The Antarctic Sea Ice Extent on Sept 13 2014 may have set a new all time record (at least for the satellite era, we don’t have data prior to that).
Southern Hemisphere Sea Ice Extent With Anomaly
Sunshine hours writes: Antarctic Sea Ice Extent Sept 13 2014 – 1,121,000 sq km above the 1981-2010 mean. Data for Day 255. Data here.
Breaking the record set in 2013 by 48,000 sq km.
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NSIDC blurb (http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/seaice.html):
“Sea ice near the Antarctic Peninsula, south of the tip of South America, has recently experienced a significant decline. The rest of Antarctica has experienced a small increase in Antarctic sea ice.”
To better see the bias in the wordage of this blurb imagine how it would be written if the situation were reversed. So, imagine that there had been a small but steady annual decrease in sea ice over the entire continent except for an increase in the Antarctic Peninsula.
“OMG! Sea ice has been declining dramatically throughout the entire Antarctic continent! Except for a little bitty piece of the Peninsula, where it is rumored to be increasing just a tad.”
As Suganuma, et al (2014) reported last month, a reconstruction of the overall mass of a small portion of East Antarctica, based on Be surface exposure dating, has declined during the entire Pleistocene. This illustrates that nothing is in ‘equilibrium’, and even during an ‘icehouse’ climate (can we all agree to destroy this nonsense terminology) or glacial period, that ice mass can be lost even during multiple glacial/interglacial episodes. The lack of any significant information of glacial dynamics of Antarctica makes any reference to the overall ‘mass’ of the continent as purely speculative. Sea ice has been expanding due to multiple reasons, least of which is CO2 which has seen a 7 -fold atmospheric increase since 1945 yet has produced 49 years of stable to de-trending temperatures and only 20 years of increasing temperatures.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379114001760
As of today’s update (which I believe has Sept 15 data,) the extent is continuing to merrily increase, and likely is setting further records. Time for another headline and update?
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL059239/abstract
Fan, T., C. Deser, and D. P. Schneider (2014), Recent Antarctic sea ice trends in the context of Southern Ocean surface climate variations since 1950, Geophys. Res. Lett., 41, 2419–2426, doi:10.1002/2014GL059239.