Monday, September 2, 2013

Can you see the Arctic Ocean?


We are near the annual sea-ice minimum (extent wise) in the Arctic, and I wondered what it looked like from space, considering how thin the ice is.  So I made a comparison of sea ice concentration and a real-time real-color view from a cool new NASA Web app called Worldview.   What's interesting is that in the areas where the sea ice concentration is being shown as very low (lower than 50%), it looks like areas of the blue ocean are showing through.  I also thought that this area of low concentration cutting through the areas of higher concentration could lead to a more rapid decline, but looking at today's image, it looks like there's been some fill.  Still, it shows how thin the ice is this time of year.  Full of holes - like Swiss cheese, as one scientist said.


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