Animation 1: Nares Strait

I've produced an animated GIF of the part of the MODIS Arctic Mosaic where you can see the mouth of Nares Strait, the Lincoln Sea and the upper part of Fram Strait. Normally the Nares Strait, the water between Greenland and Ellesmere Island (see map) is closed by so-called ice arches or ice bridges that keep the ice in the Lincoln Sea from flowing out into Baffin Bay and further south where it melts more readily.

Until recently these ice bridges would remain intact until late summer, but this has changed since 2007. As can be read in the Broken Bridges of Nares article by Patrick Lockerby, the ice arches failed to form in 2007 and "the open Nares Strait discharged about 10% of the total ice loss" of the mean ice export at Fram Strait. Lockerby also says: "The Nares Strait and Lincoln Sea areas should be surveyed as a matter of urgency." So this is pretty important, especially as the arches have failed to form again last winter.

Below is the GIF I've produced, covering the period from June 7 up till June 14th. The quality isn't great, mostly because of interfering cloud cover and having to cut down resolution (the animation wouldn't work at first because the files was too big). I would suggest to keep your eyes focused on one spot instead of trying to take the whole picture in. Concentrate in particular on the mouth of Nares Strait on the middle left and the part of the Fram Strait in the lower right hand corner (click on the picture for a version with a higher resolution):

What's interesting to see is that big floe (probably around 50 km across) that is floating towards the mouth of Nares Strait. As Gareth Renowden put it in a recent blog post:

I suspect, however, that there may be a temporary halt to ice export as a big lump of what could/should be thicker ice looks about to get stuck in the narrow entrance to the strait. If it’s thick multi-year ice, it could be a formidable obstacle, but if it’s “Barber ice”, it might not last long.

The floe has arrived at the mouth and we'll see how much blocking it will do.

The ice in the right hand corner is interesting in conjunction with a question I asked in my previous blog post called Dire Straits, which comes down to: Could Nares Strait and Fram Strait become connected along the Greenland coast? Or in other words, could Greenland become circumnavigable? It's a bit far-fetched to expect that to happen this summer, but don't put anything by this alarmist. ;-)

I'm ending the post with a map from the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI), which shows a forecast for Arctic ice movement (I've flipped the map as the original is seen from the Russian side upwards):
I'm not sure how to interpret the map as there are some buttons that you can press for a +1 to +6 day forecasts, and when I press +6 I get this map with today's date. In any case, the arrows are pointing upwards, so perhaps we'll see Knopfler Strait (that's my nickname for the eventual lead of open water between Nares and Fram) get bigger.

I'm a newbie at watching the ice up close through satellite images, so any suggestions or hints are most welcome. These files are quite big too, so I'm not sure how many TypePad will allow me to post. I'll have to see if I can make them smaller.

UPDATE: I managed to make the file smaller, so it works now. Phew.

UPDATE 2: I have two more animations of Nares Strait.

The first one is a great animation by Patrick Lockerby in his most recent article that shows Nares Strait and the big floe in greater detail:

The other one I made myself. It's a comparison between 2009 and 2010 (click for the big picture), inspired by Gareth's comment below describing the situation last year:

Comments

[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. :)