Nature; Arctic Tracking For 2nd-Lowest Sea Ice Extent On Record; Bering Sea Ice "Just Didn't Happen"
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The dynamic was especially apparent in the Bering Sea. “From about January to May the sea ice in the Bering Sea just didn’t happen,” says Alice Bradley, a polar scientist at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. “We haven’t seen that before.” A low-pressure weather system hovered over the sea for much of February, funnelling warm air from the south and pushing the little ice that did manage to form into northern waters.
Throughout the spring and summer, Arctic sea ice melted away faster than it usually does in areas such as the Beaufort Sea and the central Arctic Ocean. Ice extent and volume hit record monthly lows in July, and by early August there was no sea ice within 240 kilometres of the Alaskan coast.
Researchers are still waiting for Arctic sea ice to bottom out this year. The 2019 melt season doesn’t look likely to eclipse the record minimum of 3.387 million square kilometres measured on 17 September 2012, but it adds to evidence that sea ice is caught in a downward spiral.
For each of the past five years, September sea-ice extent has tracked well below the 1981–2010 median. And Arctic sea-ice volume is also dwindling rapidly. The level recorded in July — 8,800 cubic kilometres — is 47% below the mean value for 1979–2018. Now the annual freeze is almost ready to begin. But much of the ice that forms will be the thin, 'first-year' variety that is especially vulnerable to melting away next year.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02653-x