NIC - Main Sea Ice Line Now Well Above Svalbard - Approx. 80 North

[hatrack]

And it's only the second day of summer . . .




Baffin Bay clearing rapidly - the >1/10th line well into Kane Basin.



Davis Strait pretty much wide open.

[benburch]

1. Looks like an acrtic passage will be open this year.

I wonder if any captains will decide to use it to avoid the Panama Canal or the Straits of Magellan passage?

[XemaSab]

2. Why are "ice free" and "undefined ice" both white?

Makes the map a little hard to interpret. :shrug:

[Dogmudgeon]

3. I think it's for ice they can't measure accurately

"Undefined ice" might be their code word for "not enough to measure accurately". The color scale marks off percentage ranges, but the monochrome scale seems to be for ice they have to make guesstimates of.

These maps in 2004 and 2005 made me a little nervous. This year's is quite ... bracing. One of my longstanding enviro-paranoias has been the transformation of the Arctic into an engine of climate change. It appears to be one of the key zones involved in world-wide climate change events, and the coupling of Arctic climate with both the jet stream and the Atlantic thermohaline current(s) has only recently been investigated. In addition, just a week or so ago, a report was released concerning thawing Arctic permafrost releasing massive amounts of natural greenhouse gases. Many of our educated guesses are turning out to have been correct, if a little conservative.

--p!

[Dogmudgeon]

4. Have you kept the graphics for the past few years?

I should have, but I neglected to.

I did find some of the SIGRID data, and it's all available on a CD-ROM, but the graphic files are much easier to use, and I have poor skills in climate numerical methods, anyway.

I'm still kinda-sorta waiting for such phenomena as hurricane-scale cyclonic "tropical" storms and massive peat bog fires. Actually, I did hear that there was a big peat bog fire in Siberia, but it was a one-time news item, and I have heard nothing since.

These developments are not pleasant to watch. It would be "cool" to observe them if they were part of some reliably short-term cycle, but at this point, the loss of ice is so profound that it really only compares to proxy data reports of changes from Heinrich and Oeschger-Dangaard events.

--p!