Antarctic Sea Ice Volume
By Paul Homewood
h/t Euan Mearns
As we know, Antarctic sea ice extent has been at record lows recently:
https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index
As I surmised yesterday, the ice retreat may be due to wind patterns, which blow the ice towards the pole. This is something which often happens in the Arctic.
And back in 2016, the NSIDC commented about exactly this phenomenon, which was associated with the Southern Annular Mode:
It is therefore appropriate to look at ice volume and thickness, as well as extent. The charts below are produced by Zach Lane, a NOAA scientist.
The first chart tells a completely different story to the media narrative of a melting Antarctic. As you can see, most of the sea ice is actually thicker than normal. This is clear evidence of the ice edge being pushed polewards, squeezed closer together if you like:
https://zacklabe.com/antarctic-sea-ice-extentconcentration/
The second image shows that, although ice volume is much less than average, it is NOT the lowest on record. The record low appears to be from the 1980s, though it is not clear which year.
What is noticeable though is that, apart from this year, most of the low volume years are coloured blue (1980s and 90s), whilst the top years are all recent:
The final chart is most the revealing of all. We can clearly see that the lowest volumes were around 1980 and 1981; also the trend was steadily increasing till it hit a record high in 2014. This was followed by the drastic drop in 2016, when, according to NSIDC, the SAM flipped. Since 2016, little has changed in overall terms:
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
These guys seem to think that only events post start of the satellite era, about 45 years ago, actually matter. About 10 years ago a friend of mine went on a modern Russian icebreaker converted to a cruise ship. They sailed from Ushuaia south, across the Southern Ocean to the Antarctic Peninsula, and tried to get into the Weddell Sea. They could not, because of the sea ice, and were turned back a full ten degrees north of where Weddell got to in 1823 in a wooden sailing ship, and even four degrees north of where Cook got to, half a century before that.
If one is promoting an ideologically based theory that governments can alter global temperatures to a predetermined fraction of a degree centigrade and to a time scale of their choosing simply by adding or subtracting a few Ppm of just one trace natural compound, then one would leave out all inconvenient data which is not supportive.
The scientific data which clearly shows 37 out of the past 40 years Antarctic ice volume has been increasing is inconvenient for those who want to promote the ideological theory that governments can change global temperatures to order and to a preditermined fraction of a degree and time scale of their own choosing. No matter how preposterous that may sound.
The BBC only mentions the extent (area) of the sea ice. It never mentions the thickness or the total volume. I wonder if they don’t fit the propaganda message!
Ah but they do when area is up! A few years ago when Arctic ice was recovering, they ran stories about how it was very thin.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191018-the-problem-of-thinning-arctic-sea-ice
Paul: you write
But there is more red than blue on the map in question, which would indicate that most of the sea ice is in fact thinner than normal.
One way or another, the sea ice obsession is flogging a dead horse.
If all the sea ice melted it would make no difference to sea levels, and once it’s gone the land bound ice is above sea level. How is the remaining ice going to melt when it’s beyond a ‘warming’ ocean and temperatures remain as low as -60ºC on the continental land mass?
When Scott died in the Antarctic midsummer temperatures are understood to have been around -40ºC. A global averaged, ambient air temperature rise of 1.5ºC will make no difference whatsoever.
Putting that into perspective, your domestic freezer maintains around -18ºC.
There is a very interesting YouTube video by Tom Nelson about Antarctica:
According to the geologist, James E Kamis, Antarctica is composed of two entirely different regions geologically. The larger (80%) East Antarctica is gaining ice whilst the ice on the smaller (20%) western side is melting caused by geological heat. This is because this side/area sits on the Pacific Ring fault system.
Antarctic sequestered land ice grows fastest in warmest times when the sea ice donut around Antarctic is the smallest.
Antarctic sequestered land ice depletes in coldest times when the sea ice donut around Antarctic is the largest.
Land ice pushed into the turbulent salt water currents determines the temperature and regulation of the sea ice.
The result of all this is a stable self-correcting natural process with the thermostat setting being the temperature sea ice freezes and thaws. The control means is the size of the sea ice donut.
Check the Antarctic ice core data for ten thousand years. Warmest years had most ice accumulations. Coldest years had least ice accumulations. The warmest and coldest years alternated in the same bounds. This will continue.
Do we need to have all these scientists and Global Warmists spending time and taxpayer dollars watching ice grow and shrink in the Antarctic?
Not really a productive career one would think.
If these guys reckon it is warming in the Arctic then go build a summer holiday house down there?
ffs I am sooo over this Global Warming Babble.
Add in the Hunga Tonga volcano which put an enormous amount of water vapour into the stratosphere, a lot of which reached Antarctica.
Pink Skies Seen Over Antarctica May Be Explained by Tonga Volcano Eruption (July 2022)
There’s been an increase in polar stratospheric cloud and also aerosols. I suspect both have a warming effect in the Antarctic winter, when there’s no solar irradiance. Consequently you’d expect less sea ice than usual.
Big wet volcanic eruptions like this one are rare, the last one like it was Krakatoa in 1883. (The 1888 Royal Society report makes for some fascinating reading, and it covers a lot of climatic effects that were observed. It’s freely available on line.)
We know from Pinatubo that such temporary effects can last several years, so be prepared for more climate hysteria from the usual suspects, until sea ice recovers and they shut up.
So versus the average, its as low as its was high a few years ago. Which is exactly what you’d see with natural variation.