Stunner: Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute Confirms Antarctic Sea Ice May Have Reached Record VOLUME!

For whatever reason the following Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) press release was nowhere mentioned in the mainstream media.

And I was not able to find the report in an English version. So what follows is a professional translation. It’s indeed something the alarmists can put in their pipes and smoke on for awhile. My emphasis added:
==========================================

“Never so much sea ice at Antarctica in the last 30 years
15 October 2013

With respect to global warming it seems to be a paradox that this year sea ice in the Southern Ocean has reached the highest extent in the last decades. It was only in the mid 1970s that a similar sea ice extent had been observed.

Automatic measurement station for recording snow thickness on sea ice (snow buoy) in the polar night. Installed during the winter experiment (photo: Sandra Schwegmann, AWI).

The mean sea ice cover for September 2013 was 19.48 million square kilometers, an area that is 50 times the size of Germany. The absolute maximum of 19.65 million square kilometers was reached on September 18. And even if this maximum in sea ice cover area cannot be viewed similarly as a maximum in total volume or the total mass, sea ice physicist Marcel Nicolaus and Stefan Hendricks of the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI): “There was more sea ice this winter than we’ve seen in a long time, if there ever was so much ice since the start of regular satellite observations.“

In order to be able to make more certain statements in the future, scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute are currently working together with other colleagues of different institutes to also derive the thickness of the sea ice in the Antarctic from satellite observations. Recently this has become possible in the Arctic, but there are significant differences between the Arctic and Antarctic. The snow is thicker, more non-homogenous and it also does not melt completely in the summertime. Moreover much sea ice forms on the upper side, a phenomenon that takes place considerably more seldom in the Arctic. In the future it will be possible to calculate the volume of the sea ice there from the thickness and the extent.

The ice covered area of the Antarctic Ocean grows by a factor of 5 or 6 every year from its minimum of 3 to 4 million square kilometers to a maximum at the end of the winter (September) at the end of the Antarctic summer (February). However here there are large regional differences so that the Antarctic sea ice must be considered and evaluated as a puzzle made up of various ice covers.

Although over the last years an increase in ice cover has been observed in winter and summer as a whole, the tip of the Antarctic peninsula, for example, has been losing ice considerably, especially in the summer. While the Antarctic peninsula has warmed considerably over the last decades, the temperature in other regions remains stable.

These differences and the general increase in sea ice in many regions are for the most part the result of changes in the wind, which is spreading the ice apart. On the other hand, temperatures and winds from the Antarctic continent have a strong influence on the surrounding sea ice belt. That’s also a difference from the Arctic, and thus contributes to the sea ice in both polar regions behaving so differently.

To be able to better understand these interrelationships, over the last months, the AWI has conducted two winter experiments with the Polarstern research ice breaker in the Weddell Sea. In these expeditions the scientists encountered ever thicker and more compact ice which supports the claim of maximum ice mass. In addition to the measurements made during the journey, a number of automatic measurement stations were placed on the sea ice. These are now continuously measuring the thickness, temperature, and movement of the sea ice, as well as its snow cover, and they send the data via satellite to the AWI and its other project partners.

Reports, photos, maps and data of these experiments will shown and commented on here. More information is also available via the Steckbrief on the subject of sea ice as well as at the internet pages of the Sektion Meereisphysik (Section Sea Ice Physics).”

And in the AWI Fact Sheet Sektion Meereisphysik link, on page 2, they write:

“Even if there are no large area long-term measurements of sea ice thickness in the Antarctic, we conclude from various studies that the total volume of the Antarctic sea ice has grown over the last years.

The causes for these surprising observations are still the subject of various research projects. The main reason is currently suspected to be because of a strong natural variability as well as changes in the wind.”