[lbo-talk] on the arctic sea ice record

Andy andy274 at gmail.com
Tue Aug 28 07:06:54 PDT 2012


The NYT's article is pretty good as these things go:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/science/earth/sea-ice-in-arctic-measured-at-record-low.html?_r=1&hp

But doesn't quite convey that the extent/area record isn't everything -- it's still going down. Here's one commonly cited source of many:

http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm

The gifs of the time series here give some sense of the evolution since the 80's:

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/arctic-sea-ice/

There is a product, PIOMAS, that also produces the arctic sea ice volume with some delay (the data are sparser and it has to be partially modeled) -- arctic ice that has been around for more than a year tends to be thicker; you can lose a lot of volume before you lose a lot of area. Think of frozen lakes in the spring. Here are some plots -- note that the y axis starts at zero, but you have to be a little wary of those mathematical extrapolations. On the third hand, the physically-based expectations are now off by, oh, several decades:

https://sites.google.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/piomas

-- Andy



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