The annual arctic melt season is nearing its end. When we last left the polar ice cap in July, it was suffering from some record-breaking melt but was showing signs of a slow-down. A lot has happened since then. The slow-down continued strongly into the first-half of August, and it looked like the ice cap might end up better off than the last two years. But sure enough the melt picked up again, and right now the north pole has more ice than the still record-low year of 2007, but less ice than the years that followed. Unless it slows some more in the final weeks, we can expect to see headlines about the second-lowest-ever ice extent for the Arctic. Graph snapshot from IJIS:
And here is my personal year-over-year comparison graph:
My name is Joshua Hedlund. Welcome to the Joshua Science blog. I keep these posts separate from my main blog because they involve topics would be considered "boring" to most of my family, friends, and general readers. I'm a data junkie and statistics nerd who also happens to have a insatiable desire to understand the world, so sometimes when I come across publicly available data about earthquakes, ice levels, tornadoes, and more, I like to analyze that data and present my findings here.
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