CR
Cryospheric Sciences

sea-ice extent

You thought it was over? Here’s more on the 2023 Antarctic sea-ice extent record low

and April 26, 2024
A figure showing several lines for several years of sea ice extent. They look like a wave with the minimum around february each year and the maximum around october.
Figure 1: Daily cycle of the Antarctic sea-ice extent (in million km²) for separate years featuring record lows (2017, 2022, 2023, 2024) and a record high (2014), and for the average over the 1979-2014 period. The blue shading indicates the interannual variability (2 standard deviations) around the 1979-2014 mean [Credit: D. Docquier, based on the OSI SAF sea-ice index, last access: 24/04/2024]. The map in the lower right corner shows the Antarctic Ice Sheet, as well as Antarctic sea ice surrounding it, in September 2005 [Credit: Wikimedia Commons, NASA Earth Observatory].

  In November last year (see this post), we promised to provide you an update of what happened with Antarctic sea ice during the year 2023 – a year of an exceptionally low extent. In this post, we try our best to discuss the conditions that lead to (part of) the recent loss in Antarctic sea ice, including atmospheric and ocean processes. How sea ice usually works… One of the ways scientists h ...[Read More]

An exceptional year: What’s up with Antarctic sea ice?

November 17, 2023
An exceptional year: What’s up with Antarctic sea ice?
Figure 1: Daily cycle of the Antarctic sea-ice extent (in million km²) for each 10-year period between 1979 and 2018 (10-year averages) and for 3 separate years, including 2023 (red curve). Snapshot of 12 November 2023 [Credit: NASA., Comiso et al., “Current State of Sea Ice Cover”, see: https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/cryo/data/current-state-sea-ice-cover].

In our blog, we have written a lot about Arctic sea ice (see this post, this post and this post for recent examples). Much less has been written about Antarctic sea ice, i.e. its southern counterpart. That is not surprising as Arctic sea ice has experienced major losses since the late 1970s (beginning of satellite observations), while not much had happened to Antarctic sea ice (despite a small exp ...[Read More]