Talk:Sea ice

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[edit] Re incomprehensible picture

This graph is total nonsense without further explanation or better legends. It might make sense to its creator, but it is hard to imagine anyone else getting any benefit whatsoever from it.

  1. It talks about "monthly averages" in the caption, but there's nothing about months in the graph.
    1. The x-axis is time, in years, which implicitly includes months as a sub-period.
Not when they are scrunched together so much.
  1. It looks funny, like it is a series of blue ovals inside black ovals. Spread out more in the horizontal direction, it might be comprehensible.
    1. Its effectively two sine waves, 6 months out of phase
It's supposed to be that; the problem is, that isn't what it looks like.
  1. Nothing identifies what is northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere.
    1. Its a very minor intelligence/comprehension test. Especially after the most recent edit, its very easy to work it out (or at least I thought it was; tell me if I'm wrong). But you could add the colours in the figure caption, if you like.
It's something missing.
It is unreasonable to expect readers to go look up the history and pick out a couple of cryptic edit comments and expect them to draw conclusions on that basis. What I might understand or not understand isn't particularly relevant.
(William M. Connolley 18:23, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)) Sorry. I really didn't realise it was this difficult. You don't need to look up the edit history, just read the text that says that the NH cycle has a smaller amplitude. OK, so I'll add it.
  1. The scientific notation legend is will put non-technical people off. Just use square megameters, with numbers 5, 10, 15, and 20. Or even millions of square kilometers, with the same numbers.
    1. Well, sorry. If I ever re-drawn it I will. But it doesn't seem worth re-drawing it just for this.
I certainly didn't think this a fatal flaw either; but it obviously needs redoing, so this should be fixed as well.
  1. Just what in the world are you trying to show with it? Maybe explaining that will make it make sense. Gene Nygaard 21:22, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
    1. Lots of obvious things: that the interannual variation of the max/min is much smaller than the seasonal variation, for example (William M. Connolley 21:52, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)).
Maybe some other type of graph would be more useful?
Or maybe one similar to this over a much shorter time period, so that the wave nature shows through, to show what you were trying to show here, and a second one showing just monthly maxima over time?
In other words, play around with it and see what you can do. You are the one with the data. I don't know exactly what it should be; I just know it should be something different from what it is. This is something only a mother could love. Or "father" in this case. Gene Nygaard 22:29, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • I also had pointed out the NH/SH ambiguity in Image talk:Sea-ice.area.nh.sh.png. Black is apparently SH, and area is in m². Making graph wider would allow seeing the sine waves as such rather than as ellipsoids. Narrower pen would also help. (SEWilco 04:25, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC))

[edit] Missing references

The citations to Serreze and Stroeve are not defined. Pdn 04:16, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Ice Pack Images

The way these were positioned, on top of each other and alongside the page, made it difficult to compare them. I've put them all inside a table and greatly reduced their size, so that they can be "eyeballed" for differences more easily. I tried putting them into a gallery tag, but since the last image is of a different size, the images were scaled completely differently and defeated the purpose of the whole edit. If anyone has a better plan for making these look better (combine them all into one image, or crop them all to the same size, perhaps?) then feel free to change it appropriately.Fourthgeek 19:11, 18 July 2005 (CST)

[edit] Sea Ice

I believe the word should have been left as "calve" - a process for pieces of ice to break off in analogy with a cow having calves. The page is so big I cannot find where to edit, though; when I open an edit window - my screen search does not work inside an editing window.

I thought the figures were OK as they were. Pdn 02:39, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

You're right. "Calve" simply looks so similar to "cave", it seemed to be an easy typo. I'll change that back. As for the pictures, however, they are better organized this way. Though as I said, if someone can make a viable improvement, that's fine. If it's decided that it's better the old way, that's fine too. It's more of an aesthetic change than anything, perhaps a matter of opinion. It just seems cleaner this way, side-by-side, instead of them trailing down the page vertically.Fourthgeek 22:16, 18 July 2005 (CST)

[edit] Merge proposal

I redirected drift ice here - there was nothing to merge. Except

[[de:Treibeis]] [[ja:流氷]]

which I don't know what to do with William M. Connolley 09:33, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Hmpf. Drift ice has resurrected itself. I've re-instated the merge proposal William M. Connolley 09:25, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
Oppose merge. ("resurrection": Didn't you know that drift ice is a seasonal phenomenon in many places? :-) I resurrected it, not it itself. Of course, initially it was a naive 5th-grader level text. But I intend to expand it. It is a huge well-defined subtopic of equally huge topic of sea ice, no reason to merge. In wikipedia big articles are split into smaller ones, not vice versa. Since we are at this, why don't you suggest to merge Iceberg here too? `'mikkanarxi 02:34, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
Because sea ice is simply the same thing as drift ice. Sea ice is seasonal, too. What exactly is the distinction between SI and DI? William M. Connolley 09:44, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
"Seasonal" was a joke in response to your "resurrected". Sea ice is either drift ice or fast ice. Of course, the overwhelming majority of sea ice is Arctic and Antarctic ice packs, but still pack ice is but a type of sea ice. `'mikkanarxi 22:51, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Ah. By bizarre co-incidence, just as you were writing this I was restoring the redirect. Fast ice is indeed just another name for sea ice, which is why it redirect to sea ice. Pack ice ditto. They are all the same thing William M. Connolley 22:54, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

You still fail to understand my poit: "fast ice" is not another name for sea ice. It is another type of sea ice, just as timber is not the same as wood (calling a shovel a spade...). The whole ice topic is somewhat understructured, as I see. For example, do you know where in wikipedia is written what type of ice is iceberg? `'mikkanarxi 23:05, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
And I would agree that from the point of view of formation they are basically the same. But they have differences in many external respects. `'mikkanarxi 23:07, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Right now unfortunately I don't have time to sit and put these ice issues in order. `'mikkanarxi 23:09, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
As a final stroke, I apologize for possibly appearing as a layman asshole to you, since you surely know things here. But we laymen have a bit different perspective. `'mikkanarxi 23:27, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Animation removed

I removed the animation of sea ice fluctuation around a year.

REASON: it contained at least one severe error. It was not just a bit inaccurate, but coarsely. The animation shows the whole of Norwegian Sea freezing, which simply does not happen. Even during the coldest years of the so-called Little Ice Age the limit of sea ice was around 72 deg North latitude in Barents Sea, and the middle and eastern portions of Norwegian Sea, thus including the coast of Norway, were ice free year-round.

I assume the animation depicts such an ice situation that has most recently happened approximately 10 000 years ago, during the last Ice Age proper. Greetings from Finland (that is near Norway). 80.221.61.8 19:12, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 10:03, 10 November 2007 (UTC)