Today is 105 years since Roald Amundsen, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, Oscar Wisting and Olav Bjaaland reached the South Pole. And Google have celebrated that fact with a google Doodle: Amundsen expedition South Pole Google Doodle I love the doodle. It’s beautiful art. But it falls on me to be a bit of a bore… The doodle […]
Mark Brandon • March 7, 2017 The polynya I saw forming in early February is still clear, and very large in the Southern Weddell Sea. At the moment it is more than than 80,000 km2, although there is clearly a lot of young sea ice covering a large part of the polynya. The Weddell Sea 5 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Project MIDAS shows us that the iceberg A68 is about one trillion tonnes. This is the Antarctic Peninsula and the outline of A68 from the satellite image on 14 July 2017 shown in black. The ice front is from the Bedmap2 data set (so a little out of date), and the bathymetry from the IBCSO data […]
Approaching the middle of May and well into the Arctic sea ice retreat we can see that the sea ice extent (area of ocean with at least 15% sea ice) is still well below the mean over the satellite record. Arctic sea ice extent to 53 May 2017 from NSIDC. I like a geographic perspective, […]
Mark Brandon • November 28, 2014 I do like Google streetview and often use it if I am going somewhere new to see where I am supposed to be heading. So it’s really nice to see it at South Georgia in the South Atlantic. The landing page has links to various locations, but I particularly […]
With three of my Open University colleagues: Dr Phil Sexton, Dr Pallavi Anand, and Dr Mandy Dyson, I have been working in the background on a new landmark TV series called Blue Planet 2. This incredible series has been made by the BBC Natural History Unit with the Open University as co-producers. It has seven […]
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 with the 1989-1993 mean on the […]
Watching the sea ice extent this summer in Antarctica has been a bit surprising. The Antarctic sea ice extent has been tracking at record lows virtually the whole austral summer. We are very close now to the expected sea ice minimum, and this is where we are: Antarctic sea ice extent 12 Feb 2017 & […]
I noticed yesterday that a polynya had formed in front of the Ronne Ice Shelf over the last 2 weeks. Screengrab from NASA Worldview 17 February 2017 In that image it is about 27,000 km2 in area. I mapped the opening of the polynya from MODIS imagery over the last two weeks. There is cloud in the […]
Greenland’s ice sheet suffered major melting in July 2019, dumping billions of tons of meltwater into the Atlantic Ocena. Jennifer Latuperisa-Andresen/Unsplash, CC BY-SA Mark Brandon, The Open University The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the UN body responsible for communicating the science of climate breakdown – has released its long-awaited Special Report on […]
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 […]
At this time of the year we should expect the Antarctic sea ice to be growing rapidly, but after the historic lows of last Antarctic summer, we can see that whilst it is rapidly advancing, the sea ice extent (the area of ocean covered by >15% of sea ice) it is still ~1 ¼ million […]