🧊 Somebody had to land on each one of these

Every line is the path of a single iceberg, recorded by a GPS beacon that a field team placed on it by hand, stepping off a helicopter onto the ice. 224 of them between 1997 and 2024. The colour says when.

🛰 Why bother, when satellites can see ice? Satellites tell you where an iceberg is. A beacon tells you where it is going, every hour, through polar night and storms, until the ice it sits on finally breaks apart beneath it. Some of these beacons reported for over four years.

🧊 The ocean freezes too

This animation shows sea ice concentration on the Spilhaus projection: the proportion of the ocean surface covered by ice at each point. It does not show thickness, but coverage, from nearly open water to areas where ice covers almost the entire surface.

🌍 Spilhaus lets us see the ocean as a single connected body of water, without any region disappearing behind the globe. Here, that perspective reveals the pulse of both poles: while one gains ice through its winter, the other loses it through its summer.

🧊 Nobody steers these

Every dot is a tabular iceberg, a slab of ice broken off an Antarctic ice shelf and tracked from space. The wake behind it is where it has been over the past two years. This is 1999 to 2026, around forty to sixty of them under watch on any given day.

Since 1979, ERA5 reanalysis has tracked sea ice cover across both poles, one of the most visible fingerprints of a changing climate. This animation shows the linear trend in annual mean sea ice concentration (%/decade). Land is grey; the vast majority of the ocean, which has never had sea ice and never will, is left pale and blank on purpose. That's not missing data, it's a genuine trend of zero.