Mark Brandon • October 13, 2016 My previous posts on Amundsen Sea Polynya and their development showed ~37,600 km2 of open water in front of the ice shelves. It is very early spring in Antarctica at this time of the year and it’s still cold. That means sea ice can still grow. This is the […]
Mark Brandon • November 19, 2013 I came across this brilliant Deep Sea News blog post about oil on troubled waters. It talks at length about how a surface film of oil damps out higher frequency surface waves and only the low frequency waves can propagate. The net effect is the sea feels calmer as […]
Mark Brandon • September 30, 2014 This is a storified version of Gavin Schmidt’s talk on composition & CH4 feedbacks from Arctic sea ice loss with background information. It was formed from the twitter stream #RSarctic14 from a Royal Society discussion meeting I co-organised https://storify.com/icey_mark/dr-gavin-schmidt-speaking-a-the-royal-society-23-s Posted in Science, Storify, twitter. Tags: Arctic, Gavin Schmidt, Methane, […]
Mark Brandon • January 31, 2014 In the previous post I made a plot of Antarctica and compared it to the size of Europe. I made the throwaway point that it was unreasonable to imagine Antarctica as being characterized with one climatic zone. It is not all the “coldest and windiest place” on Earth. I […]
Mark Brandon • August 31, 2018 Just over a year ago in July 2017 iceberg A68 calved from the Larsen C Ice Shelf. I appeared on BBC News before it actually calved explaining what was happening. At first A68 was slow to move and as I predicted back then, it likely got stuck on the sea […]
Mark Brandon • August 31, 2018 Just over a year ago in July 2017 iceberg A68 calved from the Larsen C Ice Shelf. I appeared on BBC News before it actually calved explaining what was happening. At first A68 was slow to move and as I predicted back then, it likely got stuck on the sea […]
Mark Brandon • January 30, 2014 I keep seeing a map of Antarctica with an overlaid outline of the United States. I thought it would be helpful to have a picture of the continent compared with the size of Europe. Antarctica compared with the size of Europe This is a picture from a book I […]
Captain Robert Falcon Scott “England knows Scott as a hero; she has little idea of him as a man. He was certainly the most dominating character in our not uninteresting community: indeed, there is no doubt that he would carry weight in any gathering of human beings. But few who knew him realized how shy […]
Mark Brandon • March 16, 2017 https://storify.com/icey_mark/giving-a-talk-at-the-nerc-science-large-grants-pan Posted in Science, Storify. Tags: grant panel, Natural Environment Research Council, NERC, research on March 16, 2017 by Mark Brandon. Mark Brandon • September 30, 2013 Working on the sea ice of the Bellingshausen Sea Whilst wandering around various old textbooks I came across a wonderful quote: Polar […]
Mark Brandon • April 25, 2017 Sea ice is still relatively low in both the the Arctic spring and Antarctic autumn. A geographical perspective always helps so here is the status of the sea ice concentration 23 April 2017 for both polar regions. The Arctic Here is the sea ice concentration 23 April 2017 compared […]
A recent interaction with a scientist left me both bemused, and if I am honest a little bruised. He described twitter as “that rather infantile social network system.” Co-incidently Peter Gibbs, an ex-Antarctican, BBC broadcaster and weather forecaster asked me about media work as a scientist – but given my recent interactions I flunked the […]
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 […]
Mark Brandon • October 12, 2016 I was interested in how long the polynya I blogged about yesterday had existed. I made a gif of the previous months sea ice data. The sea ice extent in Pine Island Bay 11 September to 10 October 2016. Data from DMSP SSMI. The development of the polynya can […]
Mark Brandon • August 23, 2018 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 […]