The northern melt continues apace, overall. Conditions are average in the Canadian high arctic and Greenland, but record high temperatures in Siberia have led to an ice edge that is hundreds of kilometres more advanced than the mean. That side of the polar sheet is also dominated by newer, thinner ice, and we may expect that there will be rapid deterioration.

At present, the total Arctic ice area is lower than any previous year on record at this particular time of year.

Still no North West passage. Come on.

mollwollfumble said:

Still no North West passage. Come on.

Probably not going to happen this year. It’s still frosty on that side.

dv said:

mollwollfumble said:

Still no North West passage. Come on.

Probably not going to happen this year. It’s still frosty on that side.

I was just reading about Franklin..well it was the Matthinna story.

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/06/20/an-icebreaker-called-polarstern-is-revealing-the-arctics-secrets?

I was wondering why Russia stopped running their North Pole base station operations in 2015 but I suppose the reason is as you’d expect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drifting_ice_station
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Since the mid-2000s it became difficult to find a suitable ice floe to station camp on, due to global warming, and several stations had to be evacuated prematurely because of unexpectedly fast thawing of the ice, so in 2008 an idea to replace the ice camps with a drifting research vessel as a station core was floated. After almost a decade of deliberation, a contract of building the station vessel was awarded to Admiralty Shipyard in Saint Petersburg in 2017. This will take a form of a large self-propelled ice resistant barge of ~10000 tons displacement, getting to the initial point of the mission by itself or with a help of an icebreaker and continuing to drift with the surrounding ice. The barge, intended to function autonomously for 2-3 years, but equipped to be supplied by air or passing icebreakers, and equipped with the required research equipment, is expected to be commissioned in 2020.

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From NSIDC

July 16, 2020
By July 15, 2020, Arctic sea ice extent was at a record low over the period of satellite observations for this time of year. The Siberian heat wave this past spring initiated early ice retreat along the Russian coast, leading to very low sea ice extent in the Laptev and Barents Seas. The Northern Sea route appears to be nearly open.
On July 15, Arctic sea ice extent stood at 7.51 million square kilometers (2.90 million square miles), 330,000 square kilometers (127,000 square miles) below the record for July 15, set in 2011. This places extent at the lowest level for this time of year on the satellite record. Low extent for the Arctic as a whole is largely driven by extensive open water in the Laptev and Barents Seas, continuing the pattern that began this spring and was discussed in the previous post. Ice concentrations are low in the East Siberian Sea; remaining ice in this area is likely to melt out soon. By contrast, extent north of Alaska is near the 1981 to 2010 average for this time of year. Such contrasts serve as prominent examples of the larger variations that occur for sea ice extent on the regional scale in comparison to the Arctic Ocean as a whole.

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The thin newish ice north of Alaska continues to melt quickly. It appears that this year’s minimum is on track to be the second lowest ever: I’d estimate ending up at something like 4.1 million sq km of sea ice.

For only the second time on record, Arctic Ice Extent has dipped below 4 million sq km. The previous year when this occurred was 2012. That year it reached a minimum of 3.387 million sq km. There are still a couple of melting weeks left, but I wouldn’t expect the record to be broken this year.

(dashed red line is 2012, light blue line is 2020)

dv said:

For only the second time on record, Arctic Ice Extent has dipped below 4 million sq km. The previous year when this occurred was 2012. That year it reached a minimum of 3.387 million sq km. There are still a couple of melting weeks left, but I wouldn’t expect the record to be broken this year.

(dashed red line is 2012, light blue line is 2020)

> The previous year when this occurred was 2012

The same year that Greenland had a record high melting rate.

I had no idea that the North East Passage was so easy to traverse this year. Fastest route from Norway to Japan by the looks of it.

Seems that the minimum has been reached, or very near to it, barring some unforeseen late September gusts. Pulses of warm air in early September pushed the melt front to within 400 km of the pole.

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September 16, 2020

In the first week of September, sea ice extent took a sharp downward turn, exceeding the pace of decline for any previous year during that period, and placing the 2020 sea ice minimum firmly as second lowest—after 2012—in the 42-year continuous satellite record. Pulses of warm air from north-central Siberia are responsible for the late downward trend. Sea ice decline has slowed in the past few days, and the annual minimum is imminent.

Sea ice extent stood at 3.74 million square kilometers (1.44 million square miles) on September 15, already well below 2007, 2016, and 2019 and within 400,000 square kilometers (154,400 square miles) of the record low extent set in 2012 (Figure 1a). Sea ice extent has dropped below 4 million square kilometers (1.54 million square miles) only once before, in 2012 (Figure 1b). Between August 31 and September 5, 2020, sea ice extent decreased by an average of 79,800 square kilometers (30,800 square miles) per day. This is a greater loss rate than any other year for these six days in the sea ice record. Ice retreat during this period was along the ice front in the northern Barents, Kara, and Laptev seas. A remaining tail of multiyear ice extends into the southern Beaufort Sea north of the Mackenzie River Delta and the Alaskan North Slope. North of Scandinavia and Russia, a very broad sea-ice-free area exists with the ice edge lying near 85 degrees N, far to the north of Svalbard, Franz Josef Land, and Severnaya Zemlya (Northern Land) (Figure 1c). The sharply defined ice edge in this area, between about 0 degrees and 100 degrees longitude, indicates strong compaction of the ice by winds coming from the south and is the furthest north the ice edge has been in this location over the satellite data record (Figure 1d).