Since the beginning of continuous satellite observation in 1979, the daily ice cover in the Arctic and Arctic has been measured extensively, offering a record of the climatic changes in the two polar
Since the start of continuous satellite monitoring in 1979, the summertime sea-ice extent in September has been on the decline, showing a loss of nearly 14% per decade, about 50% over the whole time p
At 4.0 million km², the sea-ice extent at mid-month was roughly 530,000 km² above the record low in 2012, and ca. 440,000 km² below the figure for the same month in 2019, the year with the third-lowes
But this expedition won’t proceed entirely as planned, either – like so many things in the on-going coronavirus pandemic. In mid-December, the research ship Polarstern, with the new overwintering team
The stratosphere is the part of our atmosphere beginning at an altitude of ca. 10 km, and where, thanks to the absorption of the trace gas ozone, temperatures rise with increasing altitude. Normally,
While the summer minimum was reached in the Antarctic on 19 February 2020 (at 2.68 million km²), in the Arctic the extent has been growing steadily since the end of February, and hasn’t yet reached it
The standard unit used for the sea-ice volume is thousands of cubic kilometres, and offers a better measure of the state of Arctic sea ice than the extent, since the volume includes the thickness of t
On 16 May, RV Polarstern left the MOSAiC floe, which an international team of experts has been researching since last October, to pick up the crew for the next leg of the expedition off the coast of S
Despite a storm and the adverse ice conditions, he and his team reached the MOSAiC floe almost as planned. They left the floe on 16 May and reached the sea-ice edge on Tuesday, 2 June. Now Torsten Kan
For the majority of June and at the beginning of July, the extent was below the level for the same month in the record-breaking year 2019 (Fig. 1). The monthly mean ice extent was 10.03 million km² –
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