Arctic Sea Ice



This chart is a re-creation of an image posted in the New York Times article "Arctic Ice Reaches a Low Winter Maximum". (Here is a screenshot of the chart, in case the article becomes unavailable at some point: link).

I think the original does a decent job of communicating the original data, and I thought it would be fun to recreate programmatically from the original dataset in SVG with D3. I've also added some small fade-in animations to guide focus around the chart.

The story of the data is clear: at its minimum points, the arctic sea ice extent in recent years is much lower than average, and 2015 appears to be no exception.
The source code to create this chart is available freely on my github page: https://github.com/factormystic/arctic-ice.

Feel free to fork this repository if you want to mess around with the chart. If you make something cool(er), let me know on twitter @factormystic.

It took a little over a weekend to make, and while writing the code I kept a build journal. It's a running commentary of my thoughts in the moment (mildy edited for formatting), as if I were giving a presentation as I was going along.

It's very long and verbose, but there's in-progress pictures of the chart as I was writing it.

Build Journal
comments powered by Disqus