The photo above was captured by the Catlin Arctic Survey team. It shows the break up of the ice pad where they had made their camp — the culmination of the extreme shifting ice the team has encountered over the past few weeks.

Charlie Paton describes the event, which happened during breakfast, as sudden and unexpected: “We heard a crack, a few bangs and then suddenly the ice started to break apart. It all happened very quickly and was unlike anything I’ve experienced before.”

The team scrambled to rescue equipment and sledges, managing to escape the breakup unscathed. Still, the situation highlights the danger presented by “chaotic” ice conditions, and the literal thin ice the team traverses as they collect water samples for research.

Despite the dangers the team faces, the folks at Catlin report that they remain “upbeat” following their recent resupply. Check out the team’s audio updates for more observations and stories from the ice!

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New research, conducted by the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen and published in the scientific journal Climate Dynamics, maintains that the sea ice in the Arctic sea between Greenland and Svalbard has reached the smallest size it has been in 800 years.

The research combined information about the climate found in ice cores from an ice cap on Svalbard and from the annual growth rings of trees in Finland. The data about the ice cover was gathered from the logbooks of whaling- and fishingships datign back to the 16th century as well as from records from harbours in Iceland, where the sea ice coverage has been recorded since the end of the 18th century. By combining these two sets of information the reserachers were able to track the sea ice all the way back to the 13th century.

The sea ice has been at the minimum also before, first in the late 13th century and later in the mid 17th and mid 18th century. The researchers maintain, however, that these periods were in no case as persistent as the decline of the sea ice in the 20th century when the ice diminished 300 000 square km in ten years. The sea ice has been at its largest from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, during a period called the Little Ice Age.

via The least sea ice in 800 years | Arctic Portal.

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A satellite image generated by Noetix showing the location of the pack ice in Navy Board

Last week, I mentioned Arctic Kingdom’s collaboration with Noetix, a company that provides real-time maps of the Arctic’s ever-shifting floe edge. Expedition manager Thomas Lennartz was on the ice, following Noetix-generated maps and reporting back with conditions in the field. The purpose of this collaboration was to provide Noetix with feedback on the information their satellite images provide, allowing them to provide more nuanced information about conditions on the ice.

Today, I was able to get my hands on some images from that collaboration. What follows are Satellite images of Navy Board in late May provided by Noetix, along with some notes about conditions on and off the ice from Thomas.

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An ice circle on the Southern Edge of Lake Baikal, as photographed by the International Space Station.

Science Fiction blog io9 posted a real-science story today about two mysterious, two-and-a-half-mile-wide ice circles that have appeared, with no readily apparent cause, in Siberia’s Lake Baikal.

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