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Can Antarctic sea-ice extent be determined from whaling records?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2009

Stephen Vaughan
Stephen Vaughan
Affiliation:
Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Lensfield Road, Cambridge CB2 1ER
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Summery

The subject of retreating global sea-ice extent is a matter of grave concern, and any new method that promises reliable information about past ice-extent parameters must be welcomed. However, the method proposed by De la Mare should be viewed with caution for four reasons. First, his predictions of sea-ice extent do not correspond with known observations of sea-ice extent from research published in 1936 and 1972. Second, his predictions correlate much more closely with the whale-sighting data recorded by Hansen (1936). Third, since Hansen's sea-ice extent data do not correspond closely with his whalesighting data, it must be questioned whether whale-based data should be used for retrospective predictions relating to sea-ice extent. And finally, information from the IWC indicates that De la Mare's datasets are not considered accurate. Predicting sea-ice edge extent is complex, and, it would seem, a purely biological approach is not necessarily the most accurate method to adopt.

Type
Notes
Information
Polar Record , Volume 36 , Issue 199 , October 2000 , pp. 345 - 347
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

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References

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