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Gareth

Hi Neven, nice idea with the animation but... doesn't seem to work for me, either in the post or in the pop-up. I just see the starting image.

Gareth

Looks like "Barber ice" to me...

Artful Dodger

Great idea to create an animation, Neven. I'm not sure if an animated GIF is the best approach, since all GIF's are limited to 256 colors. If I were you, I'd create a True-Color FLV video and upload it to YouTube. Then, use the "Embed Video" feature of YouTube to display your animation inline on this blog.

Patrick Lockerby

You beat me to the punch. Well done. :-)

Many thanks for the links.

That large floe has now fractured. I expect it to fragment and disperse soon. In winter, the floe would have been enough to block the strait for months, but it's summer and the floe was relatively weak from partial melting.

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=Arctic_r03c03.2010165.terra.250m

Nearby, the Petermann Glacier melange from last year continues to break up. I expect the ice tongue to lose a substantial ice island-sized chunk this summer.

I'll be blogging about Greenland's glaciers soon.

btw, you're doing a great job with this blog.
More power to your elbow.

Lord Soth

That flow wont block for long. It already developed a crack, and other pieces are breaking off of it.

GFW

A big part of that floe has already broken off. I give the rest of it two days tops.

dorlomin

Not specifically to do with the Nares straight but I have had my attention drawn to the sea ice concentrations to the North and North East of Greenland. On Cryosphere Today and the University of Bremens maps these appear unusualy low. This region is normally the bastion of the thick multiyear ice (5 and 6 year ice) yet this appears to be unusualy thin. While not dropping below 80% (although further North it seems to have ice free patches) I thought I would draw other attention to this for coments.

Neven

Thanks for the comments and I apologize for the animation not working. I figured that it would work because Jinlun Zhang's on the first SIE prediction post did so too. But this file is pretty big, so TypePad probably rejects it.

I wanted to take care of it yesterday evening, but then my modem went haywire! There's been some heavy thunderstorms - and floods - in my region, after a small record breaking heat wave, and perhaps it fried the modem.

I barely got the word of caution in and published the latest comments, and then it was finito with my internet connection. Had to get a new modem today. Later today I'll try to find a good way to put this animation and the next ones up (thanks for the tip, artful dodger).

What an anti-climax. :-(

Andy

As a fellow layman ice watcher I have really enjoyed reading your posts. I'll have to bookmark your blog.

Neven

Thanks, Andy, it's an honour.

I've finally managed to reduce the file size by using less days and cut down on resolution. Unfortunately converting the GIF to FLV or AVI and upload to Youtube - which was a great idea - just didn't work for me, no matter what software I used. Perhaps someone has a good tip or tutorial.

The image is a bit more boring because it's shorter. I guess some people would say that watching satellite images of moving ice floes is boring enough as it is! But we're among friends here. The break-up of that floe looks pretty cool, eh? ;-)

Next time I'll play around a bit more to see what TypePad will allow me to do, perhaps make the images a tad longer (10-12 days would be nice I guess). Maybe I'll zoom in on Nares Strait some more, but what I like about this part of the MODIS Arctic Mosaic is that you see both Nares and a bit of Fram Strait.

Gneiss

Now that your animation is working, it's quite something to see how quickly that large and solid-looking piece fractured. That seems to fit with Barber's Beaufort Sea observations that the ice was much weaker than it appeared from space.

Nice site, BTW. I've added it to my daily rounds.

Gareth

The Jun 15 image (250m/px) shows that the "big lump" has rotated and entered the Strait. For an interesting comparison, you can look at last year's image for the same day by changing the URL: the last part of the link form is "2010166.terra.250m" -- just change 2010 to 2009. There was an "arch" of ice at the entrance to the Strait (pretty much the same as earlier this year, back in March, for instance), and not much ice moving through the Strait. Interesting to note the state of the ice off the coast as well - it looks much more consolidated - fewer leads, less open water, but I'm not sure about the extent to which low cloud is obscuring things...

The contrast between 09 and 10 is marked. I doubt we'll see a "blink comparator" showing that over at µWatts... ;-)

Neven
The contrast between 09 and 10 is marked. I doubt we'll see a "blink comparator" showing that over at µWatts... ;-)

No, but you'll see it here. I've just made it and TypePad accepted.

Gareth

Do you deliver coffee too?

Neven

Sure, but it might take a while before it reaches New Zealand. ;-)

Patrick Lockerby

Neven, I just posted a new article: http://www.scientificblogging.com/chatter_box/arctic_summer_2010_hot_or_not.

Feel free to copy the animation or other images here, if you wish.

How long before that coffee reaches the U.K. ? :-)

Neven

That's a great animation, Patrick! I will thankfully reproduce it in this blog post.

And I'll link to your very interesting article through the latest SIE update.

dorlomin

Beautiful to watch.

Nick Barnes

Regarding circumnavigation of Greenland, I'll hold my fire until we see such much larger coastal leads. The ice all along the archipelago and Greenland was in a parlous state in 2008, and it never really opened up. See this comment of mine from 2008-08-07, with a link to a MODIS image. http://rabett.blogspot.com/2008/07/nw-passage-prize.html?showComment=1218109701765#c8513605577411554422

Bluegrue.wordpress.com
Perhaps someone has a good tip or tutorial.
Hi Neven, the combo VirtualDub and AviSynth will do the trick. I've written a short quick-start guide for you.

http://bluegrue.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/creating-a-video-from-stills-using-virtualdub-and-avisynth/

Have fun. :)

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