New Antarctic Sea Ice Video – shows cycles and ice growth

Watts Up With That?
Thursday, July 2, 2009

Antarctic Sea Ice Complete Video

by Jeff Id , reposted here by invitation. The video animation Jeff put together is well worth watching, see it below the “read more” line. – Anthony

Figure 1 – Wilkins Ice Shelf – A map of the Antarctic Peninsula with the location of the the Wilkins Ice Sheet, which is on the southern portion of the peninsula. Credit: British Antarctic Survey

Antarctic temperatures and sea ice are becoming quite a hobby. It should make for some interesting discussion around the campfire this summer – not really. It takes my computer about 15 hours to calculate this movie and it took all day to figure out how to make the movie work. Actually it takes a minute then wait, then a minute and wait again. I finally got a reasonable quality video at 15 frames per second, one frame per day from 1978 – 2009. Before you watch the video Figure 1 is a map of the Wilkins ice shelf which apparently is about to melt every hot January summer at the south pole.

The melting of the Wilkins ice shelf has happened over and over prompting numerous articles like the following.

Wilkins Ice Shelf About to Break Off and Alter the Map of Antarctica

Vast Antarctic Ice Shelf on Verge of Collapse

The headlines are truly endless and will continue this year as well.

Here is a video which is particularly pertinent in it’s discussion and the fact that it ends with a discussion of climate science by Hillary Clinton. I recommend it to everyone before watching the video below.

Wilkins Ice Shelf Collapse Video

Below is a plot of the sea ice area anomaly in the antarctic calculated from the NSIDC NasaTeam algorithm data. It shows an upward trend in sea ice extent over the last 30 years.

I’ve pointed out here many times that the trends do in fact exist if the even if the statistical certainty created by typical high frequency climate activity can create a trend of the same magnitude. This is an important differentiation which certain ‘over the top’ scientists in AGW crowd tend to blur. Statistical certainty of a trend does not always mean the trend does or does not exist, a trend is a trend to the certainty of the measurement error (different than certainty created from other noise). Some global warming bloggers like to blur that distinction.

The interpretation of a trend’s meaning does change with the statistical certainty of the trend. In the case of Antarctic sea ice growth I have seen one example demonstrating the trend is statistically significant despite climate noise. However the point of ice shrinking or growing is to interpret the consequences of a trend with regards to global warming. When interpreting the consequences of ice growth or shrinkage in my opinion the arbitrary significance threshold and linear trend has little meaning.

The annual variance of the sea ice is shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3
The huge annual variation dwarfs any apparent trend with the signal dropping to near zero every year. The thermal inertia of the ice creates a smooth cyclical process allows us to make pretty anomaly plots like Figure 2 but trend wise there isn’t much to say. So I guess I’m fired from my budding climatology career again. The reason they have little meaning becomes apparent in the wildly dynamic sea ice video presented below.

Below is a link to a video file of the Antarctic sea ice trends for 30 years.

Figure 4 – Antarctic Sea Ice Video – Click to play
Now consider that each pixel of the Antarctic ice data is 25 km and in the video of the Wilkins ice shelf, the crack is 40miles long – that is about 2.6 pixels in the Figure 4 video.

What’s really interesting about the video is the clockwise rotation of the ice which becomes especially visible during maximum extent. Another interesting point is the peninsula acts as a shelter to the ice on its leeward side. The Wilkins shelf get’s blasted by air and water currents every year from the south in this image, once we understand that combined with in the CNN video (link above) the reason the ice bridge exists is obviously due to protection from ocean and air currents by a small island (look at the angle of the ice bridge in the CNN video compared to current flow). The Island has protected this very small piece of ice from cracking for some time probably because the amazing circularity of the Antarctic continent doesn’t experience very large current changes.

I’ve watched the above video a dozen or so times (wouldn’t you after a day’s work) I noticed that there does appear to be a change in weather patterns in more recent years as the upward flow below the peninsula cuts away at the maximum ice extent on the West side of the image. The same is true for the East side of the image.

I had the advantage of doing a trend by pixel plot previously which led me to look for the effect. The plot done by myself in a previous post using a slightly older version of the same data is shown in Figure 5. The loss of ice on the West and East sides of the Antarctic is visible as blue pixels at the extreme edges of the range.

Its difficult to imagine after watching this video that this ice shelf hasn’t collapsed (or whatever it’s called) and re-formed in the last several hundred years, more than once. Remember the ice from the shelf forms on land and flows out to sea. Either way, considering the natural variation of Antarctic sea ice, can we really say the current Antarctic ice trend or the change of an ice shelf in such a tiny area has a powerful meaning for the future of Earth?

If you missed the Arctic version of the video the link is here: Arctic Ice Video

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14 Responses to “New Antarctic Sea Ice Video – shows cycles and ice growth”

1. USMC Grunt Says:
   July 2nd, 2009 at 6:04 am

   i don’t believe this …..who could believe NASA ….i just don’t believe it i am going to tell Lucy lib, she will take care of this…………how come they air brushed the hollow earth holes??????

   

   Julius Reply:
   July 2nd, 2009 at 12:52 pm

   Well the proof is in the pudding……………These pictures don’t seem to lie…

   Find out how deep the worm hole goes…

   http://www.thegrandawakening.com

   

   USMC Grunt Reply:
   July 2nd, 2009 at 1:55 pm

   it was sarcasm buddy

2. Matzo Man Says:
   July 2nd, 2009 at 6:05 am

   This is not much data. I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from this. But the propaganda media machine is in full swing, incessantly blaring out crap, so I guess we need something to counter it.

3. Astro Chimp Says:
   July 2nd, 2009 at 8:37 am

   NASA stands for Never A Straight Answer.

4. Comet Says:
   July 2nd, 2009 at 9:00 am

   Invasion shortly, the reason why can be found here……

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb1hSv2f7gE

5. Unite!! Says:
   July 2nd, 2009 at 11:13 am

   They have lies and deception but we have determination and TRUTH!

   http://www.warnthepeople.org

6. Time to Fight the NWO Says:
   July 2nd, 2009 at 11:54 am

   http://www.thegrandawakening.com/
   Check this awesome site out. ALL THE NWO VIDEOS you can eat. Tons of Alex Jones and others. Also, tons of stuff on 2012 and why the NWO situation is aall related.

7. Lee Says:
   July 2nd, 2009 at 12:46 pm

   This is the one thing that Alex Jones is completely wrong on. He’s usually correct in most of the knowledge he brings to everyone, but not this.

   The earths mantle is heating up. There will be abrupt climate change in the very near future…..not 10 years from now, but soon. It is caused mostly because of man. The ocean conveyor belt is weakening & will create a mini ice age in the future. Global warming & a future ice age are both real. They will both happen soon.

   Alex Jones & the alternative media has been duped here…..gauranteed. Your government is already prepared with underground shelters for the earth changes coming very soon. Move far away from the water & create a house with the elevation of 400 feet. Store food & water, enough for 2 years.

   Respect,

   Lee

8. Bree Says:
   July 2nd, 2009 at 2:48 pm

   Lee, are you going by that documentry about the warming of ocean current belt that runs from of the tropics up through English channel to the Artic region , where it drops again ?
   Tell us more .?

9. ChatsworthSharp420 Says:
   July 2nd, 2009 at 7:45 pm

   Check this site out, it’s about Hollow Earth,and a range of topics that aren’t discussed in mainstream media

   very interesting stuff
   http://psychedelicadventure.bl.....earth.html

10. ! Says:
    July 2nd, 2009 at 8:19 pm

    Recession
    Posted: July, 02, 2009

    Stewart,

    Is this economic recession staged? Please tell. Thanks
    Stewart’s Reply: Haven’t you been reading my site?? Like, duh! )

    http://www.expansions.com/QA_Comments.cfm

11. lincoln Says:
    July 3rd, 2009 at 7:52 am

    to create ice in any region, you need to create heat in another region. some parts of the world are heating up a little which draws the moisture out of those areas, which then fall as precipitation in other areas hence the growth of arctic caps. both sides of this argument are right! the earths environment is a paradox, anyone who says they understand it completely
    are fooling themselves.

12. JPJ Says:
    July 3rd, 2009 at 9:43 am

    I think debating whether or not global climate change is man made is really counter productive. Instead we should be focusing on proposed solutions. Cap and Trade is absolutely a scam, just another market for the elite to exploit. We need to be calling them out on this without getting into the science which is almost impossible to prove one way or the other. Demand your Senator actually read any proposed legislation before voting on it. The house version has a lot of bull, do they actually intend on inspecting people’s homes? I think even the most liberal of Senators won’t go for that.