8 ms·

Visualizing the Shrinking Sea Ice

82 points by uptown 11y ago

phowat 11y ago
If you want to see this in video, I recommend the documentary "Chasing Ice". It's available on Netflix.
- willyk 11y ago
  agreed, it's a super documentary
ddoolin 11y ago
Wow, The period of 2009 to 2012 was not kind for the ice at all. What caused such a large decrease?
- triangleman 11y ago
  Natural variation?
- ovis 11y ago
  One contributor is an increase in the amount of heat flowing from the North Atlantic into the Arctic ocean. Another factor is that the volume of old, thick ice has been declining as well, so the ice present in 2015 is younger than what was present in 2000. This ice is less likely to persist through the summer melt season.
ams6110 11y ago
At the same time (well, within a couple of years) antarctic sea ice is at record high levels https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/09/23/antarctic-sea-ice-hit-35-year-record-high-saturday/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp...
- andyjohnson0 11y ago
  ...which, as the article notes, is not necessarily good news: the southern ocean is warming.
  - talmand 11y ago
    What I got out of it is what I usually see with my attempts at being objective; we know this is happening, we don't fully understand why, and we don't fully know the pros and cons. There are guesses and theories, many of which I'm sympathetic to, that too many people are willing to move forward without being cautious.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      The house is burning down, and we should be cautious?!
      - talmand 11y ago
        Yes. A horribly mismanaged attempt at putting out a house fire can cause unnecessary problems for the rest of the neighborhood.
        JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        But this is a house we can't actually leave. That changes the equation completely.
        talmand 11y ago
        No it doesn't. Regardless of your particular situation, if you mismanage the solution, then chances are you are only making the problem worse.
      - RyanZAG 11y ago
        Yes, the house is burning down! We have a whole lot of gasoline on hand. We can dump it all onto the burning fire to try and put it out. Possible outcomes: 1) We manage to dump enough gasoline on it to starve it of oxygen quickly enough and the fire is burnt out. We clean up all the gasoline. The day is saved. 2) The gasoline catches on fire and the whole neighborhood burns down from our attempt to fix it. 3) We manage to dump enough gasoline on it to starve it of oxygen quickly enough and the fire is burnt out. The gasoline left behind isn't cleaned up well enough and it catches on fire a day later causing a bigger fire. Or we choose to do nothing: 1) The house burns down. The fire does not spread. We build a new house. 2) The house burns down and the fire spreads, burning down the whole neighbourhood. Or maybe we watch the fire for awhile and find a better way to put it out. The climate isn't as simple as this analogy. This isn't a black and white issue where we can dump our whole economy down the drain and everything is guaranteed to be rosy.
guard-of-terra 11y ago
Maybe Northern Sea Route will become viable after all.
T3RMINATED 11y ago
This Article was sponsored by Al-Gore
AuLaVache 11y ago
>The chart’s data comes from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, a collaboration between NOAA and the University of Colorado. This is the oldest data set for sea ice available—it goes back to 1978. (That’s a pretty long time, at least for satellites: Landsat, the longest continuously operated satellite-data program, only started six years earlier.) The satellite era for Arctic ice did not start in 1979. It started in 1973. The 1990 IPCC report shows a graph of it: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_chapter_07.pdf http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_chapte... [see page 30 of the .pdf (= page 224 of the IPCC report) Figure 7.20a] It shows the ice grew ~1.5 million km before 1979, and has declined since then. So starting the record in 1979 (at a peak) is a bit of a cheat. >Mapbox has also placed the sea-ice levels next to Earth’s mean atmospheric temperature. Also be wary of talk of average atmospheric arctic temperature increases. They certainly have increased, but that obscures the whole picture. It's only in the summer that arctic air temperatures rise above freezing, and summer temperatures have not increased at all since 1958. See all years here: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php It's variations in winter, spring and autumn (when air temperatures are still well below freezing) that has raised the average temperature. In my view the ice is probably mainly melting from below from heat transported from the Atlantic. Less insulating ice allows water (~ +4c) to warm the colder air above it. It's not melting from above from increased air temperatures as the article seems to imply. [18.55 Edited for idiocy]
- joering2 11y ago
  Aaah the never ending debate about global warming. It's been proven to be a scam so many times and everyone has their favorites. To me when NASA came and admit the rising temperatures on Earth do match up with rise of temperatures on most other planets of our system, including Mars, because the Sun has its rising/declining activity patters and some go into thousands of years, this was clear indication humans are like a drop of blood in a Pacific Ocean. AFAIK, there are not human-made factories on Mars. End of discussion.
  - stpe 11y ago
    UN's IPCC assessment reports - the fifth published last year - may give you some perspective on science's view of climate change (which is the commonly used term).
chrisau 11y ago
Why since 2005, are things the wrong way around? Increases in temperature match with increases in ice levels??!! e.g. 2005 to 2007 saw a 0.09 decrease in temperature above norm, and a 1.16million km2 decrease in ice? Then as the temperature increased, the ice did too, up to 2010, then temp and ice decline to 2012. Since 2012 temp has been rising again and so has the ice. And you wonder why there's skeptics out there?! You can clearly see the overall trends of heat rising and ice decreasing, but graphs like this shouldn't be thrown out to the masses without reasonable explanation of the anomalies of the last 10 years.

82 points by uptown 11y ago

phowat 11y ago

If you want to see this in video, I recommend the documentary "Chasing Ice". It's available on Netflix.

willyk 11y ago
agreed, it's a super documentary

ddoolin 11y ago

Wow, The period of 2009 to 2012 was not kind for the ice at all. What caused such a large decrease?

triangleman 11y ago
Natural variation?
ovis 11y ago
One contributor is an increase in the amount of heat flowing from the North Atlantic into the Arctic ocean. Another factor is that the volume of old, thick ice has been declining as well, so the ice present in 2015 is younger than what was present in 2000. This ice is less likely to persist through the summer melt season.

ams6110 11y ago

At the same time (well, within a couple of years) antarctic sea ice is at record high levels https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/09/23/antarctic-sea-ice-hit-35-year-record-high-saturday/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp...

andyjohnson0 11y ago
...which, as the article notes, is not necessarily good news: the southern ocean is warming.
- talmand 11y ago
  What I got out of it is what I usually see with my attempts at being objective; we know this is happening, we don't fully understand why, and we don't fully know the pros and cons. There are guesses and theories, many of which I'm sympathetic to, that too many people are willing to move forward without being cautious.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    The house is burning down, and we should be cautious?!
    - talmand 11y ago
      Yes. A horribly mismanaged attempt at putting out a house fire can cause unnecessary problems for the rest of the neighborhood.
      - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        But this is a house we can't actually leave. That changes the equation completely.
        talmand 11y ago
        No it doesn't. Regardless of your particular situation, if you mismanage the solution, then chances are you are only making the problem worse.
    - RyanZAG 11y ago
      Yes, the house is burning down! We have a whole lot of gasoline on hand. We can dump it all onto the burning fire to try and put it out. Possible outcomes: 1) We manage to dump enough gasoline on it to starve it of oxygen quickly enough and the fire is burnt out. We clean up all the gasoline. The day is saved. 2) The gasoline catches on fire and the whole neighborhood burns down from our attempt to fix it. 3) We manage to dump enough gasoline on it to starve it of oxygen quickly enough and the fire is burnt out. The gasoline left behind isn't cleaned up well enough and it catches on fire a day later causing a bigger fire. Or we choose to do nothing: 1) The house burns down. The fire does not spread. We build a new house. 2) The house burns down and the fire spreads, burning down the whole neighbourhood. Or maybe we watch the fire for awhile and find a better way to put it out. The climate isn't as simple as this analogy. This isn't a black and white issue where we can dump our whole economy down the drain and everything is guaranteed to be rosy.

guard-of-terra 11y ago

Maybe Northern Sea Route will become viable after all.

T3RMINATED 11y ago

This Article was sponsored by Al-Gore

AuLaVache 11y ago

>The chart’s data comes from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, a collaboration between NOAA and the University of Colorado. This is the oldest data set for sea ice available—it goes back to 1978. (That’s a pretty long time, at least for satellites: Landsat, the longest continuously operated satellite-data program, only started six years earlier.) The satellite era for Arctic ice did not start in 1979. It started in 1973. The 1990 IPCC report shows a graph of it: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_chapter_07.pdf http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_chapte... [see page 30 of the .pdf (= page 224 of the IPCC report) Figure 7.20a] It shows the ice grew ~1.5 million km before 1979, and has declined since then. So starting the record in 1979 (at a peak) is a bit of a cheat. >Mapbox has also placed the sea-ice levels next to Earth’s mean atmospheric temperature. Also be wary of talk of average atmospheric arctic temperature increases. They certainly have increased, but that obscures the whole picture. It's only in the summer that arctic air temperatures rise above freezing, and summer temperatures have not increased at all since 1958. See all years here: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php It's variations in winter, spring and autumn (when air temperatures are still well below freezing) that has raised the average temperature. In my view the ice is probably mainly melting from below from heat transported from the Atlantic. Less insulating ice allows water (~ +4c) to warm the colder air above it. It's not melting from above from increased air temperatures as the article seems to imply. [18.55 Edited for idiocy]

joering2 11y ago
Aaah the never ending debate about global warming. It's been proven to be a scam so many times and everyone has their favorites. To me when NASA came and admit the rising temperatures on Earth do match up with rise of temperatures on most other planets of our system, including Mars, because the Sun has its rising/declining activity patters and some go into thousands of years, this was clear indication humans are like a drop of blood in a Pacific Ocean. AFAIK, there are not human-made factories on Mars. End of discussion.
- stpe 11y ago
  UN's IPCC assessment reports - the fifth published last year - may give you some perspective on science's view of climate change (which is the commonly used term).

chrisau 11y ago

Why since 2005, are things the wrong way around? Increases in temperature match with increases in ice levels??!! e.g. 2005 to 2007 saw a 0.09 decrease in temperature above norm, and a 1.16million km2 decrease in ice? Then as the temperature increased, the ice did too, up to 2010, then temp and ice decline to 2012. Since 2012 temp has been rising again and so has the ice. And you wonder why there's skeptics out there?! You can clearly see the overall trends of heat rising and ice decreasing, but graphs like this shouldn't be thrown out to the masses without reasonable explanation of the anomalies of the last 10 years.