Arctic ice minimum volumes - 1979-2017

Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Volumes 1979-2017

Andy Lee Robinson

Latest visualization of the startling decline of Arctic Sea Ice, showing the minimum volume reached every September since 1979, set on a map of New York with a 10km grid to give an idea of scale. It is clear that the trend of Arctic sea ice decline indicates that it'll soon be ice-free for an increasingly large part of the year, with consequences for the climate.

The rate of ice loss in the Arctic is staggering. Since 1979, the volume of Summer Arctic sea ice has declined by more than 80% and accelerating faster than scientists believed it would, or even could melt.

I also composed and played the piano music, "Ice Dreams". A longer version played live can be found here: https://youtu.be/_miBCygvO4Y
About the data: Sea Ice Volume is calculated using the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS, Zhang and Rothrock, 2003) developed at APL/PSC. 

Source data for this graph is available from http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpre...

More information:

The image first appeared in still form on Think Progress, and I decided to try to bring it to life over the following weeks:http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013...

An earlier video also featured on BBC's Newsnight last year:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-env...

I produced the animation using hand-written perl and php code to create povray scripts, and scheduling task distribution using MySQL between 8 linux servers working in parallel to render 875 frames at 1920 x 1080 resolution. The "farm" renders 22 frames simultaneously taking between 1-2 hours per frame.
On completion, ffmpeg combines the individual frames and music into a high quality mp4 video.