CE
Sea Ice Mysteries
18 hours ago
Guest Post By Willis Eschenbach
I’ve never seen either the Arctic or the Antarctic ice pack. I have, however, commercially fished for roe herring in the Bering Sea, setting purse seine net in “brash ice” off of Nome, Alaska. Brash ice is the broken-up remains of the pack ice. It looks like this:
As a result, polar ice has been a long-time interest of mine. So let me invite you to take a wander with me through the current state of the Arctic and Antarctic ice packs. First, here are the changes in the Arctic sea ice cover:
Figure 1. Changes in the Arctic sea ice cover anomaly during the satellite era. Values are anomalies from the 1991-2020 thirty-year average
Since around 1990, people have been talking about how human-emitted CO2 is busily reducing the amount of Arctic sea ice. When it started dropping very fast around 2015, there was talk that we’d passed a “tipping point” from which the Arctic ice would never recover. And over this entire time, predictions of an “ice-free Arctic ocean” abounded.
But then … around 2018, the Arctic sea ice rebounded.
Why did it suddenly start dropping so fast post-2015?
Nobody knows. Not one scientist on the planet can tell you.
Why the quick turnaround and rebound starting in 2018?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/11/27/sea-ice-mysteries/
