Friday, December 28, 2012

Polar Bear Frolics

So OK, Eli is one of those strange Rabett's who look at the Arctic Ice images from Cryosphere and Uni Bremen at Christmas.  Why Christmas the bunnies ask, well Santa is on his way.  Among the things that you can see at Chrismas, which are interesting, are the edges of the ic pack outside of the Arctic circle, and something amazing is happening, the coasts of Svalbard and Nova Zemelya are ice free!  by a lot. 


The last picture is 2012.  The Cryosphere Archive changes format a bit over the years, and  is missing the years between 2009 and 2011, so we can insert pictures from Bremen to show this developing trend.  Yes indeedy there is stuff going on.




8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Perhaps it's just the Christmas pudding, but to me it seemsthat there is a huge amount of terrestrial snow fall after 2005 - there is a recovery!

Just sayin'...


Bernard J. Hyphen-Anonymous XVII, Esq.

Lionel A said...

Maybe we should now re-start those winter Russian Arctic convoys.

Jokes aside, for they were no joke for those involved and these places now being ice free is a sure sign of big changes. Well caught.

BTW These recent GIFs don't appear to work here, Firefox.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

The seas may be navigable, but in the dark, all polar bears are grey, and a bear den in Spitzbergen in December is aout as dark as it gets.

EliRabett said...

Are the bunnies having trouble running Firefox under Windows 7? They work fine on XT

Anonymous said...

Running find on Firefox 17 on Ubuntu 10.04

Martin Vermeer said...

works for me on FF on Ubuntu 12.04

Neven said...

Works for me too under FF 17.0.1 and Windows 7.

Nice work, Eli. It's going to get even more interesting in February and March, if the Kara Sea south of Novaya Zemlya and practically all of the Barents Sea barely get frozen over. Again, after 2011 and 2012.

Have to get my sea ice concentration comparison pages ready for that (lot of work).

Peter said...

1984 looks odd - almost clear around Svalbard, very similar to this year (but with much less ice in Baffin/Kara this year).

Was there anything particularly funny about North Atlantic weather in 1984?