Arctic Sea Ice

Ice cube volume video

Andy Lee Robinson fired up his super computer to produce the video below, and during rendering composed the soundtrack to go with it:

I think it's his best one so far.

A new round of vids

I have all these tabs open in my browser with videos about Arctic sea ice. At a certain point my browser wil crash and I lose all those tabs, so it might be best to just post them here in case you haven't seen one of them.

I'll kick off with the latest vid on Peter Sinclair's Climatecrocks blog:

Some of the images used come from this video called The New Arctic, featuring marine scientist Ken Dunton, very well-made and appealing:

The next video, Arctic Sea Ice - The New Normal, has some nice visualizations:

Permafrost, the tipping time bomb

Peter Sinclair has made another video for the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, which I would like to share with you:

And for all you Jennifer Francis-fans out there: she didn't win an Oscar for best Weird Weather-expert, but actually did some work and held a lecture three days ago at the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions that can be watched here. And there's a radio interview with her here (starting at minute 51, it's weird to hear what she says after 500 advertisements that urge us to consume more).

New PIOMAS vid

800 frames, 30 minutes of work per frame, but Andy Lee Robinson did it.
He updated his PIOMAS 3D video to include all of 2012:

Thanks, Andy! Great job!

More from Greenland

Greenland's glaciers and ice sheet have become an integral part of this blog. Perhaps it should be renamed to ASIGIS blog? ;-)

This clip from the Chasing Ice documentary has been doing the rounds lately. It's showing the largest iceberg calving ever filmed, with 7.4 cubic km of ice crashing off Jakobshavn Isbræ:

I'm guessing the calving took place in June of this year, basing myself on this CAD image that commenter Werther had made at the time (and I used in the Dark side of Greenland blog post). It shows the glacier's retreat since 2011, with the 2012 June event in red:

Back then I wrote:

Those are pretty big calvings, but strangely enough, I haven't seen any reports anywhere (of course, the Cruise-Holmes divorce must take precedence).

Better late than ever, eh? Especially when it's accompanied by awesome footage.

[edit: commenter Perwilainen has very convincingly explained that the footage is from 2009. Keep those cameras rolling if you want to film an even bigger calving event]

Speaking of Werther.. He made another CAD image, a very detailed one using the LANCE-MODIS satellite images of the Arctic, showing the boundary of the ice sheet (click for a very large version):

Arctic methane: Why the sea ice matters

Here's a video from the Arctic News blog, which is run by the people from AMEG (Arctic Methane Emergency Group). I'm not a big fan of geo-engineering, especially if it supports the continuation of business-as-usual, but as this video has some good speakers that dare speak of worst-case scenarios, and it is not an ad for geo-engineering (that will be part 2, I surmise), I think it's worth a watch:

I'm not sure how imminent a methane clathrate collapse is, but I'm not ruling anything out. As long as methane concentrations. global as well as Arctic, are not shooting up dramatically we're in the 'safe' zone (were it not for CO2, of course).

Don't forget, if you want to have regular updates on the situation with regards to methane, you can go to Apocalypse4You's website and the ESRL Data Visualization page for Barrow (or any other sites you want).

Let's make this a sort of open thread where everyone can discuss solutions if they so wish. I haven't changed my opinion that the neoclassical economic concept that drives our economies, societies and cultures needs to be replaced as soon as possible. Maybe the brainwashing of economy students needs to stop first for that to happen.

Edit: In light of my last remark, Gareth Wyn Jones asked me to link to his article called Overshooting Limits (download document by clicking this link). I read it this summer and it gets to the core of the matter very nicely. Explaining the Galbraithian Dilemma was an eye opener for me.

Mike McCracken interview

Peter Sinclair from the Climate Denial Crock of the Week blog has been doing some great work lately by interviewing several experts on Arctic sea ice (like Jennifer Francis for instance). Not to imply that he didn't do great work before that. :-)

Here's another interview Peter conducted with Mike McCracken, Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs with the Climate Institute in Washington DC:

I don't know about the ice breaker stuff, but hey, every little bit helps.

I also recommend this video with footage from a talk McCracken held 30 years ago at Sandia Lab, called Global Warming: What We Knew in 82:

 

More vids

I'm pretty sure someone mentioned these while I was away in slowinternetistan, but the visuals are so stunning that I'm posting them two weeks later. These videos, uploaded to YouTube by noiv, were shot by folks on one of the  helicopters of the Polarstern research icebreaker. I don't know when they were shot exactly, probably somewhere in August, in the area that we refer to here as the Laptev Bite:

Melt ponds anyone? Or how about some rotten ice for your Martini?

There are a couple more videos like this one (here and here). And here's one showing the Polarstern.

Two weeks ago Noiv also uploaded a video that shows preliminary sea ice thickness measurements by the ESA's SMOS satellite (which I wrote about back in February):

This animation is now accompanied by an official ESA press release:

A New Climate State: Arctic Sea Ice 2012 (video)

Talking about cool, yet depressing vids: Peter Sinclair from the Climate Denial Crock of the Week blog has produced a new video for The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media (link) that covers this melting season and shows the reactions from several experts:

Great stuff. Thank you, Peter!

(not so) Cool vids

The melting season has come to an end (more on that tomorrow in a new ASI update) and so all kinds of cool graphs, images and videos make the rounds. Unfortunately what is going on in the Arctic isn't so cool, otherwise it'd be more fun. The awe-inspiring shattering of records and the seriousness of the whole thing is starting to hit home, surpassing my denial mechanisms.

First off, this visually awesome reconstruction of the Arctic summer storm, aka Great Arctic Cyclone of 2012, made by the NASA/Goddard Science Visualization Studio (who also made this stunning video of ocean currents) for a NASA article called Arctic Sea Ice Hits Smallest Extent In Satellite Era:

NOAA's Visualization Lab produced The Arctic's Record Breaking Ice Melt: