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Visualizations

Sea Blind: The Price of Shipping our Stuff

2015

Arctic ice melt allows commercial shipping across Russia's Northern Sea Route to be viable for the first time in history. This Arctic short-cut makes shipping even cheaper and faster than present routes by avoiding passage through the Suez canal. But the savings come at a tremendous price. Shipping is one of the most polluting and unregulated industries in the world. Colossal ships create health challenges, but worse still, the black carbon the shipping industry is allowed to emit accelerates the Arctic ice melt.

Sea Blind will be screened during the Symposium lunch breaks

Screening 1:
Tuesday, July 18
1200-1315

Screening 2:
Wednesday, July 19
1200-1315

Both screenings will be in the Naval Heritage Center Presidents Room, with an introduction by the filmmaker Bernice Notenboom.

Extremely Warm 2015-16 Winter Cyclone Weakened Arctic Sea Ice Pack - November 2015

Extremely Warm 2015-16 Winter Cyclone Weakened Arctic Sea Ice PackA large cyclone that crossed the Arctic in December 2015 brought so much heat and humidity to this otherwise frigid and dry environment that it thinned and shrunk the sea ice cover during a time of the year when the ice should have been growing thicker and stronger, a NASA study found. The cyclone formed on Dec. 28, 2015, in the middle of the North Atlantic, and traveled to the United Kingdom and Iceland before entering the Arctic on Dec. 30, lingering in the area for several days. During the height of the storm, the mean air temperatures in the Kara and Barents seas region, north of Russia and Norway, were 18 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than what the average had been for this time of the year since 2003.

Courtesy of NASA Goddard

Weekly Animation of Arctic Sea Ice Age with Graph of Ice Age By Area: 1984 - 2016

February 2016

Weekly Animation of Arctic Sea Ice Age with Graph of Ice Age By AreaBelow is an animation of the weekly sea ice age between 1984 and 2016. The animation shows the seasonal variability of the ice, growing in the Arctic winter and melting in the summer. In addition, this also shows the changes from year to year, depicting the age of the sea ice in different colors. Younger sea ice, or first-year ice, is shown in a dark shade of blue while the ice that is four years old or older is shown as white. A color scale identifies the age of the intermediary years.

Courtesy of the NASA Visualization Studio

Extremely Warm 2015-16 Winter Cyclone Weakened Arctic Sea Ice Pack - November 2015

Extremely Warm 2015-16 Winter Cyclone Weakened Arctic Sea Ice PackA large cyclone that crossed the Arctic in December 2015 brought so much heat and humidity to this otherwise frigid and dry environment that it thinned and shrunk the sea ice cover during a time of the year when the ice should have been growing thicker and stronger, a NASA study found. The cyclone formed on Dec. 28, 2015, in the middle of the North Atlantic, and traveled to the United Kingdom and Iceland before entering the Arctic on Dec. 30, lingering in the area for several days. During the height of the storm, the mean air temperatures in the Kara and Barents seas region, north of Russia and Norway, were 18 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than what the average had been for this time of the year since 2003.

Courtesy of NASA Goddard

Arctic Sea Ice Figures

Arctic Sea Ice FiguresZachary Labe is studying at UC-Irvine in Dr. Gudrun Magnusdottir's Research Group to apply a series of GCM ensemble experiments to understand the dynamics and relative forcings of natural and anthropogenic climate change on this high latitude circulation and resultant teleconnection. These animations depict ice volume, extent, and thickness changes over recent decades.

Courtesy of Zachary Michael Labe, University of California Irvine

The Arctic's oldest ice is vanishing - December 2016

The Arctic's oldest ice is vanishingSea ice grows throughout the winter and melts throughout the summer, reaching its maximum extent in late February or March, and its minimum extent in September. The ice that survives at least one summer melt season is typically thicker and more likely to survive future summers. Since the 1980s, the amount of this perennial ice (or multiyear) has declined dramatically. This animation tracks the relative amount of ice of different ages each week from 1990 through early November 2016.

Courtesy of Climate.gov