What was done
The Odden ice tongue is a winter ice cover phenomenon that occurs in the Greenland Sea with a length of about 1300 km and an aerial coverage of as much as 330,000 square kilometers.  In the present study, the authors utilized satellite imagery to analyze and quantify a number of attributes of the Odden ice tongue ... including its average concentration, maximum area and maximum extent ... over the period 1979-1998.  In addition, they used surface air temperature data from Jan Mayen Island, located within the region of study, to infer the behavior of the phenomenon over the past 75 years.

What was learned
The Odden ice tongue was found to vary in size, shape and length of occurrence during the 20-year period, displaying a fair amount of interannual variability.  Quantitatively, trend analyses revealed that the ice tongue has exhibited no statistically significant change in any of the parameters studied over the short 20-year period.  However, proxy reconstruction of the Odden ice tongue for the past 75 years revealed the ice phenomenon to have been "a relatively smaller feature several decades ago," due to warmer temperatures that were exhibited at that time.

What it means
The fact that the Odden ice tongue has persisted, virtually unchanged in the mean during the past 20-years, is in direct contrast with climate alarmist predictions of rapid and increasing warmth in earth's polar regions as a result of CO2-induced global warming.  However, this observation, along with the observational evidence from Jan Mayen Island that temperatures there actually cooled at a rate of 0.15 ± 0.03°C per decade during the past 75 years, bolsters the climate realist claim that There Has Been No Global Warming for the Past 70 Years.