It is May 16th, and the ice at Nenana, Alaska has not broken up yet. This puts 2013 in second place for the latest breakup date, and rapidly closing on first place – which was May 20, 1964.
Disrupting the Borg is expensive and time consuming!
Recent Comments
Real Science 
Hold on baby hold on for just 5 more days.
When that ice breaks up it will just be a travesty. Our most precious resource just melting away like that. I’m sure all the bedwetters will cry themselves to sleep thinking about how this proves global warming and how if it wasn’t for the deniers, they could get some new laws and regulations in place to save that ice. One of them will probably make a movie showing the ice breakup and use it in their propmotional propoganda.
I didn’t plot the data myself, just looked at the histogram. The 1964 date looked to be a 2-3 sigma effect, so reaching it would be an impressive feat. Given the distribution, I’d say that any year getting into 2nd place would only have a 10% chance of reaching first. Maybe I should run some actual numbers before running my mouth though.
Regardless, the canary in the coal mine is singing! Oops, they thought it was dead.
-Scott
and the tripod remains upright still….we are in a solid second for now…
It’s funny how Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian chooses to go to Alaska now to highlight the plight of America’s “first climate refugees”. Some of us pointed her to Thermokarst Slumping which has got nothing to do with global warming but vegetation disturbance of the tundra causing sinking. We also pointed out the area’s terrain was a bad place to locate people who were traditionally nomads.
Bikers are parked in front of the webcam.
I guess $318,500 is a juicy jackpot!!
At 1 AM Nenana time, the webcam shows lots of water running on the surface of the ice. Must be getting very close to break up.
I don’t know Andy, forecasts for the rest of the week show night time temps below freezing and an 80% chance of snow today & 50% chance tomorrow (May 17,18). Tonight & tomorrow’s low is predicted to by 19F so a lot of that water will refreeze.
I’d love to see the record broken just because Martin Jeffries of University of Alaska, Fairbanks said:
“The Nenana Ice Classic is a pretty good proxy for climate change in the 20th century.” back in 2009.
We should ask him how he feels about it in the 21st century.