There’s been an ice meme gone viral, comparing apples to oranges, or rather land ice in Antarctica to sea ice in the Arctic, fooling and confusing everyone (see way below). So here’s a true 10–Year Challenge comparison for Arctic Sea Ice volume only.

10–Year Challenge: If we conflate the full loss of ice all through the year to a journey from the North Pole to the South Pole, then we were already Going South ten years ago, in January 2009. But we’ve come a long way since that: See the 2019 globe to the right, for January 2019.

Q: Where’s the data source for this plot?
A: Here: http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/data/
Q: How can anyone make a decadal average graph?
A: Easy. Use a computer. Add all the ice for the latest 3650 days, divide by that number of days.
Q: Why would I even do that?
A: Let’s say you want to know how much ice we have in the latest decade compared to the decades before that.

The aforementioned viral meme:

This combination of photos from NASA and the National Snow & Ice Date Center shows the Getz Ice Shelf in Antarctica in 2016, left, and a remnant of ice in the Chukchi Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean, in 2018. The Associated Press reported on Friday, Jan. 18, 2018, that these photos, from opposite poles of the planet, have been circulating on the internet as a pair, falsely purporting to show the deterioration of the same portion of sea ice from 2008 to 2018. (Jeremy Harbeck/NASA, Julienne Stroeve/NSIDC via AP)