Jan Mayen and the Odden Ice Tongue

[logicmanPatrick]

As the Arctic ice area shrinks, it leaves outside its ever-smaller perimeter geographical and bathymetric features that can no longer affect ice loss.  These regulatory factor losses must be allowed for when predicting future sea ice cover.

The Odden Ice Tongue is a prime example of a 'gatekeeper' which no longer functions.

The Odden used to extend frequently across the Jan Mayen current and act to suppress the rate of ice loss through the Fram Strait.  It also acted to suppress the northward flow of the warm north Atlantic current.  That gatekeeper function no longer exists, so trends noted since the last appearance of the Odden in 1997 do not bear direct numerical-statistical comparison with pre-1997 trends.

Further information -

http://oro.open.ac.uk/12096/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication
/248801554_Seasonal_and_interannual_variability_of_the_Odden_ice_tongue_and_a_study_of_environmental_effects

http://www.science20.com/chatter_box/arctic_tipping_points_7_can_arctic_recover

Jan Meyen effect on local meteorology -

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=70074

[Neven]

Great reference post, Patrick, thanks.

[logicmanPatrick]

Glad you liked it, Neven.  I hope to post more contributions as and when I can spare the time and energy.

[oren]

Thank you Patrick. I was not even aware of Jan Mayen's existence. I guess it also plays some bathymetric part in the separation between the North Atlantic / West Spitzbergen Current and the East Greenland Current.

[logicmanPatrick]

My pleasure.

I was not even aware of Jan Mayen's existence. I guess it also plays some bathymetric part in the separation between the North Atlantic / West Spitzbergen Current and the East Greenland Current.

And then some!  Jan Meyen is just a speck on a map, but in its effects on Arctic climate it punches far above its weight.

[Tor Bejnar]

I had to go to Wikipedia for some basic info, so I figure others might need that too.

First, the location:  Jan Meyen, the island, is located about 71^oN (vaguely 1/3rd of the way north of Iceland heading toward Svalbard.  (It is nowhere near the NE corner of Greenland, where I started looking!)  On the map in this thread's first post, the island is surrounded by a slanted white rectangle.  (The island is sort of New Zealand shaped.)  Svalbard is shown in the upper right part of that map, and the Greenland coast, toward the left, is bordered in white (as are all the land masses).

Odden ice tongue

The Odden ice tongue or simply the Odden (Odden is Norwegian word for headland) was a key winter ice formation area in the Arctic. It was known for a long time and was encountered by Fridtjof Nansen but was only fully understood with the advent of satellite imagery.[24]

The Odden had a length of about 1,300 km and covered an area of up to 330,000 km² in most years. It extended eastward from the main East Greenland ice edge in the vicinity of 72–74°N during the winter because of the presence of very cold polar surface water in the Jan Mayen Current, which diverts some water eastward from the East Greenland Current at that latitude. Most of the already formed ice continued floating south, driven by the wind, so a cold open water surface was exposed on which new ice formed as frazil ice and pancake ice in the rough seas, producing a giant tongue shape.[25] The salt rejected back into the ocean from this ice formation caused the surface water to become denser and sink, sometimes to great depths (2500 m or more), making this one of the few regions of the ocean where winter convection occurred, which helped drive the entire worldwide system of surface and deep currents known as the thermohaline circulation.[15][16] Since the 1990s, the Odden Ice Tongue rarely develops.[citation needed]

[emphases added]

Edit:  screen print from Google Maps with place names thread.

[logicmanPatrick]

Tor: that's a great addition to this thread.  Thanks.

btw, Jan Mayen is often described as being tea-spoon shaped.  This is of course no help to coffeee drinkers.   

[Martin Gisser]

A photo from Jan Mayen beach is perhaps why me toe dippin wimp fell in love with the Arctic, dreaming of a cozy hut there with a fireplace and a sauna fed by driftwood...


http://www.boomsbeat.com/articles/4939/20140606/35-breathtaking-photos-of-jan-mayen-in-norway.htm






BTW typo in thread title

[logicmanPatrick]

Martin: I really like those crazy rock formations and black sand.  I wouldn't want to live there, though.  That firewood would soon run out.  As Fridtjof Nansen proved: the ice carries wood from Siberia via the transpolar drift.  Reduced ice = reduced firewood.

I don't know how to fix the title typo.  Neven!  Help!   

[Neven]

I've modified your title, but you should be able to do so as well (top right in the comment you want to modify).

[charles_oil]

Yes - thanks for thread.  I looked at NSIDC Chartic, and as a guess put in 1980 - sure enough you can see it develop nicely in December heading towards the winter maximum on the linked diagrams.

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/

[A-Team]

Folks, to see what has been previously posted, you have to go all the back to the topics root page and do the search there (with the correct spelling). Not from the page you are on.

To access -- and hopefully read far enough into to fix the misconceptions errors above -- all those P Wadhams/JC Comiso papers on Odden Tongue simply find an early one, google-search its complete title, and click on the site count. The wiki article was simply copy-pasted from one of these.

The Odden Tongue was an interesting phenomenon. While that's gone forever and does not seem to have been that important, we might ask if something similar could emerge elsewhere as the ice retreats, for example what we see today around the St Anna Trough east of Franz Josef.

For me, the most fascinating part of these old '90's articles was the abysmal quality of the (open source civilian) satellite imagery. We are always hearing about the satellite record going back to 1979 but what they don't tell you is how awful the imagery was. Of course, ten years from today someone will be tsktsk-ing on a hyperforum about how horrible the imagery was back in 2016.

http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/arctic-zone/essay_wadhams.html how ice forms

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19990009390.pdf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1029/1999GL900502/asset/grl13308.pdf?v=1&t=iwl2esyo&s=d930ed15791bd588c62fcf622aa914267456e29d
http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1029/96JC01440?r3_referer=wol&tracking_action=preview_click&show_checkout=1&purchase_referrer=www.google.com&purchase_site_license=LICENSE_DENIED_NO_CUSTOMER
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2000JC000204/full
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v408/n6813/full/408634a0.html
http://booksite.elsevier.com/DPO/chapter12.html



2
Arctic sea ice / Re: Home brew AMSR2 extent & area calculation
« by Bill Fothergill on July 20, 2016, 11:20:32 AM »
......  and well defined within the limit of Jan Mayen fracture zone and the Mohns Ridge. Overall, sea  ......
3
Arctic sea ice / Re: Arctic Image of the Day
« by Espen on March 24, 2015, 08:41:32 PM »
......  "tropical" island of Jan Mayen with its lagoons along the coast: ......
4
Greenland and Arctic Circle / Re: Jakobshavn Isbræ / Ilulissat Isfjord / West Greenland
« by A-Team on November 03, 2015, 01:24:36 PM »
...... 've seen some striking eddies in airflow over Jan Mayen but here not, though presumably there is a sharp  ......
5
Arctic sea ice / Re: The 2015 melting season
« by Vergent on June 20, 2015, 05:55:39 AM »
...... /www.google.com/maps/place/Hopen,+Svalbard+and+Jan+Mayen/@74.3636453,27.4259949,4z/data=!4m2!3m1! ......
6
Arctic sea ice / Re: Short to Medium Term Arctic Sea Ice Conditions Discussion
« by jdallen on September 12, 2013, 06:39:04 PM »
...... , with a 965 Hpa Low coming in around Jan Mayen Island next week, ECMWF projects a transport band  ......
7
Arctic sea ice / Re: When will we see open ocean at the north pole?
« by gfwellman on March 31, 2013, 05:11:39 AM »
......  north from Iceland. It could also have been Jan Mayen or any other land area in the north Atlantic or  ......
8
Consequences / Re: Florida Climate Scientist Provides Alarming Projections in a Recent Interview
« by OldLeatherneck on April 09, 2015, 12:05:08 AM »
......  Nordic Seas to the east of the island of Jan Mayen. The sediments contain minute calcite tests of  ......
9
Greenland and Arctic Circle / Re: Calving into the Arctic Basin
« by Espen on March 21, 2015, 07:36:12 PM »
......  calving from Norwegian glaciers (Svalbard, Jan Mayen) and Russian glaciers (various islands)  ......
10
Developers Corner / Re: Geocoding S-1 images
« by nukefix on August 09, 2015, 11:59:11 AM »
......  and Espen have been looking at  Sptizbergen, Jan Mayen, and Iceland we don't look at too often.   ......

[logicmanPatrick]

A-Team: thanks for all those very useful links.

I did actually search this site for "Odden" and found little information.  Should have searched for "Jan Mayen".   

I hope that collecting lots of info together under a single title will help Arcticians old and new.

[budmantis]

Patrick, thanks for starting this thread. When I check the ocean temperature graphics, I always look to see what the temperature is in the area where the Odden used to form. I've been spending too much time in the politics area of the Forum to even notice this thread until today.

[logicmanPatrick]

budmantis: I hope this useful info will keep you out of politics for a while. 

Good overview -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Mayen_Microcontinent

In depth - pun intended -
Seafloor data and mapping of the Jan Mayen Micro-Continent area, tools applied for sub-surface structural and faciesanalysis, and identification of offshore geo-hazards

Anett Blischke, Iceland GeoSurvey
Ögmundur Erlendsson, Iceland GeoSurvey
ÞórarinnS. Arnarsson, Orkustofnun
Guðrún Helgadóttir, Marine Research Institute
www.hafro.is/rad-hafsbotn14/glaerur/Anett%20Blischke.pdf

[budmantis]

Thanks Patrick. A diversion from politics would be welcome, as it tends to be an exercise in futility.