Observations From The WUWT Sea Ice Page

Image Credit: Cryosphere Today – University of Illinois – Polar Research Group

By WUWT Regular Just The Facts

Global Sea Ice Area, shown above, has remained quite average this year. However, this is not due to a recovery in Northern Sea Ice Area;

or Arctic Sea Ice Extent;

which are both still trending below average. Rather Global Sea Ice Area appears to be average due to the fact that Antarctic Sea Ice is trending well above average;

having been above average for much of the last two years:

It is difficult to draw any concrete conclusions from this, as we only have a 34.5 years of satellite sea ice measurements;

on an approximately 4,540,000,000 year old planet. However, there are some things that we can infer, for example in this Change in Maximum, Mean and Minimum Sea Ice Extent graph;

there is a large decline around minimum, with a much smaller decline around maximum. The reasons for the large decline around minimum according to Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University are as follows:

“The average thickness of the pack ice has fallen by roughly half since the 1970s, probably for two main reasons. One is a rise in sea temperatures: in the summer of 2007 coastal parts of the Arctic Ocean measured 7°C—bracingly swimmable. The other was a prolonged eastward shift in the early 1990s in the Arctic’s prevailing winds, known as the Arctic Oscillation. This moved a lot of ice from the Beaufort Gyre, a revolving current in the western Arctic, to the ocean’s other main current, the Transpolar Drift Stream, which runs down the side of Siberia. A lot of thick, multi-year ice was flushed into the Atlantic and has not been replaced.” The Economist

There is ample evidence to support influence of Atmospheric Oscillations on sea ice, however it is that  “summer of 2007 coastal parts of the Arctic Ocean measured 7°C—bracingly swimmable” that jumps out at me, because of this current Northern Hemisphere Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly map:

which shows large coastal temperature anomalies in the Arctic. Does anyone know why is it so warm along the Arctic coasts? Per the large anomaly in the Western Hudson Bay, is that a sensor failure or is there another cause? And what’s going on along the coast of Russia along the Kola Peninsula and near the White Sea? If you look at these satellite images;

that bright blue area really doesn’t look natural. Kola Bay, which is to the West of the bright blue area, is “Contaminated with Hydrocarbons”;

Kola Bay of the Barents Sea is seriously polluted with oil products. That has been demonstrated by satellite monitoring of coastal areas of the Kola Peninsula and the Kola and Kandalaksha Bays areas, both of which are passageways for oil product transportation and in which near-shore zone facilities for hydrocarbon reloading, transportation and storage are located. According to the satellite-based monitoring data from the second half of 2011, oil slicks were detected on 60% of images of the Kola Bay. Spill-International.com

and a couple years ago in:

Kandalaksha Bay in Russia’s far northern Kola Peninsula, some 400,000 square meters of the coast and 200,000 square meters of the bay’s basin area had been polluted with oil products as a result of the May 7, 2011 accident – including a range of islands that are part of a local nature reserve. The oil slick spreading from Belomorskaya (or White Sea) oil bulk plant, a coastal facility in the town of Kandalaksha in Murmansk Region, was threatening hundreds of protected wild species inhabiting the Kandalaksha National Park, only a kilometer and a half away. Belonna.org

Does anyone know what the cause of the current bright blue area off of the Kola Peninsula is? Has anyone seen any studies on the potential impact of anthropogenic effluent, waste heat and oil slicks on Arctic Sea Ice?

To see more information on sea ice please visit the WUWT Sea Ice Reference Page.