BACK TO 1979 LEVELS FOR SEA ICE, as reported in Daily Tech, 1 Jan 2009. Since 1979 scientists have been observing the changes in sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic regions using satellite images. With each seasonal cycle millions of square kilometres of this ice melt and reform, but the scientists use a calculation named the “mean ice anomaly” to follow the overall trend. This is the “seasonally-adjusted difference between the current value and the average from 1979-2000”. At the end of 2008 the anomaly was just under zero, i.e. the sea ice was about the same as it was in 1979. The University of Illinois's Arctic Climate Research Center has produced a graph of the global sea ice area and the sea ice anomaly for 1979-2008 showing the anomaly has risen and fallen many times over the 29 years of records. The latest rapid increase in ice defied recent predictions that the Arctic sea ice would soon completely melt.
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