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Arctic Sea Ice Volume at record low.

It likely qualifies as it's from the major site.

This will certainly set a record for a drop as it was u usually high late in the year.
Still - it's not much of an indicator...multiyear is more critical and even that is suspect now

Rotten’ multi-year ice
FEBRUARY 11, 2010
in CANADA, SCIENCE, THE ENVIRONMENT
Because of the tilt of the Earth, the polar regions will always be cold in the winter. What is changing in the Arctic is the amount of ice that can endure through the summer months. Ice that has survived two winters is said to be ‘multiyear’ ice. Because more salt has been forced out from it, it is harder than younger ice. That makes it more durable, as well as a greater hazard to ships. While the decline in the overall extent of Arctic sea ice has been dramatic, the decline in the extent of multiyear ice has been even more so. This animation shows it vanishing over the past 30 years.

Furthermore, at least some scientists believe that most of the melting taking place has been from the bottom, and anecdotal reports from people operating icebreaking ships suggest that the multiyear ice still out there isn’t the same thing as what existed before. It is riddled with brine channels and weaker, and sometimes just consists of a thin layer of young ice covering small chunks of old ice. As such, it is more vulnerable to melting. This weak and vulnerable ice can provide a false impression of strength, when viewed from space. David Barber, Canada’s Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba, has explained to Parliament that “we are almost out of multiyear sea ice in the northern hemisphere.”
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This is a very good animated indicator as you can see the multi-year ice decline over the past 30 years.

http://nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaiceminimum/images/20070822_oldice.gif
 
Presumably you mean the anomaly is a record low, ice volume won’t hit it’s minimum until Sept or so.

I agree that we look to be headed for a new record volume this year when we hit the yearly minimum. I prefer to look at max and min, the timing of the transition in between can play such a large role in the number it can result in some very odd results.
 
a) black water is far more absorptive than white ice when solar hits. It's remarkably higher.

b) mechanical breakage is far higher which does not add energy the way a) does but promotes faster melting.
 
And ?

The post and image I was responding to was based on area ..

That's why I asked how that image ( area ) showed why volume was so low.

macdoc said ' because of more ( remarkably more ) black water...'

I said ' more than when ? ', because it's about the same as it was a year ago ..
 
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Open water has a lower albedo than ice. There was a lot of open water for this time of year in that image, greg. This will translate into dropping volume, as you can see it is in the graph I posted in the OP.
 
Skeptical Greg said:
And ?

The post and image I was responding to was based on area ..

That's why I asked how that image ( area ) showed why volume was so low.

macdoc said ' because of more ( remarkably more ) black water...'

I said ' more than when ? ', because it's about the same as it was a year ago ..
Click to expand...

Gotcha, I misunderstood.
 
NOT the way it says i the OP subject. NOT the "lowest ever".

Only the lowest in ummm... according the the graph, lowest in 30 years. That's darn near "weather", not 'climate'.
 
Remarkably higher ? Higher than when ?
Click to expand...

Black water has a remarkably higher heat gain than continuous surface ice.

There was one article showing a new pattern of stippling on the surface ice with pockets of water on top which would also pick up heat faster.

Really tho single year ice is of marginal value in assessment unless you happen to be planning shipping routes.
 
BenBurch said:
I am going to go out on a limb and say that the volume loss will catch up to the extent numbers this year, and that extent will hit a record low too.
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Let us know how that prediction works out for you. :)

(Probably better than mine for last year, but that was rather more bold. Or "foolhardy" as some described it, which I can hardly argue with.)
 
casebro said:
NOT the way it says i the OP subject. NOT the "lowest ever".

Only the lowest in ummm... according the the graph, lowest in 30 years. That's darn near "weather", not 'climate'.
Click to expand...

Only "near"? Surely you can do better than that.

So how did things look 30 years ago in the Arctic at this time of year? Similar enough that it might have been lower the year before? Or a few years before? Or ten years before?

Of course the Arctic wasn't a complete bloody mystery fifty years ago, and it wasn't anything like this. Cling on to your sophistry if you must (and perhaps you must) but it's looking increasingly desperate. If this summer does see a record low in extent you can always hope that summer 2011 will be a little higher, which could count as a "recovery". At least you could present it as such. What the heck, you don't have to believe in what you say as long as you can find something to say.
 
Given the pattern in Canada I can see that happening....hottest winter ever by a wide margin....30 yesterday, high 20s nearly all week and no rain....gonna be tough on farmers.

Mind you it's snowing out west :boggled: :D
 
lomiller said:
Presumably you mean the anomaly is a record low, ice volume won’t hit it’s minimum until Sept or so.

I agree that we look to be headed for a new record volume this year when we hit the yearly minimum. I prefer to look at max and min, the timing of the transition in between can play such a large role in the number it can result in some very odd results.
Click to expand...

Ahh, there's the nugget I was looking for (fingers poised!).

Couldn't remember precise minima time but was thinking Aug-Sep.

So it looks like we're on course for a mid-decade ice-free arctic in the summer sometime in the next decade?
 
Skeptical Greg said:
...the Arctic basin on the 20th, has about as much sea ice as it did a year ago ..
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The Arctic basin is the central part of the arctic, it's only one part of the Arctic and the last part to melt. in fact before the last few years there was hardly any melting in the Arctic basin period, even during the height of the melt in Sept.

There will not be any melting there this time of year so the anomaly will be close to zero what I pointed out is that the ice pack is breaking up, that won't change the ice area much but it will change the albedo from solid ice
 
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casebro said:
NOT the way it says i the OP subject. NOT the "lowest ever".

Only the lowest in ummm... according the the graph, lowest in 30 years. That's darn near "weather", not 'climate'.
Click to expand...

This year is well outside the normal range of variation over the past 30 years. That is highly unlikely to be weather, and the fact that we have strung together multiple years that are very low and you have climate.
 
TShaitanaku said:
So it looks like we're on course for a mid-decade ice-free arctic in the summer sometime in the next decade?
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I highly doubt that. The models all tend to show periods of rapid decline interspersed by periods of more stability on the way down to an ice free summer sometime around the middle of the century. Most are underestimating the decline so it could happen sooner but in a study a couple years ago only 1 run of one model has indicated that will be as early as the next decade.
 
Yeah 14 years was the earliest I'd seen and that was a couple years ago so 2010 -2020 is very unlikely but 2030-2050 pretty high probability no matter what steps we took.

Only a strong volcanic presence might reverse that for a while. There is simply too much warming in the pipeline even if we stopped adding to the problem.
 
macdoc said:
Yeah 14 years was the earliest I'd seen and that was a couple years ago so 2010 -2020 is very unlikely but 2030-2050 pretty high probability no matter what steps we took.

Only a strong volcanic presence might reverse that for a while. There is simply too much warming in the pipeline even if we stopped adding to the problem.
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Another thing people don't get. If we stopped adding Industrial CO2 to the atmosphere right now, it would still get warmer for years.
 
BenBurch said:
Nope.
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That's funny: Apparently we have photographs and written accounts of submarines meeting at the North Pole in open water in 1987, and of "large polynyas (areas of open water)," at the North Pole in 1959.

ETA: of course, there is still some ice there, but before you insist that this is meaningful ice that means that the pole is not truly "ice free", please promise me that when, in the doomsayer-prophesied "ice-free summer", I point out that there is still plenty of ice to be found, you will not then insist that this ice isn't meaningful and doesn't count for purposes of falsifying the prophesy.
 
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"Open" means "less than 10% ice" in other words, not white on the extent map. In other words, navigable carefully by non-icebreakers and non-reinforced vessels.

In arctic or near-arctic waters can, open water, sometimes 100s of meters wide, can form spontaneously as a result of winds and currents. And it can close just as quickly. This is why such things are useless for navigation.

Now, did you have a point, or were you just looking for some trite "gotcha" that could be demolished in seconds by somebody who has been reading about arctic operations his whole life?
 
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Speaking as a polar bear with an iPad, I find myself torn between the bear-porn-access joys of the modern world, and the lack of ice floe rest these days that was the inevitable price of the human industrial progress that brought me so much furry-assed *********** cyber-spectator sensual yum-yums.
Either way I end up with tired arms, and.... *splash splash for hours*... well, bye, glug glug... silly me for succumbing to the temptations of industrialisation and the knowledge-based society..glug glug..bye.
 
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theprestige said:
That's funny: Apparently we have photographs and written accounts of submarines meeting at the North Pole in open water in 1987, and of "large polynyas (areas of open water)," at the North Pole in 1959.

ETA: of course, there is still some ice there, but before you insist that this is meaningful ice that means that the pole is not truly "ice free", please promise me that when, in the doomsayer-prophesied "ice-free summer", I point out that there is still plenty of ice to be found, you will not then insist that this ice isn't meaningful and doesn't count for purposes of falsifying the prophesy.
Click to expand...

While I wouldn't want to impede on your gotcha-moment, complete with a cite from a denialist website, we're talking about the entire arctic and not just the immediate area around the north pole. Ben went a little too far in dumbing it down, no doubt expecting people to understand what he was talking about.

Obviously he was wrong about that.
 
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