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Rubber Duckies For Global Warming Research
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Nov 16, 2008 07:51 PM
from the next-time-try-penguins dept.
from the next-time-try-penguins dept.
The Wall Street Journal has a look at global warming research using rubber duckies. The toys have been employed in tracking ocean currents since 1992; but recently NASA robotics expert Alberto Behar released 90 yellow rubber ducks into the melt water flowing down a chasm in a Greenland glacier. "Each duck was imprinted with an email address and, in three languages, the offer of a reward. If all goes well, Dr. Behar hopes that one day they will emerge 30 miles or so away at the glacier's edge in the open water of Disko Bay near Ilulissat, bobbing brightly amid the icebergs north of the Arctic Circle, each one a significant clue to just how warming temperatures may speed the glacier's slide to the sea."
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Science: Thousands of Rubber Ducks to Finally End Journey 210 comments
Bert de Jong writes "The Daily Mail reports that thousands of rubber ducks who have traveled the seas of the world since 1992 are about to end their journey. After escaping out of a container fallen off a Chinese freight ship in a storm, scientists have been followed them on their fifteen year trek. This has turned out to be an invaluable source of information for studying ocean currents. Now it seems inevitable though that they will finally land on the shores of South-West England. '[Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer] correctly predicted what many thought was impossible - that thousands of them would end up washed into the Arctic ice near Alaska, and then move at a mile a day, frozen in the pack ice, around their very own North-West Passage to the Atlantic. It proved true years later and in 2003, the first Friendly Floatees were found, frozen and then thawed out, on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and Canada. So precious to science are they that the US firm that made them is offering a £50 bounty for finding one.'"
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Idle: 130,000 Inflatable Breasts Have Been Lost At Sea 5 comments
pomke writes "According to WAtoday, 'More than 130,000 inflatable breasts have been lost at sea en route to Australia.
Men's magazine Ralph was planning to include the boobs as a free gift with its January issue.
The cargo is worth about $200,000, which is another blow for publisher ACP's parent company PBL, which is already in $4.3 billion of debt.'
I wonder if they could be used for Global Warming Research?"
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Dupe (Score:5, Informative)
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Yea I posted on the other one that if they'd just throw more ducks and plastic and crap in there'd be no evaporation and no glowbull worming.
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I think the dupe is intentional. They're actually going to post this story another 88 times and see if any of the other versions end up being read by a different demographic.
Irony. (Score:5, Funny)
Raise your hand if the prospect of an environmentalist dumping plastic into the ocean for research purposes is deeply amusing.
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I'm still waiting for one of them to propose creating the biggest CO2 emitting burner on earth to prove global warming.
In the meantime, yeah I'm amused.
Rubber duckie, you're the one. (Score:5, Funny)
Rubber duckie, you're so fun.
Re:Rubber duckie, you're the one. (Score:5, Funny)
You make bathtime lots of fun. Rubber ducky I'm awfully fond of you. Too bad I must now go litter our oceans with your cute little yellow non-biodegradable petroleum product carcasses.
Parent
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKheYay-2MU [youtube.com]
Shortly afterwards (Score:2, Funny)
Great idea, it's happened before by accident (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure this is where he got the idea.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-464768/Thousands-rubber-ducks-land-British-shores-15-year-journey.html
Re:Great idea, it's happened before by accident (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed, it was a shipment of such bath tub toys washed overboard in the Pacific during a 1992 storm that accidentally launched this unusual field.
Parent
What do they expect to prove with this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What do they expect to prove with this? (Score:4, Interesting)
How long it takes is rather important.
Parent
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In that case, they probably wouldn't learn much about glacier melt, but they could learn something about the ocean currents in the region.
Re:What do they expect to prove with this? (Score:5, Interesting)
They're not only wondering where the water goes, but how long it takes to get there and where it goes after that.
If they all come out at once then we know the routes they all took about the same route, or the routes they took were all more or less direct. If they emerge over years or even decades then we know some are becoming trapped, only to be released later. What if a duck washes up in India, twelve years after it was released in Greenland?
They're interested in knowing *everything* that could happen to these ducks after they're released. Furthermore, data from this experiment could confirm or falsify other oceanographic theories, all for $200 worth of rubber ducks.
Parent
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This is showmanship, not science (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
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The melt waters flowing under the glacier and through small streams will flow through gravels and other obstructions that the rubber duckies can't flow through. Thus, any data coming back will have a huge caveat hanging over it and will be rather useless from a scientific point of view.
Huh? If data comes back, it's because the ducks made it through the obstructions, which is scientifically interesting; people may see where the ducks emerge into the ocean, which is scientifically interesting; and if anyone finds the ducks later, they will indicate where the ocean currents from the glacier goes, which is scientifically interesting.
Radioactive tracers etc can give far better information.
I don't know about radioactive tracers, but the article says that another scientist tried dye and it didn't work — they couldn't find any trace of it. I d
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Hmm, sounds like a job for the alternate scientific method at Mythbusters.
Yes, but what if (Score:2, Funny)
This is all fun and games until the Italians get a hold of the ducks and hold them for ransom. Then our world will have no defense against global warming. What will these "scientists" be saying when the Italians control our weather with their nefarious ices?????
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Spam begets research begets spam (Score:5, Funny)
"This duck was lost by a Nigerian prince. Email this address to claim your reward."
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"This duck was lost by a Nigerian prince. Email this address to claim your reward."
Ha ha! Like anyone would believe that a Nigerian prince could have accidentally lost a rubber duck in Greenland (AND that he could have been so long-headed that he had written a message in advance) and reply...oh, wait a minute...
NASA's shoddy (fraudulent?) work (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's publish the rubber duckies for Global Warming Research and ignore Goddard Institute for Space Studies of NASA headed by James Hansen which published falsified data [telegraph.co.uk]. James Hansen is a global warming alarmist.
A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.
This is simply another proof that the mainstream media is no longer interested in facts or reporting unbiased news, just like during the election of the Anointed One. Rather, they simply parrot agendas that fit their own opinion.
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Im just glad to see that California with their wildfires are doing their part to reverse this cooling trend...
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Re:NASA's shoddy (fraudulent?) work (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's publish the rubber duckies for Global Warming Research and ignore Goddard Institute for Space Studies of NASA headed by James Hansen which published falsified data.
I hate to break it to you, but making a clerical mistake is not the same as "falsifying data".
This is simply another proof that the mainstream media is no longer interested in facts or reporting unbiased news
Uh, no, it's a sign that quickly-fixed data reporting errors which have no impact on any major climate studies are not front page news.
I also hate to break it to you, but minor errors are found and fixed in scientific data sets all the time. It's only news when the data error is the basis for some important scientific conclusion. (That has been the case, for instance, with the XBT ocean thermometers and the UAH satellite data.)
Your post is a prime example of how ridiculously polarized the global warming debate has become. You're grasping at straws, man. A mistake in two month's data reporting, which has nothing to do with James Hansen personally, is not a global scientific conspiracy nor a disproof of global warming.
just like during the election of the Anointed One
Anointed One? Yeah, you really sound like an impartial arbiter of scientific accuracy. You might want to tone down the hypocrisy while whinging about "bias".
Parent
Re:NASA's shoddy (fraudulent?) work (Score:5, Insightful)
how ridiculously polarized the global warming debate has become
Quite true. Personally I've become nearly apathetic upon the realization that both sides exaggerate to the point of dishonesty. Well, really it's the extremists on either side that do the lying, but since the issue is so polarized there's the illusion (perhaps becoming reality) that they speak for their respective groups.
Parent
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It sounds an awful lot like a case of bad interpolation of missing data. Copy previous month is a heck of a lot lower order than a simple linear function, even. But some interpolation would be necessary to start working with the results. You push out the corrections in the errata when the data comes in if you miss CD press time.
Now there is definitely some question as to why the gaps would be represented by previous data instead of nulls or flag values, and clerical error is certainly a plausible reason.
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You don't understand. The glacier is melting at 0.2 ducks per year! Prior to this experiment, the glacier was melting at zero ducks per year. It has increased 2 whole ducks per 10 year period! At this rate of increase, the entire population of ducks will be exhausted by 2142! Don't you care about the ducks?
The only upside is that, barring any additional interference, the glacier's melting will return to zero ducks per year once all the ducks are gone.
Re:NASA's shoddy (fraudulent?) work (Score:5, Informative)
About the author of this opinion article:
He has claimed that Asbestos is "chemically identical to talcum powder", and the BBC has accused him of basing his reputation on "lies about his credentials, unaccredited tests, and self aggrandisement".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Booker#Criticism [wikipedia.org]
He is not a credible person.
Parent
Reward (Score:5, Funny)
Has made apperances on childrens television shows
Please report any information on the whereabouts on Rubber Duckie to Ernie, Sesame St NY. +123 (456) 789-10-11-12
Cash reward
Disko Ducks? (Score:2, Funny)
Next month's story (Score:5, Funny)
Scientists are extremely alarmed over a new phenomenon recently observed in the arctic glaciers. Melt water, which normally flows through micro rivers deep in the glacier until it reaches the sea, has started to flow over the surface instead, accelerating the rate at which the ice melts. "It's like something went and plugged up the flow, and now it's backing up like a giant toilet with a rubber duck stuck in it." remarked one researcher.
The researchers are currently seeking a $10 million grant to investigate the cause of this disturbing event.
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Re:Pollution Anyone? (Score:4, Funny)
Now lets all calm down, nobody here needs to gain any knowledge.
Parent
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Re:GPS tracker anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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Nobody's talking about tracking anything under the ice. You can't track rubber ducks under the ice either. It's when they're on the open sea that people want to track them. (Well, they'd like to be able to track things under the glacier, but they can't. They have to wait for whatever it is to emerge in the ocean.)
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They don't need to know where it is if it's still ice-locked. However, if they included a solar panel and a supercapacitor that could supply power to a little GPS tracker when the rubber ducky is bobbing about on the surface of the ocean, that could possibly supply some very useful data.
Re:GPS tracker anyone? (Score:4, Funny)
Embed a hit single from Mariah Carrey in each one. Let the RIAA find them.
Parent
Re:GPS tracker anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
The article says he already tried a GPS tracker, and it failed to report in. I suppose he figured that rather than continuing to toss in expensive devices, he'd try a larger number of cheaper objects. If nobody finds them, at least it wasn't a big waste of money.
By the way, there are already robot floats in the ocean which can be tracked to show ocean currents (ARGO). Most of them don't use GPS, though, but Doppler radio tracking (here [argos-system.org]).
Parent
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if we rode our bike to work
What the hell do you think? Muscle energy isn't free energy, it comes from food, and food is anything but green energy. Funny you should talk about "making us feel better", because it's exactly what the type of stuff does, with disputable benefits.
bought less stuff
So your idea of saving the world is downscaling the economy and living like Cubans?
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Re:Saving the world (Score:4, Insightful)
Using dollars is not a good metric. Food production is heavily subsidized; the price you pay for food at the grocery store in no way represents its actual costs to produce. (And it gets even worse when you try to take into account the externalities of food production that are allowed to be placed on the public without recompense -- the runoff from farms into water supplies and the Gulf, for one example.)
A better way is to look at energy and calories. The exact values depend on the food, your location, and other factors, but it's not atypical for 1 calorie of food energy to use over 100 calories of petroleum energy in its creation, transportation, packaging, and retail sale. If you buy nothing but raw foods at farmers' markets, the number will of course be lower, but even something as innocent as iceberg lettuce can have a huge energy debt. Michael Pollan does an analysis in one of his books, and if you are on the East Coast, eating lettuce from California, it's something like 4500 cal of petroleum for the measly 80 cal of human-consumable energy in the lettuce. It's much worse for heavily-processed foods.
I am a big proponent of bicycling, but it's not necessarily as obvious a win on carbon-emission grounds as it might appear. There are lots of other good reasons to bike, though. (To name a few, it decreases urban air pollution, which leads to health problems that consume resources, same also with obesity-related issues, if widely adopted it would make the roads safer, etc.)
I think of it as a "healthy / pleasant lifestyle" choice, rather than an "environmental" choice. You cannot claim to be much of an environmentalist while leading a resource-intensive, Western lifestyle. It simply cannot be done. Even the most "environmentally conscious," bike-riding, CFL-using, Prius-owning, self-righteous neo-hippies are contributing massively to the problem, practically just by getting up in the morning. You cannot eat, drink, shit, or die in America and not be contributing to the problem in some way. (You can't really even kill yourself without incurring a debt, since the way we deal with dead bodies is, in itself, not exactly environmentally sound. Although that's probably the most un-hypocritical approach.)
The truth is that individual choices matter very little in the grand scheme. If you drive an efficient vehicle, or ride a bike, great -- that's slightly less demand for gasoline, slightly lower prices, and slightly more gas for someone else to put in their Hummer (or someone in India to fuel their shiny new Tata). It's still getting pumped out of the ground as fast as we can find it either way. Our civilization is going to hurtle down the road it's going down, until it runs into something Really Bad -- maybe global warming, maybe Peak Oil, maybe something else -- and either engineers a clever way around it, or collapses in an orgy of suffering and death like nothing history has ever recorded. Whether or not you rode a bike to work won't change the outcome in the slightest.
It might make you feel a lot better, though, in the meantime. That's why I do it, and why I'd tell anyone they should as well.
Parent
No phishing here (Score:3, Funny)
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If they show up soon -> Proof of Global Warming.
If they show up in 100 years -> Proof of Climate Change.
Either way, we need to stop whatever we're about to do.