Arctic Sea Ice

NASA image of the day: Bering Sea

A little over a month I looked at the situation in the Bering Sea, with sea ice cover larger than it has been for the last decade. This hasn't changed as NASA's Earth Observatory shows with the following satellite image of the day and accompanying text I have reproduced below:

Bering Sea Teeming with Ice

For most of the winter of 2011–2012, the Bering Sea has been choking with sea ice. Though ice obviously forms there every year, the extent of the ice cover has been unusually widespread this season. In fact, the past several months have included the second highest ice extent in the satellite record for the Bering Sea region, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

The natural-color image above shows the Bering Sea and the coasts of Alaska and northeastern Russia on March 19, 2012. The image was acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Black lines mark the coastlines, many of which have ice shelves or frozen bays extending beyond their land borders.

NSIDC reported that ice extent in the Bering Sea for January was 562,000 square kilometers, at least 104,600 square kilometers above the 1979 to 2000 average. Though numbers were not released for February, the pattern persisted through to March 2012.

Continue reading at NASA's Earth Observatory website...

Bering the load

After last year's corny title (Bering in mind) I naturally had to continue the tradition. But this year the pun is quite appropriate, as it seems that the Bering Sea is indeed bearing the load of anomalous ice cover that offers a counterweight to what's happening on the Atlantic side of the Arctic, and thus keeps total sea ice extent and area figures in balance. If it weren't for this chances of a new winter maximum ice cover would be very great indeed.

On the Cryosphere Today sea ice area map for the Bering Sea region figure we can see how anomalously high sea ice over is at the moment (red line):

The NASA Blue Marble on the NSIDC Sea Ice Index confirms: