A report from the Antarctic - 09/15/2018

Antarctic Sea Ice Extent Hits New Record Low

Today  Robert Fanney reported that Antarctic Sea Ice Extent Hits New Record Low for the Day. 

Margo has also done an exhaustive report in which she talks at length about the situation in Antarctica.

This is in addition to a report that I did a couple of weeks ago - 

Antarctic ice at maximum well below average

Today’s news comes at a time when the sun is just starting to return to the continent and the South Pole is still in darkness.

The following,which comes from Zack Labe shows the global sea ice anomaly.

The purple represents Antarctica.

This is the sea ice extent for Antarctica on 13 September.

Here is the sea ice concentration.

And here is the thickness for 14 September as registered by the US Navy.

And a .gif showing changes in the last 30 days.

  

THE HOLE IN THE OZONE LAYER

The hole in the ozone layer, that we are all told is healing should reach its maximum size in the Antarctic winter.

However, this short video shows that this is not happening and it appears to be getting bigger.

We shall be monitoring this over the next weeks and months.

Iceberg A68A, that broke off from Larsen B a year ago is on the move

A year ago, in July 2017 a large iceberg calved off the Larsen C ice shelf

Iceberg twice size of Luxembourg breaks off Antarctic ice shelf

Satellite data confirms ‘calving’ of trillion-tonne, 5,800 sq km iceberg from the Larsen C ice shelf, dramatically altering the landscape.

It became stuck and has remained so since then to the last week or so.
Here are couple of stories that came out about this.

A trillion tonnes of ice on the move: Iceberg A68A

Just over a year ago in July 2017 iceberg A68 calved from the Larsen C Ice Shelf. 

I appeared on BBC News before it actually calved explaining what was happening.

At first A68 was slow to move and as I predicted back then, it likely got stuck on the sea bed (we say "grounded"). It has stayed pretty much in the same place through to July 2018.

But now A68 has started to swing northwards.

As the light is coming back to Antarctica, at high latitudes visual imagery is very washed out. But if we look at other data such as the brightness temperature, you can see some striking features.

Giant Antarctic Iceberg Makes Dramatic About-Face

Margo has been monitoring this recently from NASA Worldview and put together the following report:

The area has mostly been in thick cloud but the next two photographs show the changes over a day.

Fracturing of sea ice in the Ross Sea

To further illustrate the rapid deterioration of ice in the Antarctica while the sun is only just returning to the region this photo from today of an area in the Ross Sea, to the south of New Zealand and not far from the coast shows fractures in the sea ice.

US Navy data indicates that ice in the region is about a metre thick.



My suspicion is that this melt season in Antarctica is going to be a rocky ride.