Scoresby Sund. [Photo by Dragonfly Leathrum]
Kap Brewster in the clouds (foreground) at the southern entrance to Scoresby Sund. View is to the north-west into the entrance of the fjord. In the background the northern shores are visible behind the iceberg. [Photo by Dragonfly Leathrum]
Evening sun on mountains on the Volquart Boons Kyst in Scoresby Sund on August 20, 2018. [Photo by Dragonfly Leathrum]
Kap Brewster at the southern entrance of Scoresby Sund on Aug.-20, 2018. View is to the south-east out to the open foggy sea. [Photo by Dragonfy Leathrum]

We were here to explore how the coastal ocean off Greenland may relate to Daugaard-Jensen Gletscher at the head of the fjord some 360 km away (195 nautical miles or about a day of constant steaming at 8 knots). This tidewater glacier discharges as much icy mass out to sea as does Petermann Gletscher or 79N Glacier to the north or half as much as Helheim, Kangerdlugssuaq, and Jacobshavn Glaciers to the south. Unlike all those other glaciers, Daugaard-Jensen and its fjord are still largely unexplored.

Location Map of Scoresby Sund. Kap Brewster is at bottom right while Daugaard-Jensen Gletscher 360 km away is near the top left.

Location Map of Scoresby Sund. Kap Brewster is at bottom right while Daugaard-Jensen Gletscher 360 km away is near the top left.

Part of the chart of the East Greenland coast drawn up by William Scoresby Jr. in 1822, showing the numerous features that he names in Liverpool land (Liverpool Coast) and adjacent areas. From: Scoresby (1823)

Part of the chart of the East Greenland coast drawn up by William Scoresby Jr. in 1822, showing the numerous features that he names in Liverpool land (Liverpool Coast) and adjacent areas. From: Scoresby (1823)

While the entrance between Kap Tobin and Kap Brewster was known to whalers in the early 19th century, it was William Scoresby Sr. after whom the fjord is named. His scientist son William Scoresby Jr. mapped coastal Greenland between 69.5 and 71.5 North latitude during his last voyage in 1822. Nobody entered the fjord until 1891 when Lt. Carl Ryder of the Danish Navy sailed deep into the fjord to explore the area for a year with 10 companions. They built a hut next to a natural port that they named Hekla Harbor. Amazingly, they also measured ocean temperature profiles almost every month from the surface to 400 m depth. I found these data at the National Ocean Data Center of the United States Government.

Ocean temperature (left panel) and salinity (right panel) as it varies with depth in different years. Blue represents measurements from 1891/92, red from 1990, and black from 2018.

Ocean temperature (left panel) and salinity (right panel) as it varies with depth in different years. Blue represents measurements from 1891/92, red from 1990, and black from 2018.

Searching for data from Scoresby Sund, I found 17 profiles of water temperature with data from at least 10 depths. Funny that 12 of these profiles were collected in 1891 and 1892 while the other 5 profile contain salinity measurements made in 1933, 1984, 1985, 1988, and 2002. The 1988 cast was taken by an Icelandic vessel and also contained continous data from a modern electronic sensor rather than waters collected by bottles. I “found” another 4 modern sensor profiles collected in 1990 at the Alfred-Wegener Institute in Germany.

That’s pretty much “it” … until we entered the fjord in 2018 when we collected another 27 casts thus more than doubling the ocean profiles. More exciting, though, is the very large shift in ocean temperatures from 1990 to 2018. The 1990 temperatures are very similar to the 1891/92 temperatures, but all old temperatures (also from 1933 and 1985, not shown) are all about 1 degree Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than those we measured in 2018. Why is this so? Does such warming originate from outside the fjord? If so, how does the warmer Atlantic water at depth in deep water crosses the 80 km wide shallow continental shelf to enter Scoresby Sund? Are any of these ideas supported by actual data? What data are there?

Ocean data location off eastern Greenland collected from 1890 to 2010 that reside in NODC archives. Red are water bottle data while yellow are modern electronic sensor measurements. The white box bottom left is the entrance to Scoresby Sund. Light blue areas are water less than 500 m deep while dark blue shades are deeper than 1000 m.

Ocean data location off eastern Greenland collected from 1890 to 2010 that reside in NODC archives. Red are water bottle data while yellow are modern electronic sensor measurements. The white box bottom left is the entrance to Scoresby Sund. Light blue areas are water less than 500 m deep while dark blue shades are deeper than 1000 m.

Discoveries in science can be pretty basic, if one is at the right location at the right time with the right idea. Also, there is more data to the south that I did not yet look at to investigate the question of what causes the warming of bottom waters in Scoresby Sund.

EDIT Dec.-31, 2019: Replace “warmer” with “cooler” when comparing 1891 and 1990 (cooler) to 2018 (warmer) water temperatures.

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Posted in Greenland, History, Oceanography, Polar Exploration

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