Antarctica

Antarctic sea ice extent has steadily improved in the last month and now stands at 99.6% of the LTALTA Long Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO.. Sea ice extent is up by ~900,000 square kilometres from this time last year, and close to 2 million square kilometres higher than the lowest for this date back in 2023. Obviously someone remembered to keep the fridge door shut down there this summer🥶

There’s been a massive fall of in Antarctic sea ice this season. I decided to emulate a graph I saw on Twitter that overlays a daily line series for each year since 1978 and then highlight specific series, red for 2023, blue for 2022, and green for 2016, the year of the previously lowest daily anomaly from the 1981-2010 LTALTA Long Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO.. The total for the 5th of July is just 12.332 million square kilometres, that’s just 81.6% of the LTA for that date, and around 1.8 million square kilometres lower than last year the previous lowest.

Below is another graph you don’t often see and that’s total global sea ice extent from both the Arctic and Antarctic combined. There’s a very noticeable year-on-year decline in Arctic sea ice extent in the world.