December 7 2023:  The sea ice has continued to increase, and at a greater rate of 6.29% (from last week’s growth rate of 2.51%), from the level on 11/30/2023 of 10.412 M km² to 11.111 M km² for this week. 

The negative sea ice anomaly this week was lower than the anomaly of -0.830 M km² on 11/30/2023 to a lesser negative anomaly of -0.646 M km² on 12/07/2023, and so less anomalously negative for this time of year.

In the waters around Antarctica, 2023 stands out as an extremely low sea ice year. The record began in 1979 and the sea ice extent this current austral winter season is outside of 6 standard deviations (SD) for the time series. Note that the grey shading in our Arctic sea ice plots (like the one above) is usually two standard deviations, whereas the below plot for Antarctic waters shows six SD. The current situation around Antarctica is a truly extreme deviation from what could be considered normal for the austral sea ice season.