The animation below alternates between NSIDC September ice age for the year 2012 and the year 2013.
Figure5_october_2012.png (2430×3170)
Note the huge increase in the amount of white colored ice, which they used to call 5+ ice, but now call 4+ ice. Normally they publish a graph showing the extent of ice by age vs. year, but they didn’t include that graph this year.
I created that graph myself, and you can see why they didn’t include it. There is more than four times as much “white” ice as there was last September. This is the ice which they used to call 5+ year old ice. There has been an increase in ice of every age vs. last year, but the oldest and thickest ice has taken an unprecedented jump.
But the most important thing to note is that the older ice is perfectly situated in the western Arctic, where it will survive the winter and thicken. The dirty little secret is that Arctic sea ice is making a spectacular “recovery.”
