{"id":447,"date":"2008-03-31T17:08:25","date_gmt":"2008-03-31T22:08:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/climate411\/2008\/03\/31\/antarctic_news\/"},"modified":"2008-04-22T11:22:28","modified_gmt":"2008-04-22T16:22:28","slug":"antarctic_news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/climate411\/2008\/03\/31\/antarctic_news\/","title":{"rendered":"News from the Antarctic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img src='https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/climate411\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/7\/files\/2008\/03\/james_wang.jpg' alt='James Wang' hspace=\"8\" align=\"left\" class=\"blogAuthorPic\" \/><i>This post is by <a href=\"http:\/\/environmentaldefense.org\/page.cfm?tagID=985\">James Wang, Ph.D.<\/a>, a climate scientist at Environmental Defense Fund.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>This month, while Arctic sea ice hits its annual wintertime high (such as it is &#8211; see <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/climate411\/2008\/03\/27\/arctic_ice_thin\/\">last week&#8217;s post<\/a>), Antarctic sea ice reaches its summertime low.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve already posted about the British Antarctic Survey&#8217;s report of a <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/climate411\/2008\/03\/25\/antarctic_ice_shelf\/\">vast ice berg on the verge of breaking off<\/a> the Wilkins Ice Shelf. Here&#8217;s more on what&#8217;s happening at the South Pole from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/topics\/earth\/features\/seaice_conditions_main.html\">NASA&#8217;s recent briefing on polar sea ice<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Although the Arctic and Antarctic are both at the Earth&#8217;s poles, they&#8217;re not mirror images of each other. There are some fundamental differences between them. Antarctica is a land mass surrounded by an ocean, while the Arctic is basically an ocean surrounded by land.<\/p>\n<p>Unlike the Arctic, the Antarctic typically has little perennial sea ice. There are two main reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Because there are no surrounding continents, Antarctic sea ice can float northward into warmer waters where it melts.<\/li>\n<li>Because it&#8217;s at a lower latitude, Antarctic sea ice receives more direct sunlight and heat in summer.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Almost all the sea ice that forms during the winter melts during the summer.<\/p>\n<p><b><i><font size=\"1\">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/mfile.akamai.com\/18566\/wmv\/etouchsyst2.download.akamai.com\/18355\/wm.nasa-global\/seaice\/Antarctic_Sea_Ice_Wdate.asx\">Click to view Windows Media Viewer streaming video.<\/a><\/font><\/i><\/b><br \/>\n<img src='https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/climate411\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/7\/files\/2008\/03\/217317main_antarctic_sea_ice_2005.jpg' alt='Antarctic Sea Ice' width=\"320\" align=\"left\" hspace=\"8\" class=\"blogImgLeft\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Also unlike the Arctic, which is one of the fastest-warming places on Earth, surface measurements and satellite data in Antarctica haven&#8217;t revealed overall trends in temperature or sea ice area. Warming and sea ice loss in some areas &#8211; notably the Antarctic Peninsula, where the <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/climate411\/2008\/03\/25\/antarctic_ice_shelf\/\">iceberg is breaking from Wilkins Ice Shelf<\/a> &#8211; have been balanced by little temperature change or even cooling and sea ice gain in other areas.<\/p>\n<p>Still, that doesn&#8217;t prove there&#8217;s no warming trend in Antarctica. Satellite data has only been available since the 1970s. Earlier observations from whaling ships suggest that there was a greater sea ice area before satellite observations were available.<\/p>\n<p>If Antarctica isn&#8217;t warming &#8211; or if it&#8217;s warming at a slower rate &#8211; it may be due to the atmospheric vortex circulation that surrounds it (from being a land mass centered at a pole and surrounded by ocean). This tends to hold in cold air. But that&#8217;s just one hypothesis that scientists are exploring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This post is by James Wang, Ph.D., a climate scientist at Environmental Defense Fund. This month, while Arctic sea ice hits its annual wintertime high (such as it is &#8211; see last week&#8217;s post), Antarctic sea ice reaches its summertime low. We&#8217;ve already posted about the British Antarctic Survey&#8217;s report of a vast ice berg &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arctic-antarctic"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>News from the Antarctic - Climate 411<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/climate411\/2008\/03\/31\/antarctic_news\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"News from the Antarctic - Climate 411\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This post is by James Wang, Ph.D., a climate scientist at Environmental Defense Fund. This month, while Arctic sea ice hits its annual wintertime high (such as it is &#8211; see last week&#8217;s post), Antarctic sea ice reaches its summertime low. 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