Arctic Sea Ice

First Petermann Ice Island photos

REMEMBER: There are two days left to vote on the poll widgets in the right hand bar, one is for Cryosphere Today minimum daily sea ice area, the other for NSIDC minimum September/monthly sea ice extent. You can also re-vote if you like by going to the polls directly (here for NSIDC minimum monthly SIE, and here for CT minimum daily SIA). More info and all the numbers for minimums in the 2005-2011 period in this blog post.

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Dr. Andreas Münchow, sea-going physical oceanographer, has been in the Nares Strait area for the past couple of weeks to retrieve moorings chock-full of data, deploy new ones and do all kinds of other exciting science stuff. He is currently in Resolute where the internet connection has allowed him to upload some photos to his blog, photos of the mega-iceberg that recently calved off of Petermann Glacier. I gratefully reproduce the photos here, for more info go to Dr. Münchow's blog, Icy Seas:

Petermann Ice Island 2012 (PII-2012) as seen Aug.-11, 2012 at the entrance of Petermann Fjord. The view is to the north-west. [Photo Credit: CCGS Henry Larsen.]

North-eastern portion of Petermann Glacier on Aug.-11, 2012, the meandering river is the centerline, view is almost due east. [Photo Credit: Canadian Coast Guard Ship Henry Larsen.]

Awe-some...

Petermann calves again

Petermann Glacier has calved another large ice island, about half the size
of the calving of two years ago, which amounts to about two Manhattans.

This is what it looks like:

This second big calving (spotted this time by Arcticicelost80) is another spectacular event on Greenland this year, following retreats of the Jakobshavn Glacier and lowest reflectivity of the Greenland ice sheet on record (see blog post), leading to unprecedented flooding in the southwest of Greenland. This calving was expected to happen, as the rift in the glacier has been there for years (see this thorough explanation by glacier expert Mauri Pelto).

From the Icy Seas blog:

This morning Petermann Glacier lost another ice island of a size comparable to what it lost in 2010:

The break-off point has been visible for at least 8 years in MODIS imagery propagating at speeds of 1 km/year towards Nares Strait. The fracture also extended further across the floating ice sheet from the northern towards its southern side.

This event is still evolving, Trudy Wohleben of the Canadian Ice Service noticed it first (as in 2010) after reviewing MODIS imagery. Several people in several countries are monitoring and assessing the situation, but a first estimate of its size is 200 km^2 (3 Manhattans), I will revise this figure as soon as I got my hands on the raw data.

Read more here.

Two years ago Patrick Lockerby was the first to tell the world about the big calving that occurred at Petermann Glacier. The Arctic Sea Ice blog followed suit shortly afterwards. The whole event garnered a lot of attention, popularizing the island of Manhattan as an area measurement tool (square metre, square kilometre, Manhattan ;-) ). This second big calving in as many years doesn't come as a surprise, as attested by this article on the New York Times blog from August last year:

Petermann, where art thou?

I know I should be following this more closely, but there's only so much time in a day. Luckily, Lord Soth mailed me yesterday to inform me of the whereabouts of the largest remaining piece of the Petermann Glacier that broke off last year:

As Lord Soth reports:

It is now about 100 Km north of the Island of Newfoundland, Canada. I did not expect it to make it down the Labrador Coast in one piece. The coast of Labrador is full of shoals and and offshore banks that would have grounded the ice island. It is now entering a basin off the northern Newfoundland Coast, and should come to its final resting spot grounded a few miles off the northern coast of the island of Newfoundland in places like Twillingate and Fogo Island. There is a small chance of it entering Belle isle strait and enter the gulf of St. Lawrence, but that would require the perfect timing of a North Easter, but we don't usually get these in the dog days of summer.

I decided to have another round of Google, after vaguely remembering reading something about tourist excursions to see the big iceberg, and ran into this video (link) shot a month ago:

Flushing out the Fjord 2

This is a brief update to the first Flushing out the Fjord post.

It looks some more ice is being flushed out of the Illulisat fjord. Here's an animation of the past week:

Although it looks quite spectacular, this isn't as uncommon as I suspected it to be. I'm going to look some farther back when I've mustered enough courage to dive into the archives, but I did find an image dating from 2009 (coincidentally on the second day the MODIS satellite images could be viewed online, March 19th):

Flushing out the Fjord

I wrote a blog post on Jakobshavn Isbræ last year when a 7 square kilometer (2.7 square mile) section of the glacier broke up. Here's some basic information from Wikipedia on one of the most important Greenland glaciers, with an image of the glacier on August 5th last year (the glacier is on the bottom right, with the fjord in front of it filled with icebergs):

Jakobshavn Isbræ drains 6.5% of the Greenland ice sheet and produces around 10% of all Greenland icebergs. Some 35 billion tonnes of icebergs calve off and pass out of the fjord every year. Icebergs breaking from the glacier are often so large (up to a kilometer in height) that they are too tall to float down the fjord and lie stuck on the bottom of its shallower areas, sometimes for years, until they are broken up by the force of the glacier and icebergs further up the fjord.

Well, it appears that something convinced those icebergs to get a move on, because in just a few weeks time the Illulisat Isfjord has been flushed clean. On February 26th (day 57) resident Arctic expert Lodger informed us in Open Thread 6 that some of those icebergs had left the fjord. I didn't think much of it at the time (couldn't be bothered really, as images were too cloudy). On March 1st (day 60) everything seemed to be just hunky dory again, with gaps neatly frozen over, but apparently this was just a prelude to the Great Flushing.  I've made a reconstruction with a handful of satellite images that were clear enough to be used from day 52 (Feb. 21st) to day 102 (April12th). Check out the Royal Flush between days 82 and 83:

The Climate Show Cryosphere Special

Gareth Renowden of the Hot Topic blog was so kind as to inform us that the latest episode of the excellent Climate Show (which IMO will be, very soon and without a doubt, a very popular and useful resource for people who want to have up-to-date information on climate change) is all about the cryosphere!

I haven't watched it yet, but I'm sure it is very interesting. Here's a summary for this episode 7:

Highlight of this week’s show is a fascinating — and sobering — interview with Greenland expert Professor Jason Box [blog]. His perspective on current events in the Arctic — from the dangers of permafrost methane, through rapid warming over Greenland and the potential impacts on sea level is essential listening and viewing. And he can surf, too. Glenn and Gareth discuss warm weather in New Zealand during a La Niña summer, drought in the Amazon and the complex interactions between climate and weather extremes, food production and political stability. John Cook from Skeptical Science debunks the favourite sceptic arguments about ice at both poles, and in the solutions segment we discuss the recent WWF report on renewable energy, and the new all-electric Porsche Boxster.

 

 

On the Climate Show website you can also listen to or download a podcast of the show, and subscribe to the podcast via iTunes.

Thank you, Gareth Renowden, Glenn Williams, John Cook and others for your show. It's an excellent way to while my hibernating time.

Where is the Petermann Baby?

As we all know the ice tongue that broke off of Petermann Glacier some time ago, has broken up in two pieces. The big mothership is still stuck against Joe Island, but where did the baby ice island run off to? Mind you, this baby is still about 80 km2 and several tens of meters high.

I didn't keep an eye on it and thus couldn't find it any more. Luckily, Phil. was so kind as to post a link to an image in the comment section of the last SIE update. I figured I'd share:

And then I got a crazy idea. What if the baby ice island drifts into Baffin Bay before the circumnavigating Norwegians and Russians do? They could then sail up to it and make pictures of it! I hereby declare the right to post these pictures first.

UPDATE: Lord Soth informed us that "the Canadian Ice Service has successfully dropped a transponder on the smaller Peterman B ice island, which has just entered Baffin Bay." You can follow Petermann-B at Sailwx.

Animation 15: Petermann Glacier revisited

The clouds have subsided again a bit, so I've updated the animation showing Lockerby Ice Island's travels:

 

It was stuck for a while, but came loose between Day 237 and 241. Patrick Lockerby says in his latest piece on the ice island:

If, as I suspect, it is becoming more grounded with each day after the full moon / spring tide then its next surge forward may be expected around new moon September 08 or full moon September 23 2010 - unless wedged in place by packed ice before then.

Animation 13: Greenland east coast

With cloudiness on the increase again in the Arctic, what with all those cyclones moving in over Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago, I decided to take the opportunity to make an overview of Greenland's east coast, where - after the breaking off and disintegration of the ice island approximately the size of Corsica (see animation) - the landfast ice has continued to break off:

 

Last week I made a short animation for comparison with the situation in 2009 around this date and at the end of the melting season:

Glaciers are losers

In his latest piece on the Hot Topic blog, On Fire Inside a Snowball, Gareth Renowden points us to this other blog from the Byrd Polar Research Center blog called MODIS studies of Greenland.

But first let's have a look what that big tabular ice berg, aka Lockerby Ice Island, that broke off of the ice tongue of Petermann Glacier last week has been up to so far:

Slowly rotating, slowly moving forward, slowly wiggling its way out of the fjord. Or will it get grounded in shallow waters after all?

Update August 16th: Added day 228. The ice island is rotating some more. Must be some hefty winds over there.

Update August 18th: Added day 229, and removed the first two images (from the break-up which can be watched here) to make the image file a bit smaller.

Update August 19th: Added days 230 and 231, made the animation a bit smaller to save space. Fascinating stuff.

Update August 21st: Added days 232 and 233. Lockerby Ice Island seems to be stuck, but a few more days are needed to confirm.

Either way, as noted by Jason Box from the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University: "Petermann Glacier is not the only major 'loser' in Greenland'. It can clearly be seen on this graph: