Looks like there's more ice, no?

[CrusaderFrank]

Techno-Archaeology Rescues Climate Data from Early Satellites

Here is a photo from the mid 60's overlaid in Google earth.

If I understand how the labeled it, the yellow outline represents the extent of the ice in the mid 60's and it looks like the present image extends beyond the view from the 60's.

Yes? No? Eeeek, it's a glacier!!?

 

[Old Rocks]

I saw no conclusions in this article. Just the statement that they were working on technological solutions to create usable pictures.

Techno-Archaeology Rescues Climate Data from Early Satellites

Archived, but not forgottenScientists today who study polar sea ice conditions rely on satellite records reaching back to 1979. But soon, data scientists hope to extend the look back by another decade or more. Researchers at NSIDC and NASA have shown that the oldest Earth observing satellite data can be made to yield new information, adding significantly to the view of Earth's climate history.
When NASA launched the first Nimbus satellite in the 1960s, they also launched an era of Earth observations from space. While the early Nimbus satellites provided meteorological and other observations, methods did not yet exist to detect features such as the margins of the sea ice cover in the Arctic and Antarctic. Even if they had, the limits of computer processing in those days would have made quantitative analysis unfeasible.
These early satellite data still reside in NASA archives on archaic, two-inch tape media. When NSIDC scientist Walt Meier and project manager Dave Gallaher learned that NASA researchers had retrieved 1960s images of Earth from the Lunar Orbiter, they wondered if early NASA satellite data could also yield information about sea ice conditions before 1979. They saw a disappearing window of opportunity to recover these data. Only one tape drive remained in the world that could read the Ampex two-inch media. Plus, the original Nimbus researchers were now in their late 70s and 80s, and contact with them would be critical to answering some of the necessary instrumentation questions.