Fall and Winter Arctic Sea Ice Thickness Declining Rapidly
- Visualizations by:
- Lori Perkins
- View full credits
This sequence shows Arctic sea ice thickness derived from winter and fall campaigns from the ICESat satellite. Sea ice grows extent grows in the summer and shrinks in the winter. While the sea ice extent might look similar from year to year this thickness data shows dramatic thinning especially near the North Pole (shown in dark blue). This image was generated with data acquired between Feb 17 - Mar 21, 2008.
But not all of the ice in the Arctic melts each summer, and the thicker, older ice that survives one or more summers is more likely to persist through the next summer. This older, thicker ice is declining thinner ice that is more vulnerable to summer melt. Seasonal sea ice usually reaches about 2 meters (6 feet) in thickness, while ice that has lasted through more than one summer averages 3 meters (9 feet), though it can grow much thicker in some locations near the coast. From 2003 to 2008, multi-year ice has thinned by an average of 60 centimeters (2 feet). The total ice volume in winter has decreased by 6,300 cubic kilometers, or 40 percent. The maximum extent of multi-year ice is now one-third of what it was in the 1990s.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio The Next Generation Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).
Animators
- Lori Perkins (NASA/GSFC) [Lead]
- Horace Mitchell (NASA/GSFC)
Scientists
- Donghui Yi (SGT)
- Jay Zwally (NASA/GSFC)
- Thorsten Markus (NASA/GSFC)
Papers
This visualization is based on the following papers:- Zwally, H. J., D. H. Yi, et al. 2008. ICESat Measurements of Sea Ice Freeboard and Estimates of Sea Ice Thickness in the Weddell Sea. Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans 113(C2). http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFM.C11B0421Z
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Datasets used in this visualization
ICESat Sea Ice Thickness (Collected with the GLAS sensor)
Nimbus-7 September Sea Ice Concentration Anomaly (Collected with the SSMR sensor)
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details nor the data sets themselves on our site.