27 years of Arctic ice in one minute

A stunning video recently published by NOAA Climate - or in Russian National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for Climate Research, which combined data on Arctic ice collected over the past 27 years - between 1987 and 2014. Colorful visualization makes it possible to estimate how seasonally and from year to year the snow and ice cover of our northern “cap” changes, as well as to trace the influence of global warming on the age of ice covers.

Every winter, the ice cover of the Arctic Ocean increases seasonally, reaching its maximum in the month of March, and every summer it melts, reaching a minimum by September. The ice that does not have time to melt by this time in winter is overgrown with a new layer, thus forming a multi-layered, multi-year ice cover. However, due to harmful emissions and the general, so-called “global warming”, the thickness and volume of this cover has been steadily decreasing since the 1980s.

A group of glaciologists led by Mark Tschudi from the Center for Astrodynamic Research at the University of Colorado ( CCAR at the University of Colorado ), together with NOAAClimate animators, processed the data on the state of the Arctic ice over the past 20 years and created a one-minute video. It shows not only how the thickness of the ice cover changed, but also how the ice masses drifted depending on the time of year. On the scale presented in the video, blue indicates the youngest ice cover (not more than 1 year), and white - the oldest (more than 9 years):
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On the video you can see some interesting features. First, in the east of Greenland, in the Fram Strait, there is an ice outlet from the giant basin of the Arctic Ocean. In this case, ice losses are compensated for by the growth of perennial ice in the Beaufort Sea off the Canadian coast, where one of the most magnificent whirlpools on Earth is located. There, perennial ices can persist for years, drifting inside a huge pool. Secondly, almost the entire multi-year ice cover melted in 2012, thus breaking another anti-record, but during 2013-2014, scientists noted a marked improvement in the situation. Thirdly, the reason for the creation of the widely used atomic icebreaking fleet in Russia, and not in Canada or the USA, is precisely the closeness of the Arctic Ocean’s pools of these strange, multiyear, and therefore thicker and stronger ice.

Additional materials on this topic:
Charctic Interactive Sea Ice Graph . National Snow and Ice Data Center. Accessed November 25, 2014.

Perovich, D., Gerland, S., Hendricks, S., Meier, W., Nicolaus, M., Tschudi, M. (2014) Sea Ice . In Jeffries, MO, Richter-Menge, J., Overland, JE (Eds.), Arctic Report Card: Update for 2014.

A source

PS: Also, among other things, other interesting infographics and data visualization videos are presented on the organization's website, such as. for example, the change in global temperature over the last century:

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