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posted by n1 on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the historical-slushies dept.

About an eighth of a University of Alberta collection of ice cores has melted due to a freezer malfunction:

A precious collection of ice cores from the Canadian Arctic has suffered a catastrophic meltdown. A freezer failure at a cold storage facility in Edmonton run by the University of Alberta (UA) caused 180 of the meter-long ice cylinders to melt, depriving scientists of some of the oldest records of climate change in Canada's far north.

The 2 April failure left "pools of water all over the floor and steam in the room," UA glaciologist Martin Sharp told ScienceInsider. "It was like a changing room in a swimming pool."

The melted cores represented 12.8% of the collection, which held 1408 samples taken from across the Canadian Arctic. The cores hold air bubbles, dust grains, pollen, and other evidence that can provide crucial information about past climates and environments, and inform predictions about the future.


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  • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Tuesday April 11 2017, @08:45AM (6 children)

    by zocalo (302) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @08:45AM (#492189)
    The article doesn't say, but the UAlberta website [ualberta.ca] has a few more details on the failures (apparently the monitoring system failed too as a aresult of some DB corruption). For the temperature to go from -37C to +40C without an alarm going off and prompting some urgent human intervention, like installing standby generators/chillers while relocating the cores to other units, seems incredibly unlikely though - whatever happened to n+1 redundancy? Guess what; they didn't have it end to end.

    To add insult to injury, according to the UAlberta article, this is apparently a modern, custom-designed, $4.6m (Canadian, I assume) facility that was only opened earlier this year, after several months of testing and commissioning, with the cores being moved from the Geological Survey of Canada’s Ice Core Research Laboratory in Ottawa mid-January. Serious embarrasment all round, I'm thinking...
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Tuesday April 11 2017, @09:07AM

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @09:07AM (#492194)

    > that was only opened earlier this year

    > It was like a changing room in a swimming pool.

    I guess they are finding out about the bathtub curve

  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday April 11 2017, @11:21AM (1 child)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @11:21AM (#492216) Journal

    That is bizarre. I mean "cold" is Canada's number one natural resource, jeez.

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  • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:30PM (2 children)

    by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:30PM (#492373)

    Sounds like they tested the freezer during the coldest months of the year instead of the warmest months of the year. Isn't that Bass-ackwards?

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 12 2017, @01:26AM (1 child)

      by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday April 12 2017, @01:26AM (#492568) Journal

      If it fails when it's really hot outside you got trouble. If it fails when it's cold there's some time before it starts to be critical. Thus test when it's cold outside.

      • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday April 12 2017, @02:48AM

        by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Wednesday April 12 2017, @02:48AM (#492587)

        They tested with water buckets they did not particularly care about.