Return to table of contents

Shrinking Arctic sea ice

Color how much Arctic sea ice was lost in the past 20 years

Shrinking Arctic sea ice

Data sources

Sea Ice Index, Version 2: September Northern Extent Shapefiles. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). Accessed December 2016. This data contains:

Comparison of September 1996 and 2016 sea ice extent Comparison of September 1996 and 2016 sea ice extent

How the data was used

Code

A python script is available in the code repository to generate or extend this activity, and can be run like this:

python sea_ice.py

Which will simply create an svg file with the sea ice shapes displayed. You can download additional shapefiles, place them in the ./sea_ice/data/ folder, and re-run the script like this:

python sea_ice.py -before 199609 -after 201609

Where the yyyymm corresponds to the shapefile "data/extent_N_{yyyymm}_polygon_v2/extent_N_{yyyymm}_polygon_v2"