Arctic Death Spiral - Evolution to July 2013

Image by Andy Lee Robinson, from http://haveland.com/share/arctic-death-spiral.png

The video below is a visualization of the Arctic Death Spiral showing the evolution of the volume of sea-ice over time from 1979 to July 2013.

The rate of ice loss in the Arctic is staggering. Since 1979, the volume of Summer Arctic sea ice has declined by more than 80% and is accelerating faster than scientists believed it would, or even could melt.

Pitch of the notes are proportional to the average sea-ice volume for each month. Spectral filters are derived from the average sea-ice volume for each year. Produced using Perl and PovRay, Midi perl and Reason and Virtualdub on a cluster of Linux servers.

Above image is another way to visualize the data. It is a screenshot from the video below, by Andy Lee Robinson, illustrating the dramatic decline since 1979 until July 2013.

Andy Lee Robinson

The soundtrack “Arctic Requiem” also by Andy Lee Robinson, is available for free download: http://haveland.com/share/Arctic-Requiem.mp3

Sea Ice Volume is calculated using the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS, Zhang and Rothrock, 2003) developed at APL/PSC.

Source data is available from:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFMDmS783Ro