But has it?
The latent heat absorbed by this ice committing hari-kari may buffer the high Arctic pack. But it's the blanket unraveling at the end of the day.
BTW Niall. Can you possibly datestamp the images you make gifs from? It makes it much easier to understand what you are looking at if you know the chronology.
The Norwegian Met also produce a sea ice area chart for Svalbard (attached). Currently standing at 391,000 km
2 which is its peak so far this year. Ice area has been rising through April. The storms earlier in the year had a big impact on ice area. We saw the edge torn apart in February with a large open area to the north of the islands. I think this graph really shows how much the ice has been ravaged in this area through winter storms surges and warm currents.
It is more difficult to pick out some of the thinner ice on the satellite images, which is why I put up the ice chart images also. The ice edge is more or less the same to the NW of Spitsbergen Island with typical NE to SW movement of the ice into the Fram Strait. Over at the island to the NE of Sptizbergen (Nordaustlandet) ice has moved across westwards from the east to run along the north coast of that island. In addition the main fragmented pack edge has drifted a little further south to almost meet up with the ice north of Nordaustlandet.
Looking at the SSTs in the area north of Sptizbergen on the Norwegian Ice charts it shows that SSTs have been dropping a little over the passed 2 months. 27th April shows it between 0 and 2 C, 27th March has a small area > 2C and 27th Feb has a much larger area > 2C.
It is possible the overall pack edge moves further south as part of a more general movement of the pack away from the Pacific side and down over the Atlantic side. But of course that would ultimately condemn more ice for final melt out via the Fram Strait.
Re date stamps. I did date the first date of the animations and the last date of the animations, at the top left, but maybe they were scrolling too quickly.
@ Uniquorn. No I wasn't trying to nit pic your images. It is always worthwhile to track individual chunks and see where they end up !