It's been over a year since this blog saw the light of day. We have now over 1 year of collective experience and learning under our belt, so I think an overview containing the most interesting articles and animations of the past year is appropriate. It's also a reference for comparison with this year's events.
June 7th 2010: the introduction to this blog, Welcome to this blog!, was written on this date. I still stand behind it, so if you want to know why I started this blog, I suggest you read it. The same goes for a subsequent piece called The Alarmist's Dilemma, written a week later.
June 11th 2010: One of the first pieces I put a lot of work into, describing Wayne Davidson's anvil seeding theory, called Arctic sea ice melt: a correlation with ENSO? Wayne has his own blog: EH2R.
June 13th 2010: A piece on the Influence of the Arctic Oscillation.
June 14th 2010: The first animation I made was of Nares Strait.
June 19th 2010: I wrote a first post on the Passages, with a first animation of the Northwest Passage that'll come in handy soon. Just a day after that came the first post on Century Breaks, which will also come in handy the coming days.
June 23rd 2010: The third animation showed the Beaufort Sea (with a short explanation of the Gyre) and is well worth having a look at.
June 25th 2010: Our focus was attracted to the Webcam Puddles that showed up for the first time on the NOAA webcams at the North Pole. There has been some discussion lately of a big crack and pressure ridge that was visible on the images of webcam 2, but no melt puddles as of yet that I'm aware of.
June 28th 2010: I did a small animation of Uni Bremen sea ice concentration maps to compare 2007 and 2010, with an interesting remark towards the end concerning Hudson Bay (of current interest as well). That same day I shat my pants when seeing the huge drop in the Arctic Basin sea ice area. Note also the SIA anomaly of -1.927 million km2 on that date in 2010 (we are currently at -1.412 million km2). Still on the same date I posted Animation 4: McClure Strait.
July 2nd 2010: This was the first animation of Petermann Glacier, showing how the sea ice in front of the glacier ice tongue broke up, with some other info and comparisons to previous years. One month later the Great Calving took place.
July 5th 2010: Events forced me to come up with a New and improved NWP animation. This was followed two days later with an animation of Vilkitsky Strait, an important part of the Northern Sea Route, as we would see a few weeks later.
July 12th 2010: Another animation, of the Jakobshavn Isbræ glacier this time, that captures last year's significant calving event. On the 21st of July I also wrote a (rather boring, if I say so myself) piece on Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier.
July 22nd 2010: A short post reporting that scientists had received the first CryoSat-2 data. Oh CryoSat, where art thou?
July 25th 2010: Yet another updated animation of the NWP.
July 27th 2011: I had finally found some time to write about the Norwegians that were planning on sailing both the NWP and the NSR in one season. The piece is called Passing the Passages.
OK, that's it for now. We'll keep the rest for some other time. I'm tired of reading my own stuff. :-)
But this should be more than enough for now for people who want to compare the main areas of focus with last year. Let's move onwards together into the second year of the ASI blog.
Hi Neven,
A belated Happy Birthday!
Just wanted to note that some of the best reference materials on the internet for comparison with this year's state of play are now the archives of this blog from last year.
Posted by: idunno | June 19, 2011 at 13:17
Thanks, idunno. :-)
I also forgot to thank all the other people who congratulated me in the Welcome blog post. Thanks, Peter Ellis, Doc Kevin, Christoffer, Lodger, Werther!
One last thing: While reading through all the post and comments of June and July last year, I noticed quite soon that PIPS never stopped forecasting ice displacement last year. So this is unusual.
If anyone has the time and inclination to thank the Naval Research Laboratory through their feedback form for their work so far and ask when their maps come back online, something might change.
Posted by: Neven | June 19, 2011 at 13:27
talking of cryosat-2 there's a strange reference on this page to "Unveiling of the first data released by CryoSat" this tuesday
http://www.avionews.com/index.php?corpo=see_news_home.php&news_id=1130787&pagina_chiamante=index.php
Posted by: k eotw | June 19, 2011 at 16:26
Indeed, k eotw. On the ESA site it says:
I guess we'll have to watch and see. :-)
Posted by: Neven | June 19, 2011 at 16:38
Wow, that brings back a flood of Memories... i believe i will have TWO ice-cubes with my nihilism today.
Cheers, Everyone!
Posted by: Artful Dodger | June 19, 2011 at 16:59