Icebound: The climate-change secrets of 19th century ship's logs
December 11, 2019 2:58 PM   Subscribe

 
Hey, I worked on some of these! The transcribing itself is dry and technical (time, wind direction, ship speed, temps, etc - recorded every one to two hours for pages and pages on end) but the stories behind the ships are always interesting. It's also possible to track individual crew members hired, fired, and sometimes AWOL through each log book.
posted by muddgirl at 3:46 PM on December 11, 2019 [28 favorites]


Oh, to me one of the coolest things they recorded was cloud formation and cloud cover, because it could tell them a lot about fronts. There is a whole system of cloud classification beyond cirrus and cumulous that I didn't know about.
posted by muddgirl at 3:56 PM on December 11, 2019 [5 favorites]


Fascinating, thanks for posting this!
posted by carter at 4:04 PM on December 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


fuck... Old Weather is such a good name
posted by stinkfoot at 5:24 PM on December 11, 2019 [3 favorites]


I transcribed some of these records too :) They make it really easy to participate.
posted by oneirodynia at 5:29 PM on December 11, 2019 [5 favorites]


To provide the requisite links, Old Weather is one of the oldest active zooniverse projects, second to Galaxy Zoo.
posted by zamboni at 6:55 PM on December 11, 2019 [6 favorites]


It looks like they haven't released any data or results yet?

To be honest, 9+ years without a release is, ah, not all that great. What's up?
posted by cowcowgrasstree at 7:35 PM on December 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


I believe data is incorporated into https://icoads.noaa.gov/
posted by muddgirl at 7:47 PM on December 11, 2019 [3 favorites]


If you want just the Old Weather data, it's here.
posted by muddgirl at 7:50 PM on December 11, 2019 [4 favorites]


Thank you muddgirl, that makes much more sense.
posted by cowcowgrasstree at 7:50 PM on December 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


A journalist friend of mine posted this yesterday and I just want to chime in (because no one has said this yet): This is an amazing piece of writing, entertaining, informative, just compelling end to end. I saw it was crazy-long and still couldn't bail on it. So many memorable characters, from turn-of-the-century ship captains to little old English ladies. Awesome.
posted by martin q blank at 7:48 AM on December 13, 2019


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