The magnitude of the negative Antarctic sea ice anomaly is nearly identical to that of the positive anomaly from 2014.
ABC News says this is a five sigma event which occurs once every 7.5 million years.
“He said vast regions of the Antarctic coastline were ice free for the first time in the observational record.
“To say unprecedented isn’t strong enough,” Dr Doddridge said.
“For those of you who are interested in statistics, this is a five-sigma event. So it’s five standard deviations beyond the mean. Which means that if nothing had changed, we’d expect to see a winter like this about once every 7.5 million years.”
Antarctica is surrounded by hundreds of miles of ice.
NOAA/G02135/south/daily/images/2023/08_Aug/S_20230824_extn_v3.0.png
Using the same climate math, the heatwave of 1936 was also a five sigma event (relative to 1960-2023) – so it never could have happened.
