Latest animation for 2019 here: [ Ссылка ]
This is an animated visualization of the startling decline of Arctic Sea Ice, showing the minimum volume reached every September since 1979. It is clear that the Arctic will soon be ice-free for an increasing part of the year, with consequences for the climate.

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 accelerating faster than scientists believed it would, or even could melt.

Based on the rate of change of volume over the last 30 years, I expect the first ice-free summer day in the Arctic Ocean (defined as having less than 1 million km² of sea ice) to happen between 2016 and 2022, and thereafter occur more regularly with the trend of ice-free duration extending into August and October.

I also composed and played the piano music, "Ice Dreams". A longer version played live can be found here: [ Ссылка ]

A full HD 1080p version is available for broadcast, and can be customized.

About the data: 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 for this graph is available from [ Ссылка ]

More information:
The image first appeared in still form on Think Progress, and I decided to try to bring it to life over the following weeks:
[ Ссылка ]

An earlier video also featured on BBC's Newsnight last year:
[ Ссылка ]

I produced the animation using hand-written perl and php code to create povray scripts, and scheduling task distribution using MySQL between 7 linux servers working in parallel to render 750 HD720p frames for 30 seconds video. The "farm" renders 20 frames simultaneously taking between 1-2 hours per frame. On completion, ffmpeg combined the frames into a maximum quality mp4, and then I wrote some music and muxed it into final 720p form for upload.

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