On November 14, 1881, an American called George Melville limped across a frozen ...
OXFORD, England - On November 14, 1881, an American called George Melville limped across a frozen delta in Siberia and pulled a pole from the snow with his frost-bitten hands.
It took Melville four more months to find De Long’s body. Nineteen other crew members also died, their heroic lives cut short by drowning, disease, exposure and starvation. But, thanks to Melville, the logbooks survived. Once, while battling through a snowstorm, he briefly considered reburying them to lighten his load, then changed his mind. “Setting my teeth against the storm,” he wrote, “I would swear a new oath to carry them through, let come what might.
In a sometimes-obsessive quest, thousands of Old Weather volunteers have extracted millions of observations about barometric pressure, wind speed, air temperature and ice from the old logbooks. These are fed into a huge dataset at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, creating what NOAA calls “a dauntingly complex, high-resolution, four-dimensional reconstruction of the global climate that estimates what the weather was for every day back to 1836.
Wood handles the science for Old Weather, but as a sailor who spent more than 25 years roaming the world’s oceans, he seems equally smitten with the romance of the seafaring life. He describes himself as a “sporadically voracious reader” who devoured all 20 volumes of Patrick O’Brian’s high-seas adventure series, “Master and Commander,” in six weeks.
She was soon captivated by the logbooks and the “thundering age” of exploration they recorded. “The stories are just so astonishingly epic,” she says. Her emails are punctuated with phrases such as “How exciting!” and “Oh joy!” One promises tales of “a mutiny, a death, a tussle with ice, scrappy writing, a spelling nightmare.”
At first, the Rodgers sailed west, crossing the North Pacific to resupply at a port on Russia’s wild Kamchatka Peninsula. Then it headed north, passing through the Bering Strait, the sliver of ocean separating two continents, and into barely charted Arctic waters teeming with walruses, polar bears and whales. It was greeted by displays of the northern lights, which the ship’s awestruck logkeeper describes in terms of what sailors know best: the sea.
Midnight to 2.20am: Ship in pack ice partially. Hove to under spanker and jib. 2.20am: Started ahead slowly under steam to work ship out of ice. Ship struck several times against heavy cakes. . . Shifting course to avoid ice, making good North-East. The Rodgers sailed on to evade the ice – only to be destroyed by a fire that started in its hold just five months into its mission. Its crew and its logbooks were rescued, although there was one casualty. The ship’s dog, a sorry-looking mutt called One-Eyed Riley, died in the fire.
In 2016, an academic paper on Arctic auroras was published in Astronomy and Geophysics, the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society in London. It was based on observations gleaned by Old Weather volunteers from the Jeannette’s logs, written while the ship was held captive by ice. Old Weather volunteers have also collected log entries about wildlife, kelp, comets and volcanic activity. “We’ve discovered volcanic eruptions that have not been recorded before,” Arthur says.
The whaling logbooks are challenging, but the extra effort is worth it, Kevin Wood says. Yes, the whalers make fewer daily observations than the Navy ships and generally lack instrumental weather data. “However, there are many more whaling voyages, and especially in the early years there are many ships out on the ice-edge at the same time in a given year,” he says. “This will significantly augment the picture we have of the ice.”Helen Julian is a nun who lives in Darlington, in northern England.
St. Francis is the patron saint of ecology, and Helen Julian says Old Weather feels “like part of my discipleship.” She heard about the group by chance, on a radio program, and saw it as a way that someone with no scientific background could help climate science. The interests of 19th century whaling captains and 21st century climatologists converge on a long-suffering species: the bowhead whale. Bowheads feed by filtering the ocean with long vertical plates in their mouths called baleen, a substance once highly prized for making everything from horse whips to corsets. Whaling ships hunted them by patrolling the ice-edge where the bowheads fed, which meant their logbooks were filled with observations about ice.
Saturday 22: Today we got our first bowhead this year. We had a fine breeze and struck at 3 o’clock P.M. and we are cutting him in now it is a large one … I have been working on my lovely little cushion today, and Mother has been sewing on a wrapper that she is making.Monday 24: It is snowing a little at times but not so hard that it keeps us from boiling. This afternoon Father and Mother covered the sofa to save it from getting any oil on it.
Purves brings to Old Weather climate expertise and experience of northern latitudes. Now 72, he’s a retired meteorologist who spent 22 years living and working in the Yukon in western Canada, a wild and sparsely populated territory famous for gold rushes and grizzlies. He has spent more time on a ship called the Bear than any other. Built in Scotland in 1874, the Bear spent its most illustrious years in the Arctic in the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service, a forerunner of the Coast Guard. Its career spanned 89 years, two centuries, two world wars and both poles. It sank in 1963 while being towed to Philadelphia to become a floating restaurant.
Purves feels most people have yet to grasp the gravity of climate change. “I’m 72, and I’m thinking I’ll still live to see a summer with no ice in the Arctic Ocean,” he says. “Will that be enough to wake people up? I really don’t know.”The Bear’s best-known captain was an iron-fisted, hard-drinking sailor called Michael Healy – a.k.a. “Hell Roaring Mike.” Healy was born in Georgia, the son of a plantation owner and a slave.
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