Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute: "Antarctic Sea Ice May Have Reached Record VOLUME!"

Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute: "Antarctic Sea Ice May Have Reached Record VOLUME!"

"Never so much sea ice at Antarctica in the last 30 years"

For whatever reason the following Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) press release was nowhere mentioned in the mainstream media.

And I was not able to find the report in an English version. So what follows is a professional translation. It's indeed something the alarmists can put in their pipes and smoke on for awhile. My emphasis added:

Never so much sea ice at Antarctica in the last 30 years."

With respect to global warming it seems to be a paradox that this year sea ice in the Southern Ocean has reached the highest extent in the last decades. It was only in the mid 1970s that a similar sea ice extent had been observed. 

The mean sea ice cover for September 2013 was 19.48 million square kilometers, an area that is 50 times the size of Germany.

"There was more sea ice this winter than we've seen in a long time, if there ever was so much ice since the start of regular satellite observations."

Even if there are no large area long-term measurements of sea ice thickness in the Antarctic, we conclude from various studies that the total volume of the Antarctic sea ice has grown over the last years.

The causes for these surprising observations are still the subject of various research projects. The main reason is currently suspected to be because of a strong natural variability as well as changes in the wind."