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 […]

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 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 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, […]

Professor Seymour Laxon in Hobart Tasmania I heard today that the UCL Prof Seymour Laxon has died in an accident over the new year. I don’t know the details and to be honest, to me, the “how” is not really that important (*). Only the loss. Seymour was the Director of the Centre for Polar […]

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 […]

Mark Brandon • February 25, 2015 Last week I enjoyed an Inaugural lecture by Professor Martin Siegert of Imperial College. Inaugural Lectures are a big deal: Imperial’s Inaugural Lecture series provides a platform to showcase and celebrate the College’s new professors. The inaugural lecture provides official recognition and celebration of the academic’s promotion to professor. […]

I very much like looking at the AQUA and TERRA MODIS sensor images every now and then. Today I saw this beautiful image off the southern tip of Greenland which was captured on 23rd February 2015. Sea ice off Cape Farewell, Greenland What you are looking at are three different white things: snow on Greenland, […]

It’s been quite a year in the Arctic. Over the winter 2015/6 we had the strongest and coldest Arctic polar vortex of the last 68 years. This contributed to a low maximum in Arctic sea ice extent. At that stage only the locals and the scientists were looking, and I wrote about this in a blog […]

— UPDATED 11 June 2014 — This post got the dreaded TL; DR on Reddit – but at least “they” acknowledged it was useful. Since it takes someone else to pick out the value in your work I offer this tweet from Jason Major. – ORIGINAL POST A significant area of Antarctic glaciological interest is […]

Mark Brandon • September 27, 2013 • Leave a reply 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.