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 wrote half of and edited a long time ago.

It always struck me as strange that Antarctica being the “coldest and windiest place” is constantly recycled. The picture shows it is a huge place and it does not have one single climate.

On the Antarctic Peninsula it is relatively mild. It’s even referred to sometimes as being the “banana belt”. But away from the heat of the ocean, and high on the plateau it is without doubt cold almost beyond comprehension.

But one thing is for sure: there is no representative Antarctic climate.

Posted in Science. Tags: antarctica, climate, map, Science on January 30, 2014 by Mark Brandon. Mark Brandon • October 2, 2013

This is a storify of the twitter noise around one talk at a Royal Society discussion meeting.

http://storify.com/icey_mark/what-is-the-future-for-sea-ice-in-the-arctic-and-a

Posted in Science, Storify, twitter. Tags: Antarctic, Arctic, climate, sea ice on October 2, 2013 by Mark Brandon. Mark Brandon • June 12, 2013

This post is quite long but stay with it. It shows how large some of the heat exchanges going on in the polar oceans can be.

The picture above shows an iceberg through mist rising from the sea.

It is pretty, but it is also showing is a vast heat flux of hundreds of watts per m² from the ocean to the atmosphere…

—

I have talked before on this blog about how the sea ice moves, and how the International Arctic Buoy Programme provide some lovely movies of the buoy tracks which show this.  I also pointed to Eric Larsen’s video of the ice moving too.

But what does this ice movement mean for the climate?

As the ice moves it fractures, and the cracks extend over wide areas. These cracks are responsible for the “water sky” I talked about previously.

A recent MODIS satellite image from the Aqua satellite  posted at the NASA earth Observatory shows one of these cracks (we call them leads) opening up.

A modis image showing a lead and sea smoke in the Arctic Ocean May 2013. From the NASA EO

From the scale bar on the bottom left you can see that the open water is ~18 km wide, and the lead is more than 100 km long. More than enough to get a ship through!

…continue reading →

Posted in Science. Tags: Arctic, climate, polar on June 12, 2013 by Mark Brandon. icey_mark • December 13, 2012

I was lucky enough on Tuesday night to get to go to a preview Screening of James Balog’s film Chasing Ice at the wonderful Curzon Soho cinema

After it ended I was on the stage with the incredible polar photographer Nick Cobbing, the wonderful polar experienced and influenced artist Michèle Noach, and the Greenpeace Senior Climate Advisor Charlie Kronick. I know that is a bit effusive – but hey follow the links to Michèle and Nick and draw your own conclusions.

From Left to right: Nick Cobbing Michèle Noach, Me and Charlie Kronick. Pic by Chris Brunner

…continue reading →

Posted in Science, Uncategorized. Tags: chasing ice, cinema, climate, discussion, glacier, photography on December 13, 2012 by icey_mark.

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 who knew him realized how shy and reserved the man was, and it was partly for this reason that he so often laid himself open to misunderstanding.

Add to this that he was sensitive, femininely sensitive, to a degree which might be considered a fault, and it will be clear that leadership to such a man may be almost a martyrdom, and that the confidence so necessary between leader and followers, which must of necessity be based upon mutual knowledge and trust, becomes in itself more difficult. It wanted an understanding man to appreciate Scott quickly; to others knowledge came with experience.

He was not a very strong man physically, and was in his youth a weakly child, at one time not expected to live. But he was well proportioned, with broad shoulders and a good chest, a stronger man than Wilson, weaker than Bowers or Seaman Evans. He suffered from indigestion, and told me at the top of the Beardmore that he never expected to go on during the first stage of the ascent.

Temperamentally he was a weak man, and might very easily have been an irritable autocrat. As it was he had moods and depressions which might last for weeks, and of these there is ample evidence in his diary. The man with the nerves gets things done, but sometimes he has a terrible time in doing them. He cried more easily than any man I have ever known.

What pulled Scott through was character, sheer good grain, which ran over and under and through his weaker self and clamped it together. It would be stupid to say he had all the virtues: he had, for instance, little sense of humour, and he was a bad judge of men. But you have only to read one page of what he wrote towards the end to see something of his sense of justice. For him justice was God. Indeed I think you must read all those pages; and if you have read them once, you will probably read them again. You will not need much imagination to see what manner of man he was.

And notwithstanding the immense fits of depression which attacked him, Scott was the strongest combination of a strong mind in a strong body that I have ever known. And this because he was so weak! Naturally so peevish, highly strung, irritable, depressed and moody. Practically such a conquest of himself, such vitality, such push and determination, and withal in himself such personal and magnetic charm. He was naturally an idle man, he has told us so;[134] he had been a poor man, and he had a horror of leaving those dependent upon him in difficulties. You may read it over and over again in his last letters and messages.[135]

He will go down to history as the Englishman who conquered the South Pole and who died as fine a death as any man has had the honour to die. His triumphs are many—but the Pole was not by any means the greatest of them. Surely the greatest was that by which he conquered his weaker self, and became the strong leader whom we went to follow and came to love.”

Apsley Cherry Garrard wrote that in the Worst Journey in the World.

Captain Scott was a complex man.

Mark Brandon • March 16, 2017

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. Mark Brandon • September 30, 2013 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 spot, in loco status nascendi et vitae, and which require strong men, absolutely sound in mind and body, courageous, willing and fit to renounce all comfort, thoroughly prepared both in theory for the work and ready to face all the hardships that may come like a bolt from the blue and in the most unfavourable moments. The sea-ice has to be studied far away, in the north or south, in white deserts of ice, where there is nothing, nothing else, no shelter no help; and where, on those vast plains in which the chasms of the sea keep tearing open and unsurmountable obstacles in the shape of mountains of ice keep piling up, the Lord only is with man.

“and as long as man will listen to the roar of the waves above the depth of the the sea, as long as the human eye will follow the play of the northern light on the silent snowy landscapes, and far away in infinite space, and so long as it will look out for the celestial bodies far away in infinite space, so long the romance of the Unknown will lead the human genius forward and upward!” (Nansen, Nebelheim.)

It is a quote from the beginning of Cryologia Maris by Josef Zukriegel, which was published in 1935 by the Geographical Institute of the Charles IV. University.

All of what Zukriegel says is all true of course – except naturally lots of women do sea ice research as well. In fact if you look at the latest AR5 IPCC report, and chapter 4 which is on the cryosphere, you will see many brilliant women polar scientists in the reference list.

Josef is a bit hard to track down for a Brit, but he does have an island named after him in Antarctica. If you look at the extremely useful gazetteer of the UK Antarctic Place names committee you can see it is actually in quite a hard place to get too.

  …continue reading →

Posted in Personal, Science. Tags: history, polar, research, Science, sea ice on September 30, 2013 by Mark Brandon.

Mark Brandon • April 25, 2017

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 23 April. Red shades = less sea ice than the 1989-93 mean on 23 April, and Blue shades = more sea ice than the 1989-93 mean on 23 April.

The mean Arctic sea ice for the years 1989-93 on 23 April, the sea ice concentration on 23 April 2017 and the difference between the two data sets. Blue shades imply more sea ice and reds imply decreased sea ice compared with the mean. The original data come from the DMSP SMMI data set at the NSIDC.

The stand out regions for me are once more (as in my post in January), the Northern Barents Sea is relatively low, along with the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk. There is a consistent retreat of the ice edge almost everywhere, and comparatively a lot of open water in Hudson Bay.

…continue reading →

Posted in Science. Tags: Antarctic, Arctic, DMSP, sea ice, sea ice extent, SMMI on April 25, 2017 by Mark Brandon.

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 exam by not answering his question. Sorry Peter. What I did do was write something quickly on why I like twitter.

Here it is for posterity.

The TL; DR answer is personally I think twitter is good for science, scientists, and for most people really.

Summary

I cannot sit on the fence. I like twitter and what it offers. I have learned things I never would, built genuine relationships with international people who I would have perhaps have only met over a quick coffee at a conference. And I have changed the way I speak about science.

It is interesting, and often funny.

It can of course be a harsh and challenging space. I am genuinely horrified at what I have seen some colleagues endure online – particularly the women: but it is here to stay. I wish my female colleagues and women in general were always treated well, and as people, but the only thing I can personally do is contribute to a positive space. I believe twitter is a strong positive for science, and it is a worthwhile investment of your time.

This short document has a few ill-considered ideas about what I like about it.

1) Connecting

Twitter enables you to connect with other scientists and researchers across disciplines and fields. This is becoming more and more important. We can all easily be experts in our own specialism – in fact it is expected. But whenever we talk to our family, the public, other researchers or the media they want and need to know what our work means in a wider sense. Twitter quickly enables you to build a wide network of people with related interests, and if you do not know something you can ask easily.

Trivial example? Want to know the best palaeoclimate record of an area you are interested in? Ask the paleo scientists directly on twitter and if time zones match you will get an answer pretty quickly.

You can also build relationships with colleagues from other departments, universities and countries. Imagine it as being like working in an open plan office but without the draw backs. Have colleagues in a different university? Just casually keep a conversation going through twitter. In 3 years I have built excellent relationships with many people who I professionally respect, and would love to work with – but without twitter I doubt I would have “met” them.

2) Many eyes make light work

If you are interested in a particular area of science and you have built a network whether to listen or to participate in, instead of one set of eyes trying to pick out things of interest and relevance to your work, you have many. You will find more research, more related media and more that is of interest and relevance to you and your work.

3) You can visit conferences virtually

There are a lot of science meetings going on. In fact it is impossible to attend a tenth of the things you would like to. But with twitter and a hash tag you can listen to a conference virtually. For example, in September 2014 I was the co-organiser of a 4 day meeting at the Royal Society. Over the 4 days of the meeting with the hash tag #RSArctic14, there were ~2600 tweets, and it reached over 340k people online. The hash tag and tweets were contributed to all over the world (the metrics are easily traceable), and we can even break it down it 69% of the contributors to the hash tag were male, and 31% women. Twitter turned what could have been nationally important science meeting into an internationally relevant one.

4) You can crowd source individual conference talks or news events

There are tools like storify which enable you to build stories about conference talks and news events using twitter. If you use these easy tools you can build science stories about key news issues. I offer you three examples:

The first is a talk that was at the Royal Society. It has had ~600 views, and tells the story of a view of the potential for Arctic methane clathrate affecting our climate.

A storify of a research talk.

The second is about melting on the Greenland ice sheet and has over 3000 views. This latter one led to me being invited on Radio 4 and news interviews as I clearly (in someone’s view!) knew what was going on.

A storify of a news story

And finally a storify of a House of commons Science and Technology committee I – and others – listened to online about the possible merger of the British Antarctic Survey and the National Oceanography Centre.

Storify of the possible merger of BAS and NOC

You can tell complex stories with twitter, and change the ephemeral nature.

5) On the whole twitter is a positive space

We all hear horror stories of how terrible online space can be and how negative it is, but in my experience that is a small component. If you tweet something like “I am giving an interview to XXXX” then I would bet virtually all of the responses you would get would be along the line of “you will be brilliant and enjoy it”. OK so some people may think you will be terrible – but even if they do think that, then they very rarely say it.

That means it feels a positive space and our online colleagues are in my experience very supportive. If you are a climate scientist you could get something along the lines of “are you going to talk about the co2 scam?” or the “pause”, or “global warming isn’t happening”, but those can sometimes be worthy questions, and part of a scientist’s role is talking to people who ask questions. I have to say l have had many questions that initially I thought were just people attacking me, but with a bit of thought I have learned a lot from the answers to them, and perhaps more importantly why they were asking them.

It is worth noting that if you behave horribly online, then you will get that back. If you behave politely and fairly then it is, in my experience, a good space.

6) You have to be prepared to stand by what you say

I have had an experience very recently when a scientist at a UK university complained to my management and just about everyone senior in science he could list through registered post that I had likely “defamed” him online. He issued me and my university with clear and specific legal threats. This was personally a bad experience as I have never encountered such bizarre legal threats before. You can find the story online if you are interested and see if you feel it warranted a pseudo legal attack, but the complaint was found to be without merit.

Now I think the reason the person attacked me and some colleagues with the threats is because we passed comments on what he was saying in public. And when we did using our professional expertise and fair comment he called “foul”. In my experience some people think that science communication is a one way broadcast action with no communication. You do see this behaviour on twitter as well.

But this is not how it works.

For example if I say “Antarctica is melting”, I should expect clever people on twitter to point out to me at a minimum that 1) Antarctic sea ice has been at a record maximum this year so what on earth do I mean, 2) to ask questions about which bits are melting? and, 3) to ask if there is an anthropogenic cause.

So you need to think about what you are saying as you are leaving digital footprints. Expect to be asked what you could perceive as critical questions. But in fact that is good – because it demonstrates people are interested in what you say, and you can sharpen both your ideas, and how you communicate them.

7) Introvert / extravert?

I would say I am an introvert. I could go as far as saying I am not a very sociable person. In my experience twitter is the perfect way for an introvert to connect with people. It is basically trivial, you have such short messages – so you cannot give much away, and you get to choose when to interact. It is, in my view, the perfect social space for anti-social people.

8) Contribute to web space and give something back

Have you ever used Google or Wikipedia to find out something work related? Of course! So give something back and be a net contributor the space. So you find something such as a journal article you are interested in, then tweet it with some context for your followers (I personally prefer “listeners” rather than “followers” because the latter implies a dynamic which does not exist). If you, and some of your network do that then there will be a lot of useful links and information for the lay person and colleagues in your subject area. You should also contribute to a Wikipedia article. Then at least you will know it is right!

All these things give you the status of someone who people may think actually knows something. (But remember my point 6 above).

Journalists and the public will ask you questions and you will get requests to be interviewed.

Overall my top tip is make it your mission to add something of value, whether it’s a link to an article you like with comment, or something you have just written. Make the space something you enjoy.

9) You can have fun

Twitter can be funny. You can come across many things that make you laugh, and you can always find things you are interested in but are off your radar. In addition you can interact with people you never would or indeed could.

I have had tweets of mine read out on Radio 5 about what logs are used for in mathematics, I have talked to women’s hour about statistics(!), And as another example: saw a television program last night on Pompey hosted by Professor Mary Beard and you have a burning question about it? Ask her on twitter. In my experience it’s very likely you will get an answer both from the Prof, and from others. Just yesterday I had a great interaction with the makers of the Wonders of the Monsoon about how they made their series. The producers and film makers were wonderfully generous and only too delighted to share their expertise. Most people are. We don’t want to work in silence do we?

Summary

You should be able to tell, by and by, I like twitter. Happy to talk science if your interested – particularly if it’s something polar. You should get online and contribute, enjoy and exploit the space too.

Resources

From the American Geophysical Union we have Building an Effective Social Media Strategy for Science Programs by Wendy Bohon et al and published in EOS.

From Holly Bik and Miriam Goldstein we have An Introduction to Social Media for Scientists published in PLOS Biology

From Darling et al we have The role of Twitter in the life cycle of a scientific publication published in the Peerj.

From Letierce et al Understanding how Twitter is used to spread scientific messages.

From the LSE and Mollett et al Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities.

And finally from Vitae Innovate a Handbook of social media for researchers and supervisors.

If you get this far please feel free to post additional useful resources in the comments. Thanks.

ADDED 31OCTOBER 2014

I asked about additional resources.

So from Prof John Butterworth (author of this magnificent book Smashing Physics) we have a really excellent 10 minute video

From Prof Simon Leather we have a great article via Barnaby Smith: Why I Joined the Twitterati: Blogs, Tweets & Talks – Making Entomology Visible.

And from Alex Brown a great article Twitter is the conference pub.

Taking photographs is an easy way to keep yourself endlessly entertained whilst in the polar regions. I started posting 1 picture a week on twitter as part of what was called “ice photo wednesday” and here they are:

Pretty iceberg in the early morning Sea smoke as the ocean freezes Just north of the King George VI Ice Shelf Sea Ice and Icebergs in the Bellingshausen Sea Icebergs and mountains on the Antarctic Peninsula First year Sea Ice in Marguerite Bay The Lemaire Channel at dawn

Mark Brandon • October 12, 2016

I was interested in how long the polynya I blogged about yesterday had existed.

I made a gif of the previous months sea ice data.

The sea ice extent in Pine Island Bay 11 September to 10 October 2016. Data from DMSP SSMI. The development of the polynya can be seen in the growth of the dark regions.

You can see that the polynya in the centre of the picture can be seen from the very beginning. This is forming in front of the Dotson Ice Shelf  – and from the scale bar you can see it is big. This polynya really starts to develop as open water around 5 October 2016.

The coastal polynya on the northern land boundary appear in mid September – and develop throughout the record.

The image below was in my previous post and it shows the three polynya from a MODIS image on 9 October 2016.

The MODIS imagery 9 October 2016 from the TERRA satellite overlain in Google Earth

Next diversion will be a area of open water / time plot.

Posted in Science. Tags: Amundsen Sea, Amundsen Sea Embayment, antarctica, Dotson Ice Shelf, Pine Island, polynya, satellite, sea ice on October 12, 2016 by Mark Brandon. Mark Brandon • June 10, 2014

— 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 the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and where it discharges into the Amundsen Sea Embayment.

Amundsen Sea Embayment: Source Wikipedia

It is a research focus (e.g. iSTAR) because it is the region where the glacier ice is melting very rapidly.

A great research article by Dustin Schroeder (The University of Texas at Austin) has just been published in PNAS which presents evidence for the geothermal heat flux beneath the Thwaites Glacier.

…continue reading →

Posted in Science. Tags: Amundsen Sea Embayment, antarctica, Pine Isand, Thwaites, WAIS, West Antarctic Ice Sheet on June 10, 2014 by Mark Brandon.

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 transit across the Kara Sea, the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea.

Maersk said: “The trial passage will enable us to explore the operational feasibility of container shipping through the Northern Sea Route and to collect data.”

There is generally a lot happening in Arctic sea ice news at this time of the year as we head to the annual summer minimum extent, and current sea ice extent is currently about 1.6 million km² below the 1981-2010 mean.

Sea ice in the Arctic currently about 1.6 million km2 below the 1981-2010 mean. 21 August 2018.

Given that the trend of minimum ice extent has been relentlessly downwards since the start of the satellite record:

Annual Arctic minimum sea ice extent. Data from from NSDIC.

we could expect the Venta Maersk to have potentially an easy passage.

But that is rarely true in polar seas – even at the height of what will be the Arctic summer.

A look at the distribution of the current sea ice extent is interesting.

Arctic sea ice 21 August 2018, mean Arctic sea ice 21 August 1989-93 and difference between the two. Reds indicate absence of sea ice compared to the older data and blues indicate increased. The yellow box indicates a region where there is much more sea ice than we could expect.

There is more sea ice in the East Siberian Sea than we could expect (~40% more than the 1989-93 mean), and a look at the latest “near real time” (end of April 2018) ice thickness data from CPOM show that the ice in this region was quite thick at the start of the summer melt season.

Arctic sea ice thickness processed at UCL from CryoSat’s SAR mode data: NOTE THIS IS END OF APRIL 2018. NRT Service Suspended during Arctic summer (May-Sept).

It is possible the Venta Maersk could find the going slow, but she is a polar rated ship designed to work in the Baltic, and by staying close to the coast she could avoid the ice completely.

It is an interesting way to move a Baltic ship from it’s build location in China to its planned operational area, and one to watch over the next month.

The excellent researcher Dr Nathanael Melia wrote a great post about the potential of Arctic Shipping on Carbon Brief in 2016: What will sea ice loss mean for Arctic shipping?

**

Interestingly if you look at the Cryosat sea ice thickness map north of Greenland you can see that at the end of the winter the sea ice thickness was already relatively low. (See the story in the Guardian: Arctic’s strongest sea ice breaks up for first time on record). The thickest sea ice is further to the west north of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

Arctic sea ice thickness processed at UCL from CryoSat’s SAR mode data: NOTE THIS IS END OF APRIL 2018. NRT Service Suspended during Arctic summer (May-Sept).

***  UPDATE From Twitter

From Dr Stefan Hendricks at the Alfred Wegener Institute

Tweet from Dr Stefan Hendricks.

**** Update 2 from Twitter

From Dr Ruth Mottram at the Danish Meteorological Institute.

Tweet from Dr Ruth Mottram. Posted in Science. Tags: Arctic, Maersk, Northern Sea Route, sea ice, ship on August 23, 2018 by Mark Brandon. Mark Brandon • November 30, 2016

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 error

Five miles wrong… What does that mean?

Here is London with a 5 mile radius circle drawn on it.

London with a 5 mile circle drawn on it.

If you sailed your ship to a position – say the edge of Rothschild Island, you would not know the exact location of that coast to within the radius of that circle.

Just get your head around that. In this age of satellites, in 2016 we don’t know the location of coastline of Antarctica to the same level of accuracy that we already know the topography of Mars, Venus and our Moon.

Why are they so bad?

As usual there are lots of reasons. Most of the coastlines were mapped out by people on sailing ships and huskie drawn sledges decades before the satellites were launched. That means the outlines of the coasts and water depths tend to be excellent. But absolute position – basically the origin of the co-ordinate system – can be out.

The bottom line is if you are trying to calculate position with a sextant and clock, it’s hard enough in good conditions (for me!). But in a snowstorm when it has been overcast for several days? The historical navigators are my heroes.

In practice today does this lack of accuracy matter?

Charcot Island. A photograph of a repeater of the navigation display of RRS James Clark Ross in 2008.

That picture of the ship’s track tells the story. The ship has skirted the coast of the island, but according to the chart we ended up on land! I have a few examples like this from Antarctica. And even the mighty Google Earth has Charcot Island wrong.

A screengrab of Charcot Island from Google Earth Pro 20 Nov 2016. The island is displaced by ~11 nautical miles.

Polar ship Captains, officers and crews take ships into areas that are genuinely unexplored. We don’t know the coastline or the water depths well.

In fact, in Antarctica all you really can be certain of is you know you are going to be surrounded by icebergs and sea ice.

It’s a big responsibility.

Posted in History, Science. Tags: Charcot Island, husky, navigation, ship on November 30, 2016 by Mark Brandon.

Mark Brandon • September 27, 2017

The polynya over Maud Rise was visible in a beautiful clear MODIS image on 25 September. It is currently ~40,000 km² of open water in the middle of the Antarctic winter sea ice. This will be some impressive heat loss.

MODIS image of the polyna over Maud rise on 25 Sept 2017. The black is ~40,000km2 of open water.

This is the polynya in the SMMI Data for the same day.

Location of Maud Rise polynya 25 Sept 2017.

A while back I calculated the heat loss through 2,000 km2 of open water in the Arctic as being ~600 GW. This is about 20 times as much open water…

As I said then, the heat loss is making the surface waters denser, so they sink away from the surface

More to come on this I expect.

Posted in Science. Tags: antarctica, Maud Rise, polynya, Weddell Sea on September 27, 2017 by Mark Brandon. Mark Brandon • September 19, 2017

Quick post on the Maud Polynya in the Weddell Sea that I wrote about last week. This is the sea ice data 17 September 2017, and the polynya is both clear and large.

The location of the polynya over Maud Rise. Sea ice data from DMSP SMMI.

An enlargement of the polynya shows that it is practically open water.

…continue reading →

Posted in Science. Tags: antarctica, Maud Rise, polynya, sea ice, Weddell Polynya, Weddell Sea on September 19, 2017 by Mark Brandon. Mark Brandon • September 11, 2017

The Weddell Sea polynya is an area of open water that sometimes appears in the Weddell Sea over a relatively shallow region called Maud Rise.

The Antarctic sea ice concentration 9 September 2017. The location of the polynya is marked and the original data come from the DMSP SMMI data set at the NSIDC.

In the latest satellite imagery from the DMSP satellite you can see the lower concentration sea ice as the darker blue colour. If you look at the MODIS imagery for the same date you can clear see black which indicates open water in the pack ice.

The MODIS imagery mosaic of Antarctica from 7 September 2017 from the MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite. The pattern in the centre of the image is because high latitudes of Antarctica are still dark at this time in winter.

…continue reading →

Posted in Science. Tags: antarctica, Maud Rise, MODIS, polynya, satellite, SMMI, SMOS, Weddell Sea on September 11, 2017 by Mark Brandon. 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 the bathymetry from the IBCSO data set.

Larsen C Ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula and the location and area of iceberg A68. The outline of A68 is derived from a satellite image of the ice shelf 14 July 2017.

There are some astonishingly beautiful processed satellite images of A68 out there such as this one via ESA from Adrian Luckman and the excellent Project MIDAS.

One image I haven’t seen is how good is knowledge of the bathymetry around A68?

The iceberg is going to drift and likely ground quite quickly. (I wrote about this on the conversation a while ago: When an Antarctic iceberg the size of a country breaks away, what happens next?)

In the map below, the shaded colour is the distance of any point on the sea bed to the closest actual depth measurement.

The distance to the nearest good depth measurement around the Antarctic Peninsula.

So the dark blue stripes labelled in the Weddell Sea are actually ship tracks – and the dark colours are good depth data. These measurements will have been made by icebreaker.

Just in front of A68 there is a very large area where no ship has been within ~80 km.

One small note on the size. I digitized the iceberg from a satellite image (a KML File can be downloaded). On twitter today there were satellite images showing fractures already.

New crack on eastern side of Iceberg A68 carves out large chunk of ice, as berg moves further away from #LarsenC Ice Shelf @deimosimaging pic.twitter.com/NagHUSUuH8

— The Antarctic Report (@AntarcticReport) July 18, 2017

But Martin O’Leary of the MIDAS team posted today on twitter that to the untrained eye looks like iceberg, is very likely fast ice (so thick sea ice that is “fast” to A68 – but only a few metres thick.)

Pretty sure this is some fast ice (i.e. sea ice, maybe a few meters thick) detaching from the berg. Looks totally different in SAR imagery https://t.co/XHDGle0gVv

— Martin O’Leary (@mewo2) July 18, 2017

Posted in Science. Tags: A68, Antarctic Peninsula, antarctica, bathymetry, Larsen C, Weddell Sea on July 18, 2017 by Mark Brandon. 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 March 2017 in the Terra MODIS true colour image.

In my original post I said this was likely formed by winds from the Ronne Ice Shelf.

Well Dr Stef Lhermitte (Delft) has put together the most amazing movie showing the development of the polynya over January and February. It shows satellite sea ice data with winds from the ECMWF overlain.

You can clearly see the winds pushing the sea ice away from the ice shelf as time progresses.

It is just as @StefLhermitte said in his tweet yesterday:

…continue reading →

Posted in Science. Tags: A23, A23a, antarctica, ECMWF, Larsen C, polynya, Ronne Polynya, Stef Lhermitte, Weddell Sea on March 7, 2017 by Mark Brandon. Mark Brandon • February 17, 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 images but the opening of the polynya is fairly clear.

Formation of the Ronne Polynya 30 January to 14 February 2017.

On 31 January 2017 there is no open water, but then over the 16 day period it opens to the ~27,000 km² in area. If you’re eagle eyed you can see that there is thin frazil ice forming in the open water in front of the ice shelf at the end of the sequence.

So what caused it?

…continue reading →

Posted in Science. Tags: antarctica, frazil ice, heat flux, polynya, Ronne Ice Shelf, ROPEX, Weddell Sea on February 17, 2017 by Mark Brandon. Mark Brandon • October 6, 2016

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 edge is compacted as the sea ice is pushed against the Peninsula.

The Antarctic Peninsula sea ice 24 August to 5 October 2016. Data from DMSP SSMI

The westerly winds (from bottom left to top right) compress the sea ice against the land (left hand side of the Antarctic Peninsula). This also creates open water on the eastern (right hand side ) of the Peninsula as the sea ice is pushed away from the land.

You can see the very sharp ice edge on the west, and the open open water in the MODIS satellite imagery.

MODIS image of the Antarctic Peninsula 5 October 2016 from the Aqua satellite.

The sea ice concentration anomaly for September 2016 shows that on both sides of the Antarctic Peninsula the westerly winds have reduced the amount of ice we would expect to observe by up to ~40%. On the west side because the sea ice is compressed, on the east side because the sea ice is being pushed away from the land.

Antarctic sea ice concentration anomaly for Sep 2016. Yellow rectangle approx area of images above. Image from NSIDC

This is just late winter weather.

There are a lot of Antarctic research stations on the west of the Antarctic Peninsula, including Rothera, the largest British Base.  If the winds maintain the westerly direction then I can imagine it could be slow to resupply the base this season. There is time for it to change. According to the published schedule the ship is not due to arrive until 27 November 2016.

A slow resupply is not uncommon and I have been on at least one unsuccessful resupply voyage in my career. I took the picture below on 11 December 2004 under similar conditions.

RRS James Clark Ross making very slow progress in compressed sea ice in Marguerite Bay, the Western Antarctic Peninsula 11 December 2004. Posted in Science. Tags: Antarctic Peninsula, James Clark Ross, Marguerite Bay, Rothera, satellite, Science, sea ice, Weddell Sea on October 6, 2016 by Mark Brandon. Mark Brandon • October 3, 2016

I noticed in a blog post last week that there was a finger of open water extending down the Western Weddell Sea. I’ve carried on watching this open water in the MODIS satellite data. Whilst it’s been opening and closing, there is a lot of open water. It’s clearly a major sea ice generating factory at the moment.

MODIS image of the Western Weddell Sea 30 September 2016. The Open Water is clear.

The open water is clear in the lower resolution passive microwave sea ice data too.

The sea ice extent along the Antarctic Peninsula 2 October 2016. Data from DMSP SSMI

If you look at some model output there are air temperatures above this open water of between -10° to about -25°C.

Surface temperature at 2m from NCEP output. 3 October 2016. From Climate Reanalyzer.org

What is really good is if you look at the temperature anomaly (i.e. the departure from the average with a 1979-2000 baseline), it is very warm over the Weddell Sea.

The temperature departure from average for NCEP output 3 October 2016. Image from climateReanalyzer.org.

I think the reason it is warmer is because the Weddell Sea pack ice is looser this year. So (as you can see in the picture above) there is lots of open water. The atmosphere is being warmed by the ocean as the sea ice is being generated.

Another pointer to the pack being looser this year is that in August 2016 in the Eastern Weddell Sea there was a rare sighting of the Weddell Polynya.

The Weddell Polynya as observed on 14 August 2016 in passive satellite data. It is a polynya with its own wikipedia page.

I think the Weddell Sea pack ice is more mobile this winter. This is also telling us something about the difference between sea ice extent and sea ice thickness. The sea ice extent is large and easy to measure in the Antarctic – but we don’t know how thick it is.

Posted in Science. Tags: Antarctic, Antarctic Peninsula, MODIS, polynya, satellite, Science, sea ice, Weddell Sea on October 3, 2016 by Mark Brandon. Mark Brandon • September 27, 2016

On 26th September 2016 the MODIS sensor on The TERRA satellite captured this beautiful image of South Georgia, with Iceberg A66 drifting past.

Iceberg A66 passing South Georgia captured in a MODIS image on the 26 September 2016. The image is available on a KML file on the MODIS Websites.

The iceberg A66 is about 15 km at it’s widest point in this image.

We can do a bit simple maths. Estimate the iceberg has a 200 m thickness and it is triangular in shape with a base of ~4 km.

the volume =  0.5 x 15 km x 4 km x 0.2 km = 6 km³.

So the relatively small A66 contains of 6000 gigtons of water. It’s a lot. But it’s not a lot.

Icebergs get their reference number depending on where they originate from. This one has an identifier “A” which means it came from the sector 0° to 90°W – that’s the Bellingshausen and Weddell Sea region. You can track icebergs like this both visually – like in in the image above – or using something called a Scatterometer. A scatterometer can measure the winds over the ocean, and because the winds change over the ice one can track the icebergs. Prof David Long at Brigham Young University provides an excellent database of Antarctic iceberg data based on that idea (this is their research paper on how they do that).

If we look at the location data from the ASCAT sensor you can see that A66 is at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula – but this data is only from this year. I will have to dig a little deeper. A job for later.

The track of Iceberg A66 from the BYU database

Once the icebergs reach the edge of the Weddell Sea they get to South Georgia very quickly. I did write about that in a paper in the OU database Physical oceanography in the Scotia Sea during the CCAMLR 2000 survey, austral summer 2000.

And some of these icebergs (although not A66) ground at South Georgia and ultimately can affect the ecosystem. Jon Amos wrote about some work I did at a San Francisco conference  in 2010 about that – it’s still available on the BBC website: Giant icebergs head to watery end at island graveyard.

Giant icebergs head to watery end at island graveyard. By Jon Amos

Overall A66 is nothing special, this is not an unusual observation.

It is a beautiful image though.

Posted in Science. Tags: A66, iceberg, South Atlantic, South Georgia, Weddell Sea on September 27, 2016 by Mark Brandon. Mark Brandon • September 26, 2016

The low sea ice extent I noticed in my previous blog post about Antarctic Sound has extended southwards along the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula.

The sea ice extent along the Antarctic Peninsula 24 September 2016. Data from DMSP SSMIS

The open water that shows up as black in the image above extends to at least as far south as the Antarctic Circle (66° 33′S). Open water along this part of the Antarctic Peninsula is unusual at any time of the year let alone the height of winter. The image below is from the National Snow and Ice Data Centre. It shows  sea ice extent >15% with an outline of the typical extent for that day based on a 30-year (1981-2010) median (orange line).

NSIDC Antarctic sea ice extent 24 September 2016 with the median extent (1981-2010) for this day.

You can see how unusual this observation is, and I wrote a general post Antarctic Sea Ice Extent a while ago.

The open water is also very clear in the MODIS imagery as the black wedge between the Antarctic Peninsula, and the sea ice of the Weddell Sea.

The MODIS imagery for the Antarctic Peninsula 25 September 2016.

In my previous post I pointed at weather systems as likely being responsible. Now to me it looks like a large system is pushing the whole Weddell Sea sea ice to the east and away from Antarctic Peninsula.

There is always some open water in the pack ice at any time of the year, but it’s clear that their is a pathway south right now. I imagine it will close soon and wouldn’t be keen to be on a ship in that open water heading south.

What is interesting is the heat transfer from the ocean to the atmosphere that far south at this time of the year will be huge. This is what I wrote about that heat loss for the Arctic.

Posted in Science. Tags: Antarctic Peninsula, MODIS, open water, satellite, sea ice, Weddell Sea on September 26, 2016 by Mark Brandon.

Mark Brandon • November 29, 2016

The sea Ice is too heavy for the RRS James Clark Ross to make Rothera base right now. You may have thought the sea ice on the satellite images didn’t look too bad, but it’s all about how thick the sea ice is, and where the open water is.

To quote the radio officer Mike Gloistein:

The sea-ice around the bottom of Adelaide Island has been heavy and whilst (for those of you who look at the satellite pictures) there are some leads and areas of open water,  they are close to land and if we took that route (which also includes shallow water and rocks) and the weather then pushed the ice inland,  the ship could easily become stuck between a rock and a hard place.

And then the ship could get seriously stuck just like I said the John Biscoe did in my previous post. In that case the ship was rescued by Polarstern.

This was the satellite image I posted yesterday:

The MODIS satellite image off Adelaide Island 25 Nov 2016, with the location of the RRS James Clark Ross 0000 28 November 2016.

And this is a navigation chart of that region.

Section of the Navigation Chart around the southern tip of Adelaide Island.

The light blue shading is shallow water and it’s not a great place for a ship to go without freedom of navigation. The sea ice takes away that freedom. This is of course a very sensible choice by the ships Master, and exactly the same thing happened to a voyage I was on in 2004.

In another few weeks it will be clear for them.

I don’t think this was predictable. You really have to be on the ground to see what the conditions are to make a call on whether it is safe or not. Two months ago on the 6 October I blogged about the sea ice and the potential of this happening, and said:

There are a lot of Antarctic research stations on the west of the Antarctic Peninsula, including Rothera, the largest British Base.  If the winds maintain the westerly direction then I can imagine it could be slow to resupply the base this season. There is time for it to change. According to the published schedule the ship is not due to arrive until 27 November 2016.

A slow resupply is not uncommon and I have been on at least one unsuccessful resupply voyage in my career. I took the picture below on 11 December 2004 under similar conditions.

James Clark Ross making very slow progress in compressed sea ice in Marguerite Bay, the Western Antarctic Peninsula.

Although it is not predictable, the fantastic British Antarctic Survey Operations will have planned for the consequences.

For a last point on the left of the navigational chart is one of my favourite place names:

Fullastern Rock to the west of Adelaide Island

As it says on the UK Antarctic Place Names website:

Fullastern Rock (67° 36′ 58″ S, 69° 25′ 59″ W) is a submerged rock on the west side of Johnston Passage, to the west of Adelaide Island. It was first charted by a Royal Navy Hydrographic Survey Unit from RRS John Biscoe in 1963.  The ship was compelled to go full astern to avoid this hazard  – a story succinctly captured by this evocative name!

Posted in Science. Tags: Adelaide Island, Antarctic, Fullastern Rock, James Clark Ross, Rothera, sea ice on November 29, 2016 by Mark Brandon. Mark Brandon • November 28, 2016

RRS James Clark Ross is on route to Rothera, the largest British Antarctic Survey research Station. In the next few hours to get to the base she will have to pass what looks like a continuous sea ice band about 15 km wide, before she enters some looser pack. To get their she will have to do some icebreaking. The band of ice has been stationary for over a week.

If you want to follow the action the ship has a webcam, or you can check the Radio Office Mike Gloistein’s update page. The web cam is as I write this but I’m sure it will be switched on soon.

The MODIS satellite image off Adelaide Island 25 Nov 2016, with the location of the RRS James Clark Ross 0000 28 November 2016.

The satellite image is from 25 November 2016, but the sea ice doesn’t look like it has changed significantly since then. I chose that date simply because it is relatively cloud free.

The ship has about 130 km to run so could dock later today – but it could be tomorrow given the sea ice.  The path I have shown in red looks quite a long way south of the Island – but close in it gets quite shallow. If your interested in your polar history the ship RRS John Biscoe was actually abandoned in this region for a while before being rescued by the German ship Polarstern.

This is as The Antarctic Report points out, quite early for the ship to reach the base.

Sea ice girds Adelaide Island; earliest RRS James Clark Ross has attempted to reach Rothera Station in 15 years @BAS_News @NERCscience https://t.co/mH1Y82hmua

— The Antarctic Report (@AntarcticReport) November 28, 2016

The track of the ship is online along with the weather conditions it is experiencing. At at about 0°C it is currently warmer than a lot of the UK.

Dr Helen Jones is the doctor on the James Clark Ross and she is writing a blog Baby it’s cold down here.

–UPDATE 1050z —

You can see James Clark Ross is now in the ice and heading for the band of relatively open water at the southern tip of Adelaide Island.

This is an image from the webcam.

A great day for #Antarctic ship navigation. Low clouds to lead the way https://t.co/Jmf3gLD404 water sky -> https://t.co/UJLBScTv2d pic.twitter.com/9lXDDWUW0V

— Mark Brandon (@icey_mark) November 28, 2016

I wrote about what a water sky is a while ago.

–UPDATE 0650z 29 November —

It was too early and the RRS James Clark Ross didn’t make Rothera.

To quote the radio officer Mike Gloistein:

The sea-ice around the bottom of Adelaide Island has been heavy and whilst (for those of you who look at the satellite pictures) there are some leads and areas of open water,  they are close to land and if we took that route (which also includes shallow water and rocks) and the weather then pushed the ice inland,  the ship could easily become stuck between a rock and a hard place.

And get stuck just like the John Biscoe…

Posted in Science. Tags: antarctica, British Antarctic Survey, James Clark Ross, Rothera, sea ice on November 28, 2016 by Mark Brandon. Mark Brandon • October 6, 2016

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 edge is compacted as the sea ice is pushed against the Peninsula.

The Antarctic Peninsula sea ice 24 August to 5 October 2016. Data from DMSP SSMI

The westerly winds (from bottom left to top right) compress the sea ice against the land (left hand side of the Antarctic Peninsula). This also creates open water on the eastern (right hand side ) of the Peninsula as the sea ice is pushed away from the land.

You can see the very sharp ice edge on the west, and the open open water in the MODIS satellite imagery.

MODIS image of the Antarctic Peninsula 5 October 2016 from the Aqua satellite.

The sea ice concentration anomaly for September 2016 shows that on both sides of the Antarctic Peninsula the westerly winds have reduced the amount of ice we would expect to observe by up to ~40%. On the west side because the sea ice is compressed, on the east side because the sea ice is being pushed away from the land.

Antarctic sea ice concentration anomaly for Sep 2016. Yellow rectangle approx area of images above. Image from NSIDC

This is just late winter weather.

There are a lot of Antarctic research stations on the west of the Antarctic Peninsula, including Rothera, the largest British Base.  If the winds maintain the westerly direction then I can imagine it could be slow to resupply the base this season. There is time for it to change. According to the published schedule the ship is not due to arrive until 27 November 2016.

A slow resupply is not uncommon and I have been on at least one unsuccessful resupply voyage in my career. I took the picture below on 11 December 2004 under similar conditions.

RRS James Clark Ross making very slow progress in compressed sea ice in Marguerite Bay, the Western Antarctic Peninsula 11 December 2004. Posted in Science. Tags: Antarctic Peninsula, James Clark Ross, Marguerite Bay, Rothera, satellite, Science, sea ice, Weddell Sea on October 6, 2016 by Mark Brandon.