Mark Brandon • March 25, 2015 Mark Brandon, The Open University You never forget the first time you see an iceberg. The horizon of a ship at sea is a two dimensional space and to see a three dimensional piece of ice appear in the ocean is quite something. But, in truth, the first iceberg […]
Mark Brandon • March 25, 2015 Mark Brandon, The Open University You never forget the first time you see an iceberg. The horizon of a ship at sea is a two dimensional space and to see a three dimensional piece of ice appear in the ocean is quite something. But, in truth, the first iceberg […]
Mark Brandon • July 18, 2017 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 The ice front is from the Bedmap2 data set (so a little out of date), and […]
Mark Brandon • September 17, 2014 British Pathé News was a British institution that produced news reels and documentaries from 1910 to 1970. Their website is full of news clips of polar interest such as Shackleton’s death in 1922. But here is something wonderful and obscure. Gambling with the Gulf Stream made in 1936! © […]
Mark Brandon • March 3, 2014 Last week the Royal Society (UK), and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a good PDF booklet called Climate Change: Evidence & Causes. In the words of the US NAS “Climate Change makes clear what is well-established and where understanding is still developing. It echoes and builds upon […]
Mark Brandon • May 15, 2017 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) […]
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 […]
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 • January 28, 2015 The South West Atlantic is a very productive part of the global ocean. This MODIS image from the Terra satellite shows the east coast of Argentina and the Falkland Islands. The ocean between is filled with swirls of lighter colour which are a plankton bloom along the continental shelf […]
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 […]
[This is a post bringing together things I have done elsewhere whilst learning how to use this platform.] I am a huge fan of the Natural Environment Research Council, and used to work for the British Antarctic Survey. It is a fact that in the UK at the moment the community has some very tough […]
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’ve been watching the open water down the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula. I said the cause of that was most likely strong westerly winds. If you look at the sea ice concentration on the western Antarctic Peninsula you can see the effect of these westerly winds. Towards the end of September 2016 the ice […]
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 sorts which is usually called the […]