I really do wonder if I'm looking at the same Arctic as Friv. Yes, there's a high pressure over the ESS at the moment. No, it's not melting in any unusual manner.
When I look at the MODIS images, the ESS is higher albedo and higher concentration even than last year.
When I look at the JAXA data on overall extent, I see that yes, the melt has picked up a bit after its brief stall - but it's still slower than most recent years. It's basically overlying the 2009 track for the last couple of weeks, and is if anything lower than the historical average melt rate for the time of year.
I mean that last sentence absolutely literally.
Melt over the last week was -376335 km^2. Average for the 2000s is -508913 km^2. Average for the 90s is -455647 km^2. Average for the 80s is -501229 km^2.
That's not a cherry picked date either. Whether I look at the last day, the last three days, the last week, the last ten days or the last fortnight, or any value in between, the current rate of loss of Arctic sea ice is lower than the 2000s average, lower than the 1990s average, and lower than the 1980s average.
It is virtually certain now that the final minimum extent will be somewhere between that of 2009 and 2010, very close to last year's minimum.