sea ice

Don’t watch that, watch this!

by Gareth June 12, 2010

If you’ve got any interest at all in the state of the Arctic Sea Ice, resist the temptation to watch the World Cup, or the start of the All Black’s winter season, and take a look at David Barber’s talk at the International Polar Year’s Oslo Science Conference. Go to the “Web TV” page, then [...]

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It’s grim up North #2

by Gareth June 10, 2010

From NASA’s eyes in the sky, this is a view of the west coast of Greenland downloaded earlier today, looking down on the Ilulissat Icefjord — the outlet for the Jakobshavn Isbrae, the biggest outlet glacier in Greenland and the largest in the northern hemisphere. It’s the long tongue of white reaching up from right [...]

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My white ice cycle

by Gareth June 3, 2010

Eli Rabett, that ever-curious but lovable lagomorph, has noticed the appearance of an apparent annual cycle in the Arctic sea ice area anomaly chart at the excellent Cryosphere Today. I mentioned the same thing in a post on Arctic sea ice back in April, and hinted that I might look at it “another day”. Well, [...]

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Ah, I see you have the Wishart that goes “ping”

by Gareth May 3, 2010

n Ian Wishart’s lexicon, to “ping” someone seems to mean catching them out in a mistake or false claim. It’s a word he’s fond of using in his regular attacks on Hot Topic, most recently over my post on sea ice volume, and a comment thereunder by William “Stoat” Connolley. My post was “bad science” [...]

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Feel floes (gone by 2016)

by Gareth April 27, 2010

The usual suspects have been making much of the fact that over the last few weeks Arctic sea ice extent (NSIDC daily graph here) has been bumping around the 30 year average for this time of year. John Cook at Skeptical Science posted on the subject last weekend, making the important point that what matters [...]

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Wake of the flood

by Gareth April 11, 2010

About 15,000 years ago the world began to warm out of the last ice age. The huge ice sheets that covered North America and Northwest Europe began to melt, and sea level began to rise. But 12,900 years before present, the climate of much of the northern hemisphere made a rapid return to full ice [...]

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Arctic sea ice maximum reached, melt starts

by Gareth April 7, 2010

Arctic winter sea ice extent reached its maximum on March 31st, the latest date since satellite records began in 1979 according to the latest sea ice update from the National Snow and Ice Data Centre. The maximum extent was 15.25 million square kilometers. The NASA image above shows the ice extent on March 6th, before [...]

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It’s grim up North (but beautiful too)

by Gareth March 29, 2010

Blogs, or to spell out the contraction, web logs, were originally just that: a log of interesting things found on the internet. Yesterday was a day when I rediscovered that tradition. Prompted by a comment from glaciologist Mauri Pelto on my recent Greenland post, I started off by making a visit to NASA’s MODIS Rapid [...]

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Tipping and other points

by Gareth February 15, 2010

During the Copenhagen kerfuffle a lot of interesting stuff hit the web: here’s something that deserves a bit more air – a Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) special issue on tipping elements in the earth system, edited by John Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. [...]

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Oops, he did it again

by Gareth January 8, 2010

It pays to beware of leaving hostages to fortune: saying or doing something that might cause you some embarrassment in the future. There’s a very fine example in this recent blog post by Ian Wishart, titled “Top 10 global warming myths exposed“. It takes the form of a piece Wishart has submitted to the Coromandel [...]

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