Arctic Ice October 2010

... the land being very high and full of mightie mountaines all covered with snowe, no viewe of wood, grasse or earth to be seene, and the shore two leages of into the sea so full of yce as that no shipping cold by any meanes come neere the same. The lothsome viewe of the shore, and irksome noyse of the yce was such as that it bred strange conceipts among us, so that we supposed the place to be wast and voyd of any sencible or vegitable creatures, whereupon I called the same Desolation.

John_Davis, 1587

Petermann's Progress

The huge ice island which calved from Petermann Glacier on August 4th was stuck in the mouth of Petermann Fjord for quite some time.  As I had suggested, it did not get into Nares Strait as a single ice island.  It broke into two main parts: Petermann 2010-A and Petermann 2010-B


Petermann Ice Island 2010-B

Petermann Ice Island - Now There Are two

Petermann Ice Island (2010) has now broken into two parts.   The smaller island is about 80 km2.  It is the thinner of the two and is likely to melt away first.  Based on the labels already in use in comments¹, I shall designate the larger island as Petermann 2010-A and the smaller one as Petermann 2010-B.


Petermann Ice Islands A and B
image source: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/images/MODIS/Kennedy/201009091609.ASAR.jpg

Arctic Ice September 2010 - Update #1

This is my first update to Arctic Ice September 2010.

Arctic Ice September 2010

As I write these words - September 01 2010 - Arctic sea ice extent as reported by NSIDC and JAXA is not as low as I had expected it to be.


image source: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
.
The IARC-JAXA graph shows 2010 extent as 4th lowest of recent years thus far, behind 2007, 2008 and 2009.

Petermann Ice Island Revisited

Petermann Ice Island (2010) Calved on August 05 2010.  The calving had been anticipated for some time and had been predicted to occur in summer 2010 by a number of people, including myself.  The actual calving event was observed in near real-time images by a number of people - credits at the foot of this article.


I give here some more background to my observations and my predictions of the Petermann calving event in a wider context of mechanical forces which may act on glaciers.


Greenland under observation