Open Sea Ice Thread

” Pinned in place by islands and landfast ice, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is unlikely to drift out to sea, said Mueller. It’s more likely to become increasingly fractured and deteriorate where it sits.”
If it’s pinned in place, it can most assuredly re-freeze.
The alternative is to sit there permanently, keep thickening until the ice stops floating and sits on the ocean floor, thereby cutting off ocean currents. Ice Ages do end, and they do begin.

HR says:
September 2, 2010 at 4:05 am
Good spot HR! Found some more … http://www.qsl.net/kg0yh/ice.htm

Duke C. says:
September 1, 2010 at 9:30 pm
Here’s a NASA photo comparison of the 50KM^2 Ellesmere Island shelf break-
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=45463
“Look’s like the break was due to stress from encroaching ocean ice- not induced by global warming.”
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Tim Williams says:
September 1, 2010 at 10:56 pm
Really? that’s not what NASA think is it?
“Driftwood and narwhal remains found along the coast of Ellesmere Island where the shelf is attached have radiocarbon dates from roughly 3,000 to 6,800 years ago, implying that the ice has been in place since those remains were deposited. Breakup along the Ward Hunt indicates a change in the conditions that previously allowed this ice shelf to persist for millennia.” http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=45463
….” Pinned in place by islands and landfast ice, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is unlikely to drift out to sea, said Mueller…..
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Perhaps another interpretation of the data is that the area is “stagnant” and even when there is a break in the ice there is refreezing.
Otherwise how do you explain the Greenland temperatures for the last 10,000 years (10 millennia) in this graph Or the findings of a peer reviewed paper that early Holocene summer temperatures throughout the Arctic 1-3° C above 20th century averages And that “Solar energy reached a summer maximum (9% higher than at present) ca 11 ka ago and has been decreasing since then, primarily in response to the precession of the equinoxes.”

Breaking news in The Netherlands, a big Dutch University (Delft University of Technology) has found that :
“Melting rate icecaps Greenland and Western Antarctica lower than expected
The melting of the ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica is about twice as slow as previously thought. The study, conducted by TU Delft, SRON and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The scientists published their findings in the September issue of Nature Geoscience. http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n9/index.html
Grace
The melting of ice sheets since 2002 is mapped with measurements of the two GRACE satellites. These detect from space small changes in the gravitational field of the earth. These changes are related to the exact distribution of mass on Earth, including ice and water. As ice melts and sea, is this influence in the gravity field.
Image: NASA
Giga Tons
Based on this principle were previous estimates for the Greenland ice sheet at 230 gigatons of ice that melts each year (that’s 230,000 billion pounds). This results then in an average global sea level rise of about 0.75 mm per year. For West Antarctica was the estimated 132 gigatons each year.
With these results, it now appears, however, not corrected for glacial Isostatic adjustment, the phenomenon that the earth’s crust continues to soar due to the melting of large ice sheets of the last Ice Age, about 20,000 years ago. These movements of the crust should you take in the calculations for these vertical motions change the mass distribution of the earth and so they also affect the gravity field.
GPS
Researchers from TU Delft have the necessary fix now, along with scientists from SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (USA), carry out much more accurate information. They did this with combined data from the GRACE mission, GPS measurements on land and ocean bottom pressure data. This shows for example that the soil drops below Greenland, perhaps one may indicate more mass in the past.
Bert Vermeersen of TU Delft: ‘The corrections for the deformations of the crust, have considerable impact on the estimated annual amount of ice melt. We conclude that the melting of ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica, about twice as slow, as was first thought. ”
The corresponding mean sea level by melting the ice caps is lower.
Model
“The innovation of our method is to offer current ice mass changes and glacial Isostatic adjustment are simultaneously fitted to the observations, rather than to assume that a glacial Isostatic adjustment model is correct,” says Vermeersen.
“Especially for Greenland we find a glacial adjustment Isostatic model quite significantly from what is commonly assumed. But there are currently insufficient data available to verify this independently. An extensive network of GPS observations in combination with geological indicators of regional and local sea level change around Greenland for the past 10,000 years, will this in the coming years may give inconclusive. ”
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=nl&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=nl&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tudelft.nl%2Flive%2Fpagina.jsp%3Fid%3D7a6c3d15-1c1e-4869-b378-840a000c6803%26lang%3Dnl

[snip] lets’ leave the triple point discussion out of sea ice, this is why the previous thread was closed. – Anthony

Interesting… sea ice extent has flattened in the last few days, while sea ice area has dropped.
Currently Arctic sea ice area is clearly the third lowest in the record (see Cryosphere today also).
Immediate hunch is that the ice is spreading out even as it melts. As the melt may continue for a few more weeks, area may yet drop to the second lowest, even if extent doesn’t.
Bring on the cold weather.

[snip] REPLY: Steve you are welcome to post comments on sea ice issues here, but we aren’t going to have you open the “triple point of water” discussion again. – Anthony

It is already open
REPLY: yes and the entire issue is fixed now. Feel free to post on extent, winds, area whatever else, but triple point is not a subject for this thread – Anthony

bbttxu says:
September 2, 2010 at 9:08 am
What software did you use to produce those graphs?
Just Excel and a screen-grab, nothing fancy.

Grr, I didn’t see this new thread and posted last night in Sea Ice News #19 instead. I’ll repost (with slight modifications) here:
I hope people are still paying attention to the ice, because the JAXA number for Sept 1 shows a 2969 km^2 gain. If this gain sticks (unlike the one from Aug 30, which was revised to a 4219 km^2 loss), it’ll be the second day of gain this year. Note that in 2008 the second day of gain marked the day after the extent minimum. In 2009, it was the third day of gain. Now don’t get excited, because I believe for all the others years in the JAXA record it was at least the 4th day of gain.
Current extent is predicting a final minimum of 5.086e6 km^2, the second highest (starting on July 1) of the year, with only Aug 8 predicting higher (effectively a tie really). My alternative method is predicting an average of 5.103e6 km^2 with a std dev of 99,800 km^2. Probability of staying above 2009 has jumped to 7.1% according to this method. 🙂
I’m glad people stopped comparing this year to 2008 a few days ago, because we’re now a whopping 374688 km^2 ahead of it and 2008 still loses an above average amount between now and the minimum. At only 91406 km^2 behind 2009 for Sept 1, we’ll still need to set a record minimum loss (<82500 km^2 to be exact) between now and the minimum to stay above 2009. This amount can be lost in as little as one day potentially…but we'll see.
And as a final note, using my admittedly poor "3rd method" given in Sea Ice News #19, a prediction of 5.270e6 minimum on Sept 8 is acquired…doubt that will happen, but the sceptics can always hope. 🙂
Any comments?
-Scott