Create your own animation
You can make your own sea-ice animations! Simply select your region (Arctic or Antarctic) and preferred timeframe from the past 20 years. The animation displayed will update automatically. All videos can be played back at various speeds.
You can also download the animations you’ve selected in various resolutions and, with proper citation, use them elsewhere. All animations are based on quality-controlled data.
Download animation
Please select the size and click “Download”. The download starts within a few seconds.
Preview
Create your own animations
The animation shows the sea-ice development (in percent) for a period of your choice (you can select the start and end dates).
To make the animations easier to work with, your selection is always ‘rounded’ to the nearest week (Monday through Sunday). The time periods available for selection date back to 3 June 2002.
To start the video, simply click the ‘play’ button. In the menu, you can select from a range of playback speeds, from 1x (1 image per second) to 10x (ten images per second).
All animations can be saved on your end device by clicking the ‘download’ button. You can select from a range of resolutions (720 px – 2952 px). The higher the resolution, the larger the file size for the download.
What is displayed?
An ice concentration of 100% indicates a seamless sheet of sea ice. Ice concentrations of less than 15% are considered to be ice-free.
The green line is a climatological reference value and shows the monthly mean sea-ice extent for the years 1981 – 2010. Please note: If the video covers the transition from one month to the next, the green line will switch to the new monthly mean sea-ice extent. The sea-ice extent is the sum of all ice-covered regions (i.e., all regions with an ice concentration of at least 15%) and is measured in millions of square kilometres.
Data provided by the University of Bremen’s Institute of Environmental Physics (IUP) in collaboration with the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). You can find further information on the base data and additional maps at our data portal.
How to cite our maps:
Please include the following in the acknowledgments: Sea-ice data from DATE to DATE from www.meereisportal.de (funding: REKLIM-2013-04).
Citation style: Spreen, G.; Kaleschke, L. and Heygster, G. (2008), Sea ice remote sensing using AMSR-E 89 GHz channels J. Geophys. Res.,vol. 113, C02S03, doi:10.1029/2005JC003384.