Taking photographs is an easy way to keep yourself endlessly entertained whilst in the polar regions. I started posting 1 picture a week on twitter as part of what was called “ice photo wednesday” and here they are: Pretty iceberg in the early morning Sea smoke as the ocean freezes Just north of the King […]
As daylight has returned to Antarctica it is straightforward to pick out polynya forming on the edge of the Antarctic continent. This one by the Stange Ice Shelf and Rydberg Peninsula caught my eye. It is a latent heat polynya formed as the winds push the sea ice away from the land to reveal the […]
I love watching the opening of a polynya in satellite data. This is North Water at the NW tip of Greenland expanding over 6 days. You can see the wind is to the SW and it is both pushing the mobile sea ice away from the fast ice of Nares Strait (the strait is named for […]
I am working on a polar oceanographic problem at the moment, but the beauty of physics is the principles are universal. That means you can end up reading widely. I came across a very interesting paper (to me): 2009 paper in Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science Through the joys of open access a PDF of […]
The seasonal cycle of sea ice extent in Antarctica has been fairly stable over the length of the satellite record. There is a slow growth of sea ice from a minimum of ~3×106 km2 in February to a maximum of ~19 x106km2 in September, before there is a relatively rapid fall in the Antarctic spring. But […]
Mark Brandon on the Northern Horizon a long time ago.
In March 2013 I was delighted to be asked to give a talk at TEDx Southampton. This is what I talked about: What the poles are telling us about our world It was brilliant to be asked to speak, and really enjoyed the fantastically well organized day. Many thanks to the hardworking large team who […]
This post is quite long but stay with it. It shows how large some of the heat exchanges going on in the polar oceans can be. The picture above shows an iceberg through mist rising from the sea. It is pretty, but it is also showing is a vast heat flux of hundreds of watts […]
Mark Brandon • March 10, 2017 https://storify.com/icey_mark/climateofgavin-scottadamssays-tweetstorm Posted in Science, Storify, twitter. Tags: climate science, Gavin Schmidt, twitter on March 10, 2017 by Mark Brandon.
A story on the BBC Business News website about the Northern Sea Route caught my eye: BBC Business News “Container ship to break the ice on Russian Arctic route”. 21 August 2018. The Danish ship Venta Maersk, (Maersk Line, ice-class Baltic feeder vessel of 3,600 containers) is going to attempt to transit across the Kara Sea, the […]
In a previous post I showed the temperature cycle on the Antarctic Peninsula, and pointed out that the monthly mean atmospheric temperatures show that it is actually surprisingly moderate. Whether you consider the temperature cycle moderate or not, the cold temperatures and strong winds drive an amazing amount of seasonal sea ice production. This plot […]
I thought it was time to look at the sea ice data as the summer Arctic melt proceeds. The image below shows the mean sea ice extent 1989-93 on 22 July, the sea ice extent 22 July 2017, and the difference between the two data sets. Reds imply less sea ice than the mean 1989-93, […]
This is a MODIS image from 2004, but it’s too good not to post here. Iceberg A38 at South Georgia 12 April 2004 I’m giving a talk tonight for the South Georgia Association called Giant Icebergs and South Georgia, so I’m wandering through a lot of these images at the moment. South Georgia is a small […]
This plot shows the Antarctic sea ice extent, the Arctic sea ice extent, and the total sea ice extent plotted against time. Like in previous post I chose 2012 only because it is the most recent complete year in this data set. Take a look at the minimum, the maximum and the range of the […]