PIOMAS Arctic Sea Ice Volume 1979 - 2012 September 2nd

Note: Superseded by http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GetB-x...

Since 1979, the volume of Summer Arctic Sea Ice has declined by 75% and accelerating.
The first summer with an ice-free Arctic Ocean for at least a day is expected to happen within a decade.
This video by Andy Lee Robinson illustrates the dramatic decline since 1979 until 2nd September 2012 (day 246).

Sea Ice Volume is calculated using the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS, Zhang and Rothrock, 2003) developed at APL/PSC.
Source data for this graph is available from http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpre...

More information:
https://sites.google.com/site/arctics...
http://neven1.typepad.com/

Also featured on BBC's Newsnight:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-env...

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Zane Selvans]

It's interesting that the big volume drop years don't necessarily correspond to the big area/extent drop years. Big volume loss in 2010, but not a big loss in extent. Big area loss this year, but not a big volume loss.

[Andy Lee Robinson]

I think the unusual Arctic storm had a hand in this, by pushing the ice around and helping to compact it and stirring up deeper warmer water, while thin outlying ice was left vulnerable to melting. Such a storm would not have bothered normal ice as much.

If the volume trend continues, as increasingly thinner ice melts then one day we might see extent almost disappear overnight.

Next few years will be interesting.

[Dosbat1]

Didn't realise that video was from you. I thought the BBC graphics people had done it. Very informative and professional.

Thanks

[Andy Lee Robinson]

Thanks very much.

It was a personal 'wouldn't it be nice if?' project to create something pretty to bridge the gap between science and viewer, to entertain and inform.

It took many days/nights of programming and experimenting with thousands of lines of code, and many hours rendering - unlikely that a programme maker with tight deadlines could devote that much time, but I'm glad it found its mark.

I'll produce more updates as new data appears.

[Andy Lee Robinson]

Chris, these comments are for Arctic Sea Ice, the animation and data. Not politics.

I'm not going to let people hijack these comments with political agendas regardless of flavour and risk ugly troll wars.

There are plenty of other places where you can go for that.

[Jai666666666]

This is still too slow.Everyone needs to eat ten times more beef and porc, grive 50 miles a day with both cars, this has to melt by 2015. I want to see at least 200 million people drown by 2016-2017,I haven't got all day. If you can submerge every coastal city by 2020,that would almost be acceptable, but I was given promises and I expect world governments to stand by their words.I expect a 50 percent decline in the world population and a 90 percent by 2030. Enough is enough,let the lions loose.

[acidonjesus]

We are still in the ice age that began 2.6 million years ago at the start of the Pleistocene epoch, because the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets still exist. Soon the ice age will be over :))

[GeaVox]

This is something that I have been asking about, on Real Climate. I wonder how much work has been done on studying the extent of ice fragmentation from ice-breakers penetrating deep into the polar cap, especially in winter, breaking-up its integrity at the time when new ice should be forming around older, more massive pack ice, cementing it. This mechanical fragmentation exposes a higher surface area to insolation and must significantly amplify melt rates.

[GeaVox]

OK, I stand corrected. However, I am sure most climatologists would claim that they are pretty ordinary people, on the whole :D

[Dosbat1]

Zane Selvans,

Well spotted! The volume loss in 2010 was as big as that in 2007. It was due to a very unusual combination of weather patterns over winter 2009/10 and into May, and seems to have lead to the near elimination of the oldest thickest ice from the PIOMAS model. Since that event the seasonal cycle of volume from PIOMAS has changed.

In line with Maslanik's work, the Arctic has now completed its first transition, from mainly old ice before the 1980s to almost totally young ice now.

[Dosbat1]

Hi GeaVox,

Please be aware that the comments at RC are mostly by ordinary people.

[GeaVox]

if you need more data, try Real Climate, there is a wealth of info by climate scientists. The most relevant of the recent discussions to Arctic sea ice there, at the moment, is "An update on the Arctic sea-ice" - 26 August 2012 - with 286 comments from climatologists.

[Chris Taylor]

Ta 4 the email & wise words. If you google "ta7king" you'll see that this is the only political vid upload on my climate site. I'm actually RINO, but 4 years of denialism would be a massive set back, and I don't think we should take that sitting down.

[Robert Fanney]

Devastating.