Navigation charts in Antarctica may not be as good as you think. It makes sailing in those regions a little more exciting than you could hope. Here is an example. The coastline of Rothschild Island just to the west of Alexander Island, Antarctica. The navigation chart says the coastline location could be 5 miles in […]
Mark Brandon • July 24, 2017 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 […]
I was lucky enough on Tuesday night to get to go to a preview Screening of James Balog’s film Chasing Ice at the wonderful Curzon Soho cinema After it ended I was on the stage with the incredible polar photographer Nick Cobbing, the wonderful polar experienced and influenced artist Michèle Noach, and the Greenpeace Senior […]
Mark Brandon • January 19, 2015 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 […]
Mark Brandon • March 11, 2014 It’s very common to hear people harking back to the time when everything was apparently “better”. Before the planet was “ruined”, before anthropogenic climate change kicked in, and when everybody treated each other with respect. Of course I don’t hold that view. Polar exploration had a golden age of […]
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 the breaking waves are damped out. […]
I noticed in a blog post last week that there was a finger of open water extending down the Western Weddell Sea. I’ve carried on watching this open water in the MODIS satellite data. Whilst it’s been opening and closing, there is a lot of open water. It’s clearly a major sea ice generating factory at the moment. […]
I got an email from a friend asking me about the picture I am using for the blog header. “Where did you take that?” Antarctica on 30th March 2007 in southern Marguerite Bay, and looking towards the Antarctic Peninsula. It was a fantastic day’s work, making oceanographic measurements with CTD sensor to work out the […]
Mark Brandon • February 13, 2017 The Metropolitan Museum of Art has made more than a third of a million images both public domain and searchable online. This is one of my current favourites: An Arctic Summer: Boring Through the Pack in Melville Bay by William Bradford and painted in 1871. An Arctic Summer: Boring […]
In 2012 I put together a storify using twitter and weblinks about the Greenland Surface Melt. In that story a bunch of climate scientists and I talked about whether the extreme melt seen in 2012 was a signature of global warming. The original BBC Greenland Melting story An Open Access paper by Sirpa Häkkinen and […]
Mark Brandon • September 27, 2013 http://storify.com/icey_mark/the-ipcc-summary-for-policymakers-in-tweets-by-a-l Posted in Science, Storify, twitter. Tags: AR5, IPCC, Science on September 27, 2013 by Mark Brandon.
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 thought a simple example would show […]
Mark Brandon • October 11, 2016 The Amundsen Sea currently has some very large polynya. In front of the Dotson, Getz and Pine Island ice shelves they are clear in the satellite data. The sea ice extent along the Antarctic Peninsula 9 October 2016. Data from DMSP SSMI. A polynya is an area of open water in the […]
Mark Brandon • March 26, 2015 I was enjoying my polar books the other night and came across a quote attributed to everyone’s favourite humanitarian polar explorer and scientist, Fridtjof Nansen. Fridtjof Nansen, 1915, from the George Grantham Bain Collection If I were not a Norwegian, I would be an Englishman rather than belong to […]