27 years of Arctic ice in one minute

A stunning video the other day was published by NOAA Climate - or in Russian by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for Climate Research, which combined data on Arctic ice collected over the past 27 years - between 1987 and 2014. Colorful visualization allows us to evaluate how the snow and ice cover of our northern “cap” changes seasonally and year after year, as well as to trace the effect of global warming on the age of ice cover.

Every winter, the ice cover of the Arctic Ocean increases seasonally, reaching its maximum in the month of March, and each summer melts, reaching a minimum by September. The ice that does not have time to melt by this time in the winter period is overgrown with a new layer, thus forming a multilayer, perennial ice cover. However, due to harmful emissions and the general so-called “global warming”, the thickness and volume of this cover are steadily decreasing since the 80s of the last century.

A team of glaciologists led by Mark Tschudi of the Center for Astrodynamic Research at the University of Colorado ( CCAR at the University of Colorado) together with animators from NOAAClimate processed the data on the state of Arctic ice obtained over the past 20 years and created a one-minute video. It shows not only how the thickness of the ice cover changed, but also how the ice masses drifted depending on the time of year. On the scale presented in the video, blue indicates the youngest ice cover (no more than 1 year), and white - the oldest (more than 9 years):



On the video you can see several interesting features. Firstly, in the east of Greenland, in the Fram Strait, there is an ice outlet from the giant basin of the Arctic Ocean. At the same time, ice losses are compensated by the growth of perennial ice in the Beaufort Sea off the Canadian coast, where one of the most grand whirlpools on Earth is located. There, perennial ice can persist for many years, drifting inside a huge pool. Secondly, almost the entire long-term ice cover melted in 2012, thus breaking another anti-record, however, during 2013-2014, scientists noted a noticeable improvement in the situation. Thirdly, the reason for the creation of the widely used nuclear icebreaker fleet in Russia, and not in Canada or the United States, is the very closeness of the Arctic Ocean basins that are strange for many years,

Additional material on this topic:
Charctic Interactive Sea Ice Graph . National Snow and Ice Data Center. Accessed November 25, 2014.

Perovich, D., Gerland, S., Hendricks, S., Meier, W., Nicolaus, M., Tschudi, M. (2014) Sea Ice . In Jeffries, MO, Richter-Menge, J., Overland, JE (Eds.), Arctic Report Card: Update for 2014. PS

Source

: Also, among other things, the organization’s website contains other interesting infographics and data visualization videos such as as. for example, a change in global temperature over the last century:

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