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Arctic Sea Ice

Jacob

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So I found something today in regards to Arctic sea ice volume that I thought would make for an interesting piece of discussion, and could potentially be a good research topic.

Disclaimer: I am not creating this to create discussion on climate change and how that affects arctic sea ice, or any of the politics related to it. Granted the discussion on climate change is what caused me to originally follow arctic sea ice, but this isn't meant to get into any of that.

With that said, I was looking at the daily sea ice volume plot from DMI this morning, and I noticed that the distribution of the sea ice, where it was thickest, thinnest, etc. looked familiar to another year that I'd seen before. I started looking back, and the year that the current sea ice volume resembles is 2012. Here's a gif comparing those two years.

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As you can tell, they are hardly identical, but there's enough similarities there that I started poking around at some other years to see if any others correlated. Naturally I started with 2018 because the distribution of the ice was pretty significantly different this time last year. I started looking back, and the first year I came to that looked quite similar was 2011. Here's the gif for those two

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Hmm, 2019/2012 and 2018/2011. Both pairs resemble each other decently well. So I checked out 2017/2010. There was a good bit of difference in overall volume those two years at this time, but again, the pattern of how the ice was distributed was the same.

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I felt like after those three years there might be some pattern emerging, but the next two sets convinced me there is likely something more to it. 2016/2009 and 2015/2008 are shown below

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2014/2007 probably have the weakest correlation, but 2013/2006 is pretty strong.

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Unfortunately, DMI data on their site only goes back to 2004, so I'm limited in how far back I can compare. I added on 2005 to 2019/2012, and 2004 to 2018/2011. Again, a pretty good correlation.

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That many pairs with a pretty good correlation is extremely unlikely to be a coincidence. There appears to be a 7 year repeating pattern (to some extent) of sea ice volume distribution. Unfortunately I don't have any conclusions to draw, as I only noticed this pattern today and have no idea what might be driving this to repeat like this.
 

Jacob

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It's approaching the August/September minimum for sea ice, and this summer has closely resembled the summer of 2012 across the arctic. Ice Area/Extent are both running almost equal to 2012, while volume is slightly higher than 2012 at this point. 2012 has the lowest ice area/ice extent/ice volume that's been recorded in the satellite era.

Also interesting that Greenland had it's biggest melt recorded in 2012, and this year Greenland has seen a big melting period as well.
 

KoD

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Somewhat relevant, this interesting video on the northwest passage allowing ships to bypass the Panama Canal is becoming more possible with the melting Artic sea ice.
 

bjdeming

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That many pairs with a pretty good correlation is extremely unlikely to be a coincidence. There appears to be a 7 year repeating pattern (to some extent) of sea ice volume distribution. Unfortunately I don't have any conclusions to draw, as I only noticed this pattern today and have no idea what might be driving this to repeat like this.

Whatever it is, it's probably home-grown -- on a quick online lookup, sunspots and aurora cycles are 11 years.

Am thinking something to do with salinity, perhaps changes of some sort in the fresh-water input (though why that would go in 7-year cycles is a question, too).

Just for the record, there are volcanoes down there, but iit wouldn't be that. That's a really deep, really sluggish spreading ridge, and while there are explosive eruptions occasionally, they don't reach the surfaces. Scientists were gobsmacked to see evidence of a past one when they went down there about 10 or 12 years ago.
 
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