Benjamin Leigh Smith: The forgotten explorer of the frozen north

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Among the geographical features named for him are a kapp (cape) and breen (glacier) in Svalbard, a sound in Franz Josef Land, as well as Ostrov Li-Smita (Leigh-Smith Island), lying east of Hooker Island in the Franz Josef Land. 

From BBC

He was one of the most intrepid explorers of the 19th Century, leading five expeditions to the Arctic and surviving for 10 months after his ship was crushed between two ice floes.

But 100 years after his death, Benjamin Leigh Smith is now largely forgotten.

Somewhere in the Arctic Ocean, about halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, there's an archipelago where Benjamin Leigh Smith's name marks its easternmost point.
The likes of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Sir Ernest Shackleton and Sir Henry Morton Stanley were superstar explorers, men who earned great renown and who had sought great renown.
On the other hand, Leigh Smith was a modest man.
The cape and adjacent glacier bearing his name (Kapp Leigh Smith and Leighbreen) are some of the few lasting tokens of his historic expeditions.
Unlike so many of his contemporaries, even unlike today's explorers, he never sought fame for discovering new places.
He didn't publish any detailed account of his explorations and he shunned public appearances, often sending someone else in his place.

Born in 1828, the Briton was one of the first explorers to take ships to the high Arctic, where extensive sea ice - the thin frozen surface of the ocean, a few metres in thickness - made conditions very hostile.

 The crew of the Eira (Benjamin Leigh Smith, second left)

"He saw and mapped areas and islands that were being observed for the first time," says Prof Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge University.
"The high Arctic had much more sea ice a century ago than it does now, which made navigating through it difficult.
"He received the Patron Gold Medal - one of the two highest awards the Royal Geographical Society gives - for his achievements, so was hugely eminent," he says.
As well as his advances in scientific exploration, Leigh Smith was at the centre of a survival feat that is arguably a match for the later exploits of the much more famous Shackleton.

In 1881, Leigh Smith's purpose-built research vessel Eira was crushed between two ice floes and sank off another Arctic archipelago, Russian Franz Josef Land, north of Siberia.

The crew survived for 10 months in makeshift huts, living off provisions salvaged from the ship and hunting walrus and polar bear.
Leigh Smith then led a voyage of escape in boats with sails made from table cloths, before they were ultimately rescued.
Every single man survived.
"This remarkable Arctic journey was executed with as much grace as that of Shackleton 40 years later," says Peter Capelotti, author of Shipwreck at Cape Flora: The Expeditions of Benjamin Leigh Smith, England's Forgotten Arctic Explorer.
"His leadership was so successful that the veteran Arctic whaling captain David Gray was moved to call him the very model of 'quiet, cool, thoroughbred English pluck'," he says.
When it came to accepting medals for his achievements, however, Capelotti says Leigh Smith "always begged off".
"Explorers as a rule are self-obsessed people who love to talk about themselves, but not this one. He once told his brother-in-law that if Queen Victoria herself asked to see his Arctic photographs, he would send his expedition photographer around to the palace with them."

 The Eira in Franz Josef Land

Capelotti puts part of Leigh Smith's low profile down to his family background.
While he came from a wealthy family, his father, who was an MP, never married his mother, an unusual and potentially scandalous situation.
And although he studied law at Jesus College, Cambridge, he couldn't get a degree immediately because it was difficult for anyone but practising members of the Church of England to gain degrees at the time.

"He was always at odds with upper society," says Capelotti. "He didn't fit in."

Leigh Smith's great-great-great niece Charlotte Moore, who lives in Sussex, agrees.
"He was both establishment but also separate because he was illegitimate and from a dissenting family, so he never received a knighthood or got that kind of honour, which is probably a factor in why his story is not better known," she says.

In fact, it was only after Leigh Smith's father died, and another man left him money, that he embarked on his first expedition to the Arctic, according to Moore.
"The first one was a sporting cruise really. All polar expeditions were from the Royal Navy, but Ben wanted to do a private non-naval expedition, so he hired a ship.
"Then he realised he was interested in the scientific side of Arctic exploration and brought back specimens for the British Museum and Kew. He even brought back live polar bears for London Zoo," she says.

 map of Franz Josef islands

By his fourth expedition, Leigh Smith's enthusiasm for Arctic exploration was so advanced that he had his own vessel - Eira - specially built.
He also named a lot of the places he mapped after friends and family.

"Mabel Island is named after a niece, Amabel. And the hut the 25 shipwrecked crew made out of driftwood, rocks and masts of ships on his last expedition was named Flora Cottage after his cousin Florence Nightingale," says Moore.

With the famous nursing pioneer for a first cousin and a father active in the campaign against the slave trade, Leigh Smith came from an outspoken family.
He was also overshadowed by his sister Barbara, a leading feminist and activist for women's rights, which may be part of the reason why he didn't like to talk about his accomplishments, according to Capelotti.

But Moore says although Leigh Smith was a private man of few words when it came to his expeditions, with his log books a "bare record - simple, factual and unemotional", he was seen as a forceful character in the family home.
"In my family he's seen as both a hero and a villain. His Arctic stuff is heroic, but he tried to prevent the marriage of one of his nieces and laid down rules over that.
"They did marry after they were 21, but the same forceful character that led people to safety at sea could apparently be uncomfortable within the family and the feud with Ben went on for many years. At the same time, people were in awe of him."

Links :

• The loss of Eira
• Review of Shipwreck at Cape Flora 

IPCC climate report: humans 'dominant cause' of warming

NASA | IPCC Projections of Temperature and Precipitation in the 21st Century

New data visualizations from the NASA Center for Climate Simulation and NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio show how climate models -- those used in the new report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- estimate how temperature and precipitation patterns could change throughout the 21st century.
For the IPCC's Physical Science Basis and Summary for Policymakers reports, scientists referenced an international climate modeling effort to study how the Earth might respond to four different scenarios of how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would be emitted into the atmosphere throughout the 21st century.

From BBC

A landmark report says scientists are 95% certain that humans are the "dominant cause" of global warming since the 1950s.

The report by the UN's climate panel details the physical evidence behind climate change.
On the ground, in the air, in the oceans, global warming is "unequivocal", it explained.
It adds that a pause in warming over the past 15 years is too short to reflect long-term trends.
The panel warns that continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and changes in all aspects of the climate system.
To contain these changes will require "substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions".

 Projections are based on assumptions about how much greenhouse gases might be released

After a week of intense negotiations in the Swedish capital, the summary for policymakers on the physical science of global warming has finally been released.
The first part of an IPCC trilogy, due over the next 12 months, this dense, 36-page document is considered the most comprehensive statement on our understanding of the mechanics of a warming planet.
It states baldly that, since the 1950s, many of the observed changes in the climate system are "unprecedented over decades to millennia".

Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth's surface, and warmer than any period since 1850, and probably warmer than any time in the past 1,400 years.

"Our assessment of the science finds that the atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amount of snow and ice has diminished, the global mean sea level has risen and that concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased," said Qin Dahe, co-chair of IPCC working group one, who produced the report.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was founded 25 years ago to provide authoritative assessments on the emerging problem of climate change.

Since its first report in 1990, the IPCC has issued increasingly complex follow-ups about every six years.
The climate models that feed into the assessments have grown bigger and better, but researchers have not succeeded in reducing some key uncertainties about climate change.

Where the reports have grown most firm is in declaring that humans are causing the world to warm.

Speaking at a news conference in the Swedish capital, Prof Thomas Stocker, another co-chair, said that climate change "challenges the two primary resources of humans and ecosystems, land and water. In short, it threatens our planet, our only home".
Since 1950, the report's authors say, humanity is clearly responsible for more than half of the observed increase in temperatures.
But a so-called pause in the increase in temperatures in the period since 1998 is downplayed in the report.
The scientists point out that this period began with a very hot El Nino year.
"Trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends," the report says.
Prof Stocker, added: "I'm afraid there is not a lot of public literature that allows us to delve deeper at the required depth of this emerging scientific question.
"For example, there are not sufficient observations of the uptake of heat, particularly into the deep ocean, that would be one of the possible mechanisms to explain this warming hiatus."
"Likewise we have insufficient data to adequately assess the forcing over the last 10-15 years to establish a relationship between the causes of the warming."
However, the report does alter a key figure from the 2007 study.
The temperature range given for a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, called equilibrium climate sensitivity, was 2.0C to 4.5C in that report.
In the latest document, the range has been changed to 1.5C to 4.5C.
The scientists say this reflects improved understanding, better temperature records and new estimates for the factors driving up temperatures.

Rising tide (Nature)

In the summary for policymakers, the scientists say that sea level rise will proceed at a faster rate than we have experienced over the past 40 years.

Waters are expected to rise, the document says, by between 26cm (at the low end) and 82cm (at the high end), depending on the greenhouse emissions path this century.

The scientists say ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system, accounting for 90% of energy accumulated between 1971 and 2010.
For the future, the report states that warming is projected to continue under all scenarios.
Model simulations indicate that global surface temperature change by the end of the 21st Century is likely to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius, relative to 1850.

Prof Sir Brian Hoskins, from Imperial College London, told BBC News: "We are performing a very dangerous experiment with our planet, and I don't want my grandchildren to suffer the consequences of that experiment."

 Links :

• Discovery : Climate Report: Everything You Wanted to Know / 10 Signs Climate Change Is Already Happening
• SeattleTimes : Pacific ocean perilous turn overview
• Washington Post : the oceans are acidifying at the fastest rate in 300 million years how worried should we be
• National Geographic : If all the ice melt (interactive map)

Barge sailing (extract form Stem van het water / The Voice of the Water)

A barge skipper who also acts as a captain
during the annual ‘skûtsjesilen’ race (Frisian sailing boat)

Amazing Dutch barge sailing in the late 1960's, extracted from the Bert Haanstra documentary 'Stem van het water' (The Voice of the Water)

World's most extreme fisherman

Human Planet joins Sam Niang, a Laotian fisherman, as he walks a high wire strung above the raging Mekong River rapids on an extraordinary commute to work.

Rivers provide the essentials of life: fresh food and water.
They often provide natural highways and enable us to live in just about every environment on Earth.
But rivers can also flood, freeze or disappear altogether!

Global warming and oceans: what are the known unknowns?

Warm Ocean Melting Pine Island Glacier

For five years an international team of experts, led by NASA emeritus glaciologist Robert Bindschadler and funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA, planned and orchestrated a mission to drill through the floating ice shelf of the Pine Island Glacier.

Finally they persevered over harsh weather conditions, a short Antarctic field season, and the remote location of the glacier, and installed a variety of instruments to measure the properties of the ocean water below the ice shelf.

From The Guardian

The world's leading oceanography experts examine global warming and the oceans in Abraham et al. (2013)

Understanding how humans are changing the climate requires experts from many different areas.
Physicists, chemists, engineers, mathematicians, biologists, atmospheric scientists, oceanographers, social scientists, the list goes on.
Scientists studying the Earth's climate work out descriptions of how humans are interacting with the environment, how those interactions cause changes, and how measurements can be made.
The methods that have been developed to measure the Earth's climate include true engineering marvels.
There are instruments on satellites that measure the rising sea levels and surface temperatures of oceans, land surfaces, and atmosphere.
But satellite instruments can't see below the surface.

Perhaps the most important component of the Earth's climate, and perhaps the hardest to measure, is the oceans that cover over 70 percent of the Earth's surface.
Over the past decades and even centuries, humans have used various techniques to measure oceans, from buckets that were dragged through the ocean waters to collect samples, to modern autonomous devices that measure the oceans day and night throughout the year and report data by satellite.
A major new development since about 2005 is use of floats that pop up and down to sample the top 2000 meters of the ocean for temperature and salinity.

Global Patterns of Carbon Dioxide

These enable us to calculate the increase in heat and the changes to the acidity of the ocean waters.
It seems logical that throughout the decades, as our measurements have become more sophisticated, our understanding of the oceans has improved.
That much is true.
But, from a climate perspective, we must address how today's oceans differ from the oceans 10, 20, or 100 years ago.
Sure, the oceans are warmer now because humans have loaded the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases, but how much warmer?
How do we compare today's sophisticated measurements with yesteryears crude ones?
For instance, if measurements in past decades were biased or their assessed depth was off, it could appear that the oceans have not warmed much in certain periods.
Such errors would also have tremendous consequences for our predictions of what the climate will be like in the future.

This complicated topic is the subject of a recent paper my colleagues and I published in the journal Reviews of Geophysics.
Nearly 30 of the world's top oceanographers collaborated on a massive study that not only went back through the history books to describe the evolution of ocean temperature measuring methods, but also looked forward to future measuring techniques.
The paper found that while all the evidence shows the Earth is warming, without pause, there are still unanswered questions and unmeasured parts of the oceans.
Underneath ice sheets and deep in ocean basins are just two regions that need more attention.
One of the world's pre-eminent oceanographers for, among other things, his important work measuring heat transferred to very deep ocean waters, is Dr. Gregory C. Johnson.
Dr. Johnson works as an oceanographer at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Washington; he is also a co-author on the paper. He notes,

"This review points to the need to expand the innovative, year-round, broad-scale measurements of the upper half of the open ocean volume so successfully pioneered by the international Argo Program all the way down to the ocean floor and into the ice-covered polar regions, so we can make well-resolved, timely, and truly global assessments of the amount of heat being absorbed by the ocean."

Arctic Sea Ice Minimum

After an unusually cold summer in the northernmost latitudes, Arctic sea ice appears to have reached its annual minimum summer extent for 2013 on Sept. 13, the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado in Boulder has reported.

Analysis of satellite data by NSIDC and NASA showed that the sea ice extent shrunk to 1.97 million square miles (5.10 million square kilometers), the sixth-lowest on record.

This animation shows daily Arctic sea ice extent and seasonal land cover change from May 16 through Sept. 12, 2013, the day before the sea ice reached its minimum area of coverage for the year.

The data was provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) from their AMSR2 instrument aboard the GCOM-W1 satellite.

In short, we are doing well, but we could do better with more deep-ocean measuring equipment.
A similar reaction comes from Dr. Kevin Trenberth, who not only is one of the world's top climate scientists, but is also recognized as a top communicator, winning the 2013 American Geophysical Union Climate Communication Award.
Dr. Trenberth has been quite active in ocean heating studies, most recently publishing an important paper which calculated significant rates of heating in the ocean.
He described this new study as,

"an excellent review of the history of ocean observations and very revealing about the problems, the issues, and the advances. Most people don't realize the state of the science of ocean observations and this paper is in that sense an expose."

Drs. Johnson, Trenberth, and others who study climate change every day are hopeful that their work will help us quantify how much climate change has occurred and what the future may hold.
While climate science, like other scientific endeavors does not package answers in neatly wrapped exacting answers, what we can say with certainty that is the Earth is warming and the best place to measure that warming is in the oceans.

The best ocean measurements show a continuous heating that is largely from human-emitted greenhouse gases, and it is an important component of sea level rise.
Indeed sea level rise may be the best single indicator of a warming planet: the other major contributor is additional water from melting land ice.
Since satellite altimeters were placed in orbit in 1992, sea level has risen at 3.2 mm/year.
That should be alarming to everyone.

Links :

• AWI :  Long-term data reveal: The deep Greenland Sea is warming faster than the World Ocean