Guest post by Steven Goddard
From The Washington Post :
According to the University of Illinois, Antarctic sea ice area is nearly 30% above normal and the anomaly has reached 1,000,000 km2. You could almost fit Texas and California (or 250 Rhode Islands) inside Antarctica’s excess sea ice.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg
According to NSIDC, over the last 30 years Antarctic sea ice extent has been growing at a rate of nearly 5% per decade, and set a record maximum last year.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/s_plot.png
And as you can see in the NSIDC image below, some Emperor Penguins have an extra long walk to their nesting ground – due to excess ice in the Weddell Sea and around West Antarctica.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_daily_extent.png
Well fed polar explorers, dressed properly for the cold climate
Sadly though, biologists using computer models have forecast that some Penguins are headed for extinction due to loss of Antarctic sea ice. Maybe that gives the males something to think about as they huddle in -70C weather all winter long, trying to keep from freezing to death or dropping their eggs. I suggest a Catlin-like expedition to the South Pole for biologists.
Male Emperor Penguins huddling to stay warm
The 30% excess of ice has not been widely reported, but there has been lots of talk in the press the last couple of days about ice breaking off the Wilkins Ice Shelf – the broken area being about one pixel in the NSIDC image above. Looking at the Wilkins picture below, I’m having a very tough time seeing any evidence of melting around the fractures, or any evidence of water pooling on the surface. Normally, such fractures are caused by tensile or shear stress, likely due to a change in currents. Ice melts from the edges towards the center, and that ice is very thick – up to 200 metres. Blaming the clean fractures seen below on warming and melting seems highly questionable – at best. I suggest bringing some actual structural and mechanical engineers into the discussion – how’s that for a novel idea in the AGW world?
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WilkinsIceSheet/images/wilkins_aerial_photo_bas.jpg
Meanwhile in the Arctic, sea ice area is about 500,000 km2 below normal, which means that global sea ice area (Arctic + Antarctic) is about 500,000 km2 above normal. You could fit Dr. Hansen’s home state of Pennsylvania plus Al Gore’s home state of Tennessee plus Gordon Brown’s Scotland plus Dorothy’s Kansas inside the excess global sea ice area. Sounds like a real global meltdown, doesn’t it?
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg
Perhaps we should be worried – about those poor penguins struggling across an extra 200 miles of ice.
Should be :”The sheet ice is only displacing part of it’s weight.
John W. (4:49:02) Disagree. You’re overlooking the mechanical properties of the ice. The sheet ice only displaces part of its weight.
I agree that ice cantilevered off land does not displace its full weight. It is spectacular to watch the glaciers at Glacier Bay fall into the water.
Ice has another property that you can demonstrate with an ice cube. If you place pressure on ice , it melts. There will be some stress relief that will reduce the cantilever area due to melting and refreezing in areas of high stress.
When we talk of the ice that flows from the land into the ocean, that is only part of the story. The major part is due to the water of the ocean freezing. Then snow can build on the frozen ice. The Ocean around Antarctic freezes at the rate of several mile per day during winter. With the thawing and refreezing of the Artic Ocean on the Canadian coastline, I would expect that very little of it is cantilevered.
pkatt (20:33:04) :
“Steven Goddard (07:29:44) :
Flanagan,
Wilkins is not in West Antarctica, and from the photos the breakup appears to be mechanical rather than due to melt.”
I agree with Steven. Perhaps the winds are driving what you are seeing?
http://squall.sfsu.edu/scripts/shemjet_archloop.html
Thats the antartic jet stream animation builder. Put in your dates and watch how the wind patterns go.. looks like the area you are showing is gettin slammed.
Agreed, the perennial seaice that used to lie off that shore is no longer protecting the ice sheet from the weather, waves and tides etc. hence the mechanical stresses on the ice sheet.
if feel sorry for the penguins that live there I love penguins