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 […]
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 […]
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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 […]
Working on the sea ice of the Bellingshausen Sea Whilst wandering around various old textbooks I came across a wonderful quote: Polar ice cannot be studied as other branches of science, philosophy, medicine or law are studied. The study of sea ice belongs among the most exhausting disciplines which have to be studied on the […]
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 marine ecosystem that’s been hidden beneath […]
Being interested in the Weddell Polynya I plotted some time series data from 1 September 2017 to 23 November 2017. On the left-hand panel, you can see the see the sea ice concentration, on the right-hand panel, the anomaly of the concentration each day compared with a mean from 1989-93. The Weddell Polynya is 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 […]
[This is a post bringing together things I have done elsewhere whilst learning how to use this platform.] Back in July 2012 the global news media went very big on a story on the Melting of Greenland. The original BBC Greenland Melting story I got involved in a discussion on twitter about it, with lots […]
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 […]
This is the 2012 sea ice extent for both the Arctic and the Antarctic. The day of year and the calendar day are at the bottom. I chose 2012 only because it is the most recent complete year in this data set. My reason for making this video is because there have been a couple […]
The MODIS sensor satellite imagery is showing a beautiful and evolving large plankton bloom in the Chukchi Sea at the moment. Plankton bloom in the Chukchi Sea, as seen in the MODIS sensor on 23 June 2015. Alaska is on the LEFT and Russia the RIGHT. The image is looking SOUTH. The plankton are the […]
The summer of 2016 saw the joint second lowest Arctic sea ice extent. But in the middle of October unusual Arctic weather has led to it becoming the lowest extent. At the same time, Antarctic sea ice extent has also reached record lows. Tamino has a simple and clear post about what a surprising thing […]
A recent interaction with a scientist left me both bemused, and if I am honest a little bruised. He described twitter as “that rather infantile social network system.” Co-incidently Peter Gibbs, an ex-Antarctican, BBC broadcaster and weather forecaster asked me about media work as a scientist – but given my recent interactions I flunked the […]