What changed this week on the continent, what we are measuring, and what the numbers actually mean. Written from the same feeds that drive the site.
The US National Ice Center refixed all 33 tracked Antarctic icebergs on 13 August. Eight moved more than 30 km in six days. Nine did not move at all.
We asked all 5,686 fitted measurements on this site which year they changed level. One answer cost us a published number, and it is now corrected in public.
At one emperor penguin colony in Marie Byrd Land the sea ice season has gone from 322 days a year to 207, and it has shortened at both ends at once.
You do not count penguins from orbit, you count their guano. Here is how the method works, and the measurements that show our own version of it failing.
COMNAP lists 114 Antarctic facilities run by 31 nations. 103 are in use, only 44 stay open through the winter, and just 83 are called stations.
An iceberg knocked the Mertz Glacier Tongue off in 2010 and grounded nearby. Summer sea ice at Cape Denison went from 4 percent to 54 percent.
Antarctica has 729 known penguin breeding sites. Measured against sea ice they are 56 independent places, and the species with the most sites have fewest.
Our sea ice metric reproduced five published emperor penguin breeding failures and completely missed a sixth. The miss is the more useful result.
In winter the furthest point on the Antarctic ice sits 1,815 km from the nearest facility that stays open, and the three closest all lie the same way.
D15A, at 3,037 square kilometres, is the largest iceberg on the US National Ice Center list. It holds a quarter of all tracked Antarctic berg area.
Emperor Island in Marguerite Bay held emperor penguins from 1948 to about 2009. Its sea ice season is 75 days shorter, and it is shorter at one end.
The sensor that flew before 1988 reads several points low near coasts. Correct for it and 34 emperor colony sea ice trends fall to 10. Here is the proof.
Antarctic science is world-class and almost entirely invisible. Here is what we are building, and why the model is Global Forest Watch rather than an academic archive.
Antarctic sea ice stands at 16.085 million square kilometres, the 4th lowest reading for 9 August in a 48 year satellite record. What that number means.
Antarctica has 729 known penguin breeding sites. Three adjacent slices of longitude hold 510 of them, and the reason is a species list, not a survey bias.
Concordia sits 3,233 metres up on Dome C, holds 80 people in summer and 0 visitors in winter. Its sun rises again this week after 104 days of night.
Web Mercator clips at 85 degrees and the South Pole is undefined in it. Here is why every web map fails on Antarctica, and the projection that works.