National Snow and Ice Data Center Director Mark Serreze studied every nook and cranny of two Ellesmere Island ice caps in the early 1980s. Now those ice caps are nearly gone.
The melt season was up to 30 to 40 days longer than average in western, northwestern, and northeastern Greenland, but was close to or below average elsewhere on the ice sheet. Melt area was above average on 52 of the 90 days of the melt season.
Increasing air and sea surface temperatures, decreasing sea ice extent and Greenland ice sheet mass, and changing behavior of fish and walrus are among key observations released today in the Arctic Report Card 2015.
On September 11, 2015, Arctic sea reached its fourth-lowest minimum extent in the satellite record:1.70 million square miles (4.41 million square kilometers).
Just for fun, we asked the experts at the Rutgers Snow Lab to show us what their data (based on NOAA satellite images) had to say about whether the number of snow-covered days during the week of Christmas has changed at all across the U.S. in the past 50 years.
This activity in a case study format explores ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet by way of outlet glaciers that flow into the ocean. Students do basic calculations and learn about data trends, rates of change, uncertainty, and predictions.
This series of visualizations show the annual Arctic sea ice minimum from 1979 to 2015. The decrease in Arctic sea ice over time is shown in an animation and a graph plotted simultaneously, but can be parsed so that the change in sea ice area can be shown without the graph.
