Citizen-science climate project adds logs from historic Arctic whaling ships

A January 1870 page from the log of the Trident, a whaling vessel that sailed out of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Volunteers transcribe the handwritten text for climate clues.

Even if climate negotiations in Paris are successful, the planet is locked into long-term warming and an uncertain future. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.

But what was the Arctic like before — when maritime explorers and whale hunters first ventured into its icy seas? If scientists could know more about Arctic climate of the past, they could better understand today’s changes, and use that knowledge to improve projections for the future.

Old Weather is a citizen-science project led by a University of Washington scientist and former mariner that is mining historic ships logs to get a unique peek at Arctic climate over the past two centuries.

An update launched Dec. 3 expands the project to also include hundreds of whaling ships, whose logbooks were preserved and scanned into digital form from New England museums and libraries.