WTF is Happening? An Overview

07-04-2023 • arclein

The first WTF is in the Antarctic, where sea-ice extent is setting record lows daily, now fully over 2 million kilometers below the 1991-2020 mean. This is not some one-off event. A decline like this has long been predicted. The impact is that there is a lot more open ocean than normal for this time of year. Open ocean means the ability to absorb incoming solar radiation, and that means further heating in a well-known feedback loop. Using JAXA data, I prepared an image to illustrate just how crazy this moment is. The way you read the image below is that each horizontal blue wavy line is a year's worth of measured sea-ice extent. Starting with the average extent over the period 1991-2020, I simply compare each day's extent with that average and plot that point on the year's blue line. The years shown in this image are 1991-2023, with 2023 in red to highlight just how unusual it is. For those of you with keen eyes, the dip at the lower right corresponds to the year 2016, the yea