Wow but that ice is looking mighty bad.

Climate change is fake!

Al Gore is fat!

Warming is good for the Earth!

Humans can't change or fix the climate, because God said so!

Green living is a Zionist/Masonic/Illuminati conspiracy!

There is no such thing as excess Co2!

It sucks, but some people really are naive enough to believe that we can't change the climate.....if the poles are melting, in their minds, it's because God made it so and not only can we not do anything, but it's a sin to try to make things better because that would be elevating ourselves above the Lord Almighty.....no shit, I really have come across people who do truly believe this crap. And what makes things even worse is that the denialists, religious fanatics or otherwise, have billions of dollars backing them.....aka, the Koch Bros., Exxon, etc.

There are two colored measurements of a satellite view of earth taken five years apart. The most recent, 09/08/2012, the surrounding outer space is slightly darker and the oceans appear a darker blue/black. Does anyone else see this, or is my imagination too fertile, eyesight poor, my position non static in front of my monitor, or perhaps a variation in my screen?

I think the fake star fields are different as well.

Therefore the fake background star fields make it more clear that these thermal models themselves could vary as well. Thanks for the clarification.

forming in the middle of what used to be dark purple is ominous. When the center portion of a solid old ice pack turns slushy and essentially fails at the location one would expect the most thickness, it leads me to believe the forces are more than atmospheric heat and perhaps water temperature below the ice flow will no longer support the ice density. That makes the summer of 2016 ice free arctic scenario, seem very plausible.

I shudder to think of the effects this collapse will have of jet streams and ocean currents all over the globe. If people think the weather is unpredictable and extreme now, wait for 2015 - 2020.

We are watching the birth of dragons.

What is happening now is the kind of stuff disaster and calamity driven sci fi movies were made of. Now, pull up a chair, free admission, the price has been paid with your future.

Either way it'll be a bummer.

It's rotting from the core outward now

"you know, we can save propellant by using an orbit that reduces coverage near the pole - and really, how much coverage do we need, it's frozen solid up there, what's to measure?"

It's a slushy mess.

that is, what was the location, and the scale

for orientation:

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/imagery/subsets/?mosaic=Arctic.2012251.terra.4km

for which a reasonable amount will fit on the screen at once. Greenland and its ice cap is the large continuous white section near the bottom left (and you can just see Iceland below it, Baffin Island to the left, and Ellesmere Island just above it). And it does make sense the point at which the 'wedges' of separate images come together would be the North Pole.

more or less consistently pushing away from Greenland:

I would predict a minimum at or near 1.

Such as it is, I think next year is going to be THE year. Yeah, there's going to be some ice left, but it's not going to be much, oh no. And all the pundits are going to be like "No one could have predicted this!"

unless losing meant I got had to drink something offensively bitter and alcoholic

when the center is slush, how much time is there before pieces enter New York Harbor, and while listing against madam liberty, provoke a whimpering siren of 'see I told you so'.

edit: deleted a word

It updates each day, every time a new one is posted on the originating web site. "Today's picture" is dated September 11. If you read this post tomorrow, it will be dated September 12. Simple, no?

Must not be that simple. So your comment pertained to the change in twenty four hours, between these pictures?

I would still be interested in his posting a visual comparison of the two days, if he is not shooting from the lip, or he commented before he studied the pic in the original post.

I was at work, in a rush and trying to be helpful and cute at the same time. Bad combo. I've also been looking at those images for so long that much of the information about how they work is second nature, so I don't slow down enough to explain them properly - in this case I missed explaining that the date on the most recent image is always yesterday's date.

Please accept my apology. I'll try and be more helpful and less flip in the future.

I think we are more alike than apart. Peace. hrh.

If what is apparent in less than a week of pictures, is reality, the ice pack is breaking up, now. The next couple of years will define our strife.

The next two or three years are going to have some intense moments. What worries me most is that the loss of arctic ice really is the driver behind the American and Russian droughts, the weakened Indian monsoon, and the soggy British summer. If that's true, then the rise in world food prices is just beginning - it would tend to just get worse from here on.

I'm glad you garden. I suspect we're all going to need to learn how in very short order.

It becomes a new game always evolving to the unexpected, from the thought to be, historical normal. We try to describe what will be, with what was, but isn't. What many don't realize, is this is a new frontier, of the unknown, an no one can define the answers to evolving dilemmas.

PS. Gardening is the postscript, to all that was thought to be important, it is the essence, of survival. Hands in the earth reap the reward of labor. It is not a figment of electronic patter, but rather a reunion with what we are borne, Nature,. Thank You. Bye

updated without change:hrh

is shocking.

:GULP:

2.26, or 30,000 below the record that was set a few days ago.

And that's just been in the past few days.

It's a profound thing to be a witness to this. I've been having a hard time shaking the goosebumps. Not sure if it is fear or awe.

Just checked, and the data were for 2 September.

Thanks!

2.2398 today. And the purple keeps fading to red...

That angry red could even chew out the North Pole over the weekend.

We're fucked, maybe.

Who are you and what did you do with Josh?

With the grand majority of an ice pack below the water surface, the rising water temperature is not going to allow the survival of old ice. The predictions of two weeks ago of the Arctic summer free of ice near 2016, now seems outdated. Me thinks much sooner.

As bad as things have gotten, it's still going to have to take extraordinary circumstances, and probably extraordinary amounts of shitty luck as well, for it to happen any earlier.

And fortunately the circumstances have been so ordinary, too...

And how, in your view, have the circumstances been ordinary?

Our luck sucks, and the circumstances have been anything but ordinary, which is why XemaSab's law will apply here: "Faster than expected", by anybody - including us.

To get a good feel for the capitulation of the ice cap at the end of the season, run the 30-day animation at
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/CT/animate.arctic.color.1.html (Java required).

Watch the end of the season, from about September 5 on. To get a good look, stop the animation and go frame by frame.

The theme of the year seems to be: "I've never seen anything like this!"

Viewing this animation it is immediately apparent the there are many forces sending this graphic in different directions at different locations on different days.

The obvious factors determining the changes are water temperatures, water and air currents, air temperatures, full sun / overcast conditions, ice movements, pressure anomalies and many things we aren't aware of; so it is hard to weigh significance to a period of a day or a week.

As the differences are great between Sept. 5 to present, it is equally different from August 20 - August 25. The colors representing the ice density are flying all over the place from dark purple to red, from one location to the next, sometimes in just the passing of two or three days.

View the north coast of Greenland in each of the thirty days of this animation, one day you think it won't recover from red a week later it is dark purple.

About the only short term conclusion I can make from this animation is the ice pack is very very unstable.

edit; spelling

Fascinating.

In a macabre sort of way...