According to NSIDC maps, between the end of July and the end of September, more than 90% of the older, thicker green multi-year ice (MYI) melted in this 1000 km wide region – while leaving the thinner, more vulnerable turquoise and pink ice largely intact.
Note that the shape and extent of of the turquoise has hardly changed, while the shape of the green is unrecognizable.
Mother Nature must be a progressive, because she decided to selectively kill off the stronger ice to make room for the weak.
Me thinks someone is playing games, or they have suddenly become color blind. It’s like that liberal/progressive math where 2 + 2 = whatever they feel at the moment.
Steve, in order to show what happened you need to look at a movie of ice age or movie of ice motion so that you can see both the effects of transport as well as open water development near the pole during the summer. People who were in the field in the region of your box document vast expanses of open water (sometimes more than 50% open water), 1-2 cm/day melt rates, rain events. Also important to remember, ice of different ages does not always accurately reflect thickness differences. While comparisons between ice age and ice thickness from ICESat (see Maslanik et al., 2007) show a linear relationship between ice age and thickness for ice ages 2-10 years old, local ridging/rafting also occurs that would change that relationship in certain regions. Ice motion vectors indicate faster flowing ice in recent years, reflecting an overall thinner ice cover. You would expect more ridging and rafting of the thinner FYI, and therefore while you had a mixture of FYI, 2nd year old ice and older ice types in the box you selected, some of that younger ice may have been thicker than the older ice that disappeared in the open water areas that developed in August.
The 2007 melt season led to quite a dramatic thinning of the older ice types, seen in both ICESat and ERS 1/2 SAR thickness estimates (2 meters of basal melt was recorded in buoy data).
I think it’s misleading to show these two ice age maps from different time-periods and conclude that the data is wrong.
Julienne,
I’m looking at satellite photos from that time frame. I see open water in early September in the top half of the rectangle (east), but not in the bottom half (west.).
It also appears that the open water mainly formed in thin ice which blew into the region from the east, rather than by melting the green ice.
Even without significant expertise in the field of ocean ice, I can understand and appreciate your response. Thanks Julienne.
So these color schemes refer to MYI from previous data sets so that they know just what surface is MY and which is younger? (Intuitively, the thicker and older meme is clear but the older and more “rotten” comes to mind as a whimsical misunderstanding.)
OT
Steven,
Is there a way to email you these items rather than an OT Post?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20101007/od_yblog_upshot/culprit-identified-in-massive-worldwide-honeybee-die-off
From above article; “As reported by Kirk Johnson of the New York Times, a somewhat odd pairing of entomologists and military scientists has pinpointed likely culprits: a fungus and a virus, both of which flourish in cool, wet environments.”
I thought we are having the hottest decade, evah!
More satellite problems?
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi1_ice_area.png
LOL!
“Boulder, we have a problem…”
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/
Steven, is that the area where your MYI might have been? Looks like a loss of 0.5 million km^2 😉
Must be right or NISDC surely would not have released it. As I recall they received a large amount of stimulus money last year to improve their technical capability and to hire more experts. I have the utmost faith in the the ability and integrity of all the people working on climate change and in their mission to improve our lives through science.
That said, I think you, Mr. Goddard, should get back to making rockets and stop second guessing NSIDC.
Not everyone shares your faith in the government.
Doug in Seattle
We were told to trust The Royal Society too. Now they have admitted—too an extent— they were in error. Some day they will catch up with the rest of the science they were in error on.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/30/the-royal-societys-toned-down-climate-stance/
That said, I think you, Mr. Goddard, should get back to making rockets and stop second guessing NSIDC.
I must be missing something here.
Guess what, mother nature has more volcanoes under the sea that we didn’t know about, amazing stuff
http://www.physorg.com/news205664485.html