No, this is not a review of one of the Disney sequels. Fredt34 sent me a mail to draw my attention to this ice analysis map from the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute from St. Petersburg, Russia. This institute had some great weekly sea ice displacement forecast maps last year, but unfortunately the web page went down in the middle of the melting season.

This ice analysis map is nice too, though, as it gives us an idea of the age of different parts of the ice pack, which is why I think this blog post will fit in nicely with the recent string of posts on sea ice thickness.

Here's the current situation according to AARI (click for a larger version):

The light blue shows where the open sea is, and the dark blue is for water covered with Nilas (very thin ice). The pink is for young ice between 0-30 cm thick, and the green is first-year ice with a thickness of 30-200 cm. The brown colour for olde ice that survived at least one melting season, is what interests us most, as all the other colours will probably melt out this season.

To us Europeans and Americans this image might look like it's upside down, but that's because it's from a Russian perspective. They are perfectly entitled to do this. In fact, I'll even flip this Arctic sea ice age figure from the NSIDC March analysis (courtesy of J. Maslanik and C. Fowler from the University of Colorado) so it's easier to compare: