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 March 2017 in the Terra MODIS […]
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 of South America. Terra/MODIS Image captured […]
Mark Brandon • March 16, 2017 • 4 Comments 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.
[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 • February 13, 2018 Iceberg A68 calved from the Larsen C ice shelf earlier this year. I wrote about before. As the berg calved it is starting to reveal a patch of seafloor that has been covered by thick glacial ice, and as the BAS press release says this has revealed: a mysterious […]
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 […]
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 winter pack ice. These are likely latent […]
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 winter pack ice. These are likely latent […]
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 […]
The extent and thickness of the Arctic sea ice is decreasing for every month of the year. But looking at straight lines on graphs with a relentless downward trend it’s easy to lose the geographic sense of what is happening. The red areas in the plot below show where ice was absent on 3 March […]
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 […]
[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 […]
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 […]
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 the long history of climate-related work […]