Antarctic Sea Ice Maximum, 2023

  • Released Monday, September 25, 2023
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After growing through the southern hemisphere fall and winter, sea ice in the Antarctic appears to have reached its annual maximum extent. The image above shows the ice extent—defined as the total area in which the ice concentration is at least 15 percent—at its 2023 maximum, which occurred on September 10. On this day the extent of the Antarctic sea ice cover peaked at 16.96 million square kilometers (6.55 million square miles), making it the lowest yearly maximum extent on record. This year’s maximum is 1.75 million sq km below the 1981-2010 average Antarctic maximum of 18.71 million sq km.



Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Release date

This page was originally published on Monday, September 25, 2023.
This page was last updated on Monday, September 25, 2023 at 1:04 PM EDT.


Datasets used

  • BMNG (Blue Marble: Next Generation) [Terra and Aqua: MODIS]

    ID: 508
    Sensor: MODIS

    Credit: The Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).

    This dataset can be found at: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/

    See all pages that use this dataset
  • 10 km Daily Sea Ice Concentration [SHIZUKU (GCOM-W1): AMSR2]

    ID: 795
    Type: Observed Data Sensor: AMSR2 Collected by: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

    Credit: AMSR2 data courtesy of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

    See all pages that use this dataset
  • 10 km Daily 89 GHz Brightness Temperature [SHIZUKU (GCOM-W1): AMSR2]

    ID: 796
    Type: Observed Data Sensor: AMSR2 Collected by: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

    Credit: AMSR2 data courtesy of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

    See all pages that use this dataset

Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.