Opposite Behaviors? Arctic Sea Ice Shrinks, Antarctic Grows
September 2012 witnessed two opposite records concerning sea ice. Two weeks after the Arctic Ocean’s ice cap experienced an all-time summertime low for the satellite era (left), Antarctic sea ice reached a record winter maximum extent (right). But sea ice in the Arctic has melted at a much faster rate than it has expanded in the Southern Ocean, as can be seen in this image by comparing the 2012 sea ice levels with the yellow outline, which in the Arctic image represents average sea ice minimum extent from 1979 through 2010 and in the Antarctic image shows the median sea ice extent in September from 1979 to 2000. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio and NASA Earth Observatory/ Jesse Allen
The steady and dramatic decline in the sea ice cover of the Arctic Ocean over the last three decades has become a focus of media and public attention. At the opposite end of the Earth, however, something more complex is happening.
A new NASA study shows that from 1978 to 2010 the total extent of sea ice surrounding Antarctica in the Southern Ocean grew by roughly 6,600 square miles every year, an area larger than the state of Connecticut. And previous research by the same authors indicates that this rate of increase has recently accelerated, up from an average rate of almost 4,300 square miles per year from 1978 to 2006.
“There’s been an overall increase in the sea ice cover in the Antarctic, which is the opposite of what is happening in the Arctic,” said lead author Claire Parkinson, a climate scientist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “However, this growth rate is not nearly as large as the decrease in the Arctic.”
The Earth’s poles have very different geographies. The Arctic Ocean is surrounded by North America, Greenland and Eurasia. These large landmasses trap most of the sea ice, which builds up and retreats with each yearly freeze-and-melt cycle. But a large fraction of the older, thicker Arctic sea ice has disappeared over the last three decades. The shrinking summer ice cover has exposed dark ocean water that absorbs sunlight and warms up, leading to more ice loss.
On the opposite side of the planet, Antarctica is a continent circled by open waters that let sea ice expand during the winter but also offer less shelter during the melt season. Most of the Southern Ocean’s frozen cover grows and retreats every year, leading to little perennial sea ice in Antarctica.
Using passive-microwave data from NASA’s Nimbus 7 satellite and several Department of Defense meteorological satellites, Parkinson and colleague Don Cavalieri showed that sea ice changes were not uniform around Antarctica. Most of the growth from 1978 to 2010 occurred in the Ross Sea, which gained a little under 5,300 square miles of sea ice per year, with more modest increases in the Weddell Sea and Indian Ocean. At the same time, the region of the Bellingshausen and Amundsen Seas lost an average of about 3,200 square miles of ice every year.
› View larger The ice covering the Bellingshausen Sea, off the coast of Antarctica, as seen from a NASA Operation IceBridge flight on Oct. 13, 2012. Credit: NASA/Michael Studinger
Parkinson and Cavalieri said that the mixed pattern of ice growth and ice loss around the Southern Ocean could be due to changes in atmospheric circulation. Recent research points at the depleted ozone layer over Antarctica as a possible culprit. Ozone absorbs solar energy, so a lower concentration of this molecule can lead to a cooling of the stratosphere (the layer between six and 30 miles above the Earth’s surface) over Antarctica. At the same time, the temperate latitudes have been warming, and the differential in temperatures has strengthened the circumpolar winds flowing over the Ross Ice Shelf.
“Winds off the Ross Ice Shelf are getting stronger and stronger, and that causes the sea ice to be pushed off the coast, which generates areas of open water, polynyas,” said Josefino Comiso, a senior scientist at NASA Goddard. “The larger the coastal polynya, the more ice it produces, because in polynyas the water is in direct contact with the very cold winter atmosphere and rapidly freezes.” As the wind keeps blowing, the ice expands further to the north.
This year’s winter Antarctic sea ice maximum extent, reached two weeks after the Arctic Ocean’s ice cap experienced an all-time summertime low, was a record high for the satellite era of 7.49 million square miles, about 193,000 square miles more than its average maximum extent for the last three decades.
The Antarctic minimum extents, which are reached in the midst of the Antarctic summer, in February, have also slightly increased to 1.33 million square miles in 2012, or around 251,000 square miles more than the average minimum extent since 1979.
The numbers for the southernmost ocean, however, pale in comparison with the rates at which the Arctic has been losing sea ice – the extent of the ice cover of the Arctic Ocean in September 2012 was 1.32 million square miles below the average September extent from 1979 to 2000. The lost ice area is equivalent to roughly two Alaskas.
Parkinson said that the fact that some areas of the Southern Ocean are cooling and producing more sea ice does not disprove a warming climate.
“Climate does not change uniformly: The Earth is very large and the expectation definitely would be that there would be different changes in different regions of the world,” Parkinson said. “That’s true even if overall the system is warming.” Another recent NASA study showed that Antarctic sea ice slightly thinned from 2003 to 2008, but increases in the extent of the ice balanced the loss in thickness and led to an overall volume gain.
The new research, which used laser altimetry data from the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), was the first to estimate sea ice thickness for the entire Southern Ocean from space.
Records of Antarctic sea ice thickness are much patchier than those of the Arctic, due to the logistical challenges of taking regular measurements in the fierce and frigid waters around Antarctica. The field data collection is mostly limited to research icebreakers that generally only travel there during spring and summer – so the sole means to get large-scale thickness measurements is from space.
“We have a good handle of the extent of the Antarctic sea ice, but the thickness has been the missing piece to monitor the sea ice mass balance,” said Thorsten Markus, one of the authors of the study and Project Scientist for ICESat-2, a satellite mission designed to replace the now defunct ICESat. ICESat-2 is scheduled to launch in 2016. “The extent can be greater, but if the sea ice gets thinner, the volume could stay the same.”
Maria-José Viñas
NASA’s Earth Science News Team
Besides using different annual average comparisons & failing to mention the Aug 2012 storm, the graphics are at different scales, with a much tighter shot of the Arctic. Greenland is in fact only 15% as large as Antarctica (without its ice sheets, however the continent would remain an archipelago, even with isostatic rebound; much of Greenland would also be under the new, higher sea level).
The effect is to exaggerate Arctic sea ice loss & reduce apparent Antarctic gain.
The decrease in summer Arctic ice while the Antarctic ice hits record highs my be consistent with global warming theory, but it is also consistent with no global warming due to CO2. Funny, but they did not mention that.
tallbloke says:
October 24, 2012 at 3:29 am
It’s interesting to note that the one place where Antarctic ice has reduced from the average is off the Antarctic Peninsula.
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The earth’s magnetic poles are in a period of rapid change, faster than at an time previously observed. Has anyone thought to track cloudiness at the poles, to see if this is changing as the magnetic poles are changing?
If you look at the motion of the earth’s magnetic poles, you find that the southern magnetic pole is moving northward and reduced ice at the Peninsula is the result. While ice is increasing at the south pole as the magnetic pole moves away from the geographic pole.
At the north pole, ice is reducing as the magnetic pole moves towards the geographic north pole. Co-incidence, perhaps. However, the magnetic poles control where the solar wind enters the earth’s atmosphere, and it seem highly improbable that a massive stream of ionized particles entering the atmosphere has no effect on earth’s weather and climate.
We know that ionization affects clumping rates of particles. This effect is widely used in air purifiers in the home. We know that cloud formation is dependent on the number and size of seed particles. Thus it seems likely that the solar wind could affect cloud formation independent of cosmic ray interaction. Clouds remain one of the poorly understood drivers of climate. Largely ignored as billions are poured into CO2 research.
“Climate does not change uniformly: The Earth is very large and the expectation definitely would be that there would be different changes in different regions of the world,” Parkinson said. “That’s true even if overall the system is warming.”
Thus the Medieval Warming Period can indeed have been global, even without evidence that everywhere wasn’t warming, nor did the warming that was detected have to have happened at exactly the same time.
Or will the (C)AGW-pushers declare special rules again, anthropogenic global warming may be spotty in spatial and temporal coverage but natural global warming must be everywhere simultaneously? Wouldn’t be the first time they’ve claimed reality itself will distort and be reformed due to the unprecedented effects of the miraculous consensus-creating CO₂ molecule.
This illustrates my issue with the concept of a “global average” of anything to try and draw conclusions. If scientists want to think in terms of a global average, and this value is plotted against a factor (such as CO2 level) then if a response (such as ice level) at the North Pole decreases by 10% but the response at the South Pole increases by 10% then the average will show a change of 0%. These “global average” scientists will have to conclude that the factor has no bearing on the average response value.
If there’s a more realistic appreciation that the system is complex and it’s the microscopic investigation of the complex behavior that is important then one might be able to discuss that the factor of interest my drive Northern responses in one direction while driving the Southern response in a different direction.
Unfortunately the generic AGW scientists insist on global average measurments when the local measurements don’t support their hypothesis, and then focus on the local measurments when the global average measurements don’t support their hypothesis.
“There’s been an overall increase in the sea ice cover in the Antarctic, which is the opposite of what is happening in the Arctic,” said lead author Claire Parkinson, a climate scientist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “However, this growth rate is not nearly as large as the decrease in the Arctic.”
Classic red herring. Whether or not sea ice has decreased in the north fatser than it has expanded in the south is absolutely irrelevant. BOTH hemispheres are supposed to be losing polar ice, according to the IPCC reports based on NASA models. They aren’t. Your models are wrong.
Parkinson and Cavalieri said that the mixed pattern of ice growth and ice loss around the Southern Ocean could be due to changes in atmospheric circulation. Recent research points at the depleted ozone layer over Antarctica as a possible culprit. Ozone absorbs solar energy, so a lower concentration of this molecule can lead to a cooling of the stratosphere (the layer between six and 30 miles above the Earth’s surface) over Antarctica. At the same time, the temperate latitudes have been warming, and the differential in temperatures has strengthened the circumpolar winds flowing over the Ross Ice Shelf.
Yes, those things point out additional problems with your models. They do not accurately predict stratospheric ozone, stratospheric temperature, circumpolar winds, or the effect of circumpolar winds on sea ice. As you sum it up, they do not accurately model “atmospheric circulation”.
Given that this is the fundamental purpose and claim to fame of a General Circulation Model, maybe you guys ought to STFU, stop making red herring press releases trying to prop up the political efficacy of your ‘global warming’ theory, and go back to the drawing board to fix the models that embody that theory. Step 1: fix the theory.
You listening, Perlwitz?
I think this is strong evidence that “global atmospheric temperature” is not a good measure of climate change and that a correlation between that measure and anthropogenic emissions of CO2 is very suspect. The Arctic is warming and the Antartic is cooling while atmospheric CO2 has been increasing at both poles. Natural longterm climatic changes are so much greater than any possible anthropogenic contribution. It is time for climate scientist to start doing their mass and energy balances on local and regional levels and concentrating on the water cycle rather than CO2. Their is at least an order of magnitude difference in energy exchange with evaporation/condensation, freeze/thaw of water and the possible warming of .04% atmospheric CO2
@P.solar
I’m fully aware of the P-V-T curves for fluids and gases. Normal deep drilling from solids into liquids requires some form of “well seal” as BP discovered with their Deep Horizon blowout. The Russians used the LIQUID state of the first estimated, then measured above 32F water to rush up the bore and freeze, forming an ice seal. This is exactly what happened. There are nodes of Uranium and Thorium mixed in the mantle, subject to varying particle bombardments, daily Earthtides [look it up] and core stirring from a 900 mile permanent magnet core that rotates faster than the surface. This geology is explained in “Earth’s Elemental Petrol Production” and results in variations in both time and location of geothermal outflux. The Russians have been extracting above freezing samples and hope to launch a remote camera robot. Laboratory half life decay is restricted to LABORATORIES….much like “Carbon heat capture”.
“shrinking summer ice cover has exposed dark ocean water that absorbs sunlight and warms up, leading to more ice loss.”
Sunlight in the Arctic at the height of summer is only 3% of normal sunlight as it comes in at a low angle and through a greater distance of atmosphere (the W/m^2 is down 97%). Any heating of the water will be near the surface and will be rapidly lost to evaporative cooling.
In 2007, most of the melting was from sea ice driven OUT OF the Arctic by the prevailing winds—it melted elsewhere, not in the Arctic. The NAO also pumped a large bolus of warm water into the Arctic Basin where the warm water rose under the ice and melted it from below. As the ice melts, the cold water sinks and the warm water stays at the top against the bottom of the ice.
Warm air moving into the region can do some melting, but warm water is much more effective. Solar input is the least of these factors.
The myth that the Arctic would remain melted if it ever lost all of its ice is silly. Do they really think that 6 months of no energy input is going to maintain a climate above freezing?
Wow…we have been given two new measurement parameters to parse…. Connecticuts and Alaskas! Anyone know what the conversion rate is into Manhattans?
On another note, the Arctic is a vast open ocean which only contains sea ice; the Antarctic is a huge land mass surrounded by sea ice. How can they compare the two sea ice areas as if they were the same thing? If the Antarctic were just an open ocean…then they could…correct?
“The steady and dramatic decline…” ??
One method to contain Antarctic ice expansion is to simply mislabel the data points on the chart as Cryosphere does:
http://api.viglink.com/api/click?format=go&key=cdee124b11d6baacda6c3e29b12e23dc&loc=http%3A%2F%2Fwattsupwiththat.com%2Freference-pages%2Fsea-ice-page%2F&v=1&libid=1351089865866&out=http%3A%2F%2Farctic.atmos.uiuc.edu%2Fcryosphere%2FIMAGES%2Fseaice.recent.antarctic.png&ref=http%3A%2F%2Fwattsupwiththat.com%2F2012%2F10%2F24%2Fnasa-on-earths-bipolar-sea-ice-behavior%2F&title=Sea%20Ice%20Page%20%7C%20Watts%20Up%20With%20That%3F&txt=%3Cimg%20class%3D%22%20%22%20src%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Farctic.atmos.uiuc.edu%2Fcryosphere%2FIMAGES%2Fseaice.recent.antarctic.png%22%20alt%3D%22%22%20width%3D%22640%22%20height%3D%22480%22%3E&jsonp=vglnk_jsonp_13510899118231
Usually they also obscure the current value by overprinting with the always lower average number, just to make sure. No answers to several queries to them about this.
Oddly enough this is a prediction made by Svensmark, that sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic will be in opposite cycles. see his book ‘The Chilling Stars’.
The vast majority of multi-year ice is lost during the winter, not the summer. Winter winds blow the thick ice out into the North Atlantic where it melts when it contacts warmer water.
Between 1988 and 1996, two thirds of the five year old ice disappeared.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/the-dirty-little-secret-about-arctic-ice/
10:30 min
From higley7 on October 24, 2012 at 7:28 am:
Except the incoming warmer ocean waters would be supplying energy, as would the incoming river runoff from the lower latitudes.
Another attempt at “re-framing” à-la-Trenberth. Not just attempting to reverse the normal order of disproving the null-hypothesis, as should be used when the scientific method is applied correctly, but subtly trying to imply that skeptics are claiming something they are not?
The issue is that the modelers have not really got a clue about WHY these two, apparently contradictory, observations occur. There is one thing that they get spot-on though, and all the carefully chosen superlatives hedged-around with “could”s, “possible”s, and “can”s, cannot disguise it:
Global warming causes the seas to fall? If you want to save Venice and the Maldives, haul all the misdirected polar bears to the right pole in SUVs. (/s)
Regarding the scale of the two polar regions. The Arctic Ocean is almost equal in size to the continent of Antarctica – both are approximately 14 million square km
@tallbloke:
I believe there is an active volcano on that penninsula. All we have to do is go back to Anthony Watts, 2008. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/01/22/surprise-theres-an-active-volcano-under-antarctic-ice/. I love this site! Glad to see and read you making sense out there Tallbloke.
Can I make a suggestion? Can one of you whizzes drop the arctic area onto the antartic area to show a visual perspective of the comparison in size. I think a lot of people look at the big open gap between the orange line in the arctic pics and panic. I think it would be quite an interesting view for the less informed?
Parkinson said that the fact that some areas of the Southern Ocean are cooling and producing more sea ice does not disprove a warming climate.
But of course it doesn’t.
Hey Claire – What would?
Please be specific.
I hate this kind of biased reporting. For example, looking at the two yellow lines in the opening graphic, you’d think that the difference between the amount of melting is quite large. But the left graph is the average of the minimum ice extent in the North, and on the other hand it is the September median ice extent in the South.
w.
“Parkinson said that the fact that some areas of the Southern Ocean are cooling and producing more sea ice does not disprove a warming climate.”
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True, but by the same token, isn’t it also the case that recent loss of ice in the Arctic does not prove a warming climate? There are other factors like wind, sun, and oceanic oscillation that could be factors as well. I see no reason to jump to conclusions either way. But one thing’s for sure, catastrophic, accelerating warming on a global scale is not currently happening.
With the water radiating basically into outer space and heat transfer proportional as T^4, sink at 3K and source at about 273K, you think heat transfer from the currents and runoff are going to stay ahead? I remain,,,doubtful.
@Fred Allen
“There’ll be glaciers in Texas, Kenya and northern Australia and GISS will still be showing evidence for global warming.”
—
There’ll be open water in the Arctic and a glacier-free Glacier National Park (in ten years) and you guys will still be fantasizing evidence for global cooling / no warming / warming but not man-made / maybe man-made but not harmful / possibly problematic but I don’t like hippies and government regulation / a huge catastrophe but it’s too late now so let’s enjoy the party while it lasts.