The 2018 melting season

[epiphyte]

Although quite active here in the past, this summer I've confined myself to looking in from time to time and seeing the discussion evolve in the same way that it has for the past five years, at least...

   - In March/April, the previous low 2-D picture and/or patchy or otherwise less than historically harsh winter winter leads to vapid swooning that the ice is done-for.
   - In May, the fact that area/extent isn't historically low engenders sage reminders to the vapid that that it's still cold out there.
   -In June/July we get another dose of apparent (but in the 0.5-2m thickness regime, hopelessly speculative) indications of relative normalcy; area/extent, melt-ponds, PIOMAS, DMI average temperatures, and the like.

... and sometime in August or early September, all the fuzzy observations and even fuzzier inferences are finally subjected to the definitive test; which is to say:

    For every pixel, is there ice or no ice?

For my money, that's why, when it comes to matching up sea-ice models, and even direct (but interpreted/low-resolution/2D) satellite observations with reality, this is the time of year at which it is possible to learn something you didn't already know. Or that you already knew you didn't yet know. Or alternatively, to unlearn something that you thought you knew but didn't.

This is the time of year when surprises happen.  The Laptev gets bitten. The Beaufort + ESS unexpectedly disintegrate. Rubble washes out into the Atlantic faster than it can melt.

It’s the time when ice that is supposed to be perennial suddenly reveals itself to be fragmented, mobile, fragile, visibly ephemeral, or even simply absent.

This year what I’m seeing, not least by virtue of the astonishingly effective visualizations created by A-Team, is that the visibly ephemeral part of the arctic is, well…

…All of it.

[Pmt111500]

This year what I’m seeing, not least by virtue of the astonishingly effective visualizations created by A-Team, is that the visibly ephemeral part of the arctic is, well…

…All of it.

Gone are the reticulated patterns
Gone is the stable white
These things that matter
To a bear of ice

Summer seems still a couple of weeks short to cause a forced transition to a land-based diet, though.

[Eco-Author]

someth'en seemed to click when watching the atlantic front... Been watching the Greenland Svalvard area for three years and for some reason said that would be a key determinant if we go blue soon... Most active salty body of water with an almost guaranteed ridge over Scandanavia  It just clicked...

[RikW]

Just been checking worldview and there are too much clouds on the arctic for a good view, but when clicking around the last few days the ice does look bad. It's fractured almost everywhere with blue parts visible in a lot of places. To be honest, I think we just dodged a bullet and the ice is in a worse state than the numbers suggest. I can't remember seeing pictures of so many ice in such a bad state, with this low amount of sea ice left.

[wallen]

Worldview for the 20th is by far the clearest view of Nares Strait along it's full length, for the entire melt season

[Neven]

I've been away for a couple of days (on the road to holiday address, dealing with traditional post-work migraine), but I'm back now, trying to catch up.

[NeilT]

I don't think this 12-years claim is even true.

It is not difficult to validate.

For almost every year in solar cycle 24, there have been less sunspots than in a more "normal" month.  This means less total solar output and less energy to drive TSI.  The cycle flip over between 24/25 will be the one to watch, the solar minimum of cycle 23/24 was the lowest in 100 years.



So the statement that solar output is down, but GHG forcing is up, is correct.  When the 10/11 year solar cycle returns to a more normal output the Arctic is going to get a double whammy of renewed solar forcing with increased GHG forcing.

If you do a bit of digging, solar cycles tend to run in pairs to 24/24 are likely to be low.  Cycle 26, from 2028/29 is the question.  If it returns to normal or, even, higher than normal, the Arctic ice is going to change even faster.

[pauldry600]

Is it strange that Northern greenland has water above it?

I always thought this was pure frozen ice with little chance of melt

[binntho]

Is it strange that Northern greenland has water above it?

I always thought this was pure frozen ice with little chance of melt

Well, yes it's a bit strange, there has been quite discussions about this over the last few weeks, you can find it all in this forum.

[pikaia]

"Arctic’s strongest sea ice breaks up for first time on record.
Usually frozen waters open up twice this year in phenomenon scientists described as scary."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/21/arctics-strongest-sea-ice-breaks-up-for-first-time-on-record

[pauldry600]

its extremely dangerous if you ask me.

Havent been on here much this year as Jaxa keeps breaking but Im quite alarmed to see open water North of Greenland

Even though it will prob only be a top 5 year of melt once Greenland is melting like that theres no reversal

[mostly_lurking]

"Arctic’s strongest sea ice breaks up for first time on record.
Usually frozen waters open up twice this year in phenomenon scientists described as scary."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/21/arctics-strongest-sea-ice-breaks-up-for-first-time-on-record

The picture in the article is really just fear-mongering as usual.
Icebergs detach and float around.

[A-Team]

Is it strange that Northern greenland has water above it?

Yes, long-lasting backwash events in the Fram Strait are almost never seen; extensive commentary on the surprising Feb 12th incident can be found in the freeze season forum. The warm water injection event of August 3rd apparently swept a warm West Greenland Current eddy about Molloy Deep across the normally southbound but now dormant East Greenland Current, injecting a volumetrically substantial pulse of warm Atlantic Waters over the shallow shelf above north Greenland.

Whatever the ultimate underlying cause, the event continues to slowly develop along a thousand kilometers of coast as of the August 20th. The first animation, an overlay of OSI-SAF ice motion vectors on UH AMSR2 sea ice concentration, shows that this is not a lift-off event (overall icepack rotation or bulk movement) relative to north Greenland and the CAA coastline. (Lift-offs and long fracture propagation are common in winter, attributable to fixed island constraints on CCW icepack rotation under anti-cyclonic weather patterns.)

The second shows a possibly related development farther west: ongoing partition of the main CAB  in the vicinity of Prince Patrick and Banks Island, with the separating ice melting out as they round Banks Island in the very warm waters of Amundsen Gulf.

This pocket of the Beaufort Sea commonly develops floe motions seemingly independent of the larger ice pack. In six of the last eight years, long stringers of thick ice originating above Prince Patrick have swung up the Alaskan coast for months, this year reaching the Chukchi before turning sharply north.

What is unusual here is to see the ice heading up the Amundsen; for most of the fall and winter it steadily injected newly formed ice in the opposite direction, westward in the Beaufort to the south of the developing stringer.

Up-forum, several people have proposed that Beaufort Gyre waters are flushing out to Baffin Bay; the Amundsen is the upper end of a lesser Northwest Passage and so southbound currents there (and in M'Clure Strait) could explain observed ice transport.

Arctic Ocean inflows have to balance outflows or sea level would have to rise or fall; that's not physically sustainable given multiple connections to the global ocean. Normally the EGC is the principal route for outflows.

Tech note: scientist T Lavergne, whose twitter site was quoted in the excellent Guardian article, authored the AI algorithms used to make the ice motion vectors hosted by OSI-SAF today. Like UH AMSR2, the graphic files are not properly formatted as netCDF Geo2D so I could not make a clean overlay in Panoply; the vectors had to be lifted off the background in Gimp, a difficult exercise in discovery since the graphics are deeply dithered.

DTU's gif in the Guardian article by L Toudal runs from July 27th to August 13th. It combines Sentinel1 radar and AMSR2, with the innovation being Sentinel1 1-day ice drift vectors (Lavergne's are two-day). The graphic is not visually effective however and it works better to enhance off the  3.125 UH AMSR2.

[deconstruct]

The picture in the article is really just fear-mongering as usual.
Icebergs detach and float around.

Why is it fear-mongering? Are your scared by the image? Is anyone scared by the image? I can't see anything scary in that image, its just an iceberg floating around. So what?

The only critique about the image is, that it is just an illustration of the Arctic. It has nothing to do with the article itself. It might have been better to use an image of melting sea ice or a satellite view of the Artice Sea North of Greenland.

[binntho]

The first animation, an overlay of OSI-SAF ice motion vectors on UH AMSR2 sea ice concentration, shows that this is not a lift-off event (overall icepack rotation or bulk movement) relative to north Greenland and the CAA coastline.

Amazing. Thanks as always A-Team! Lift-off would be fairly "normal" if unusual. But what's happening now seems to be way out of order.

[Jim Pettit]

The picture in the article is really just fear-mongering as usual.
Icebergs detach and float around.

"Fear-mongering as usual", huh? "Icebergs detach and float around"? Why, I do detect ideology-based denial in your statements. But you should know that the article quotes a scientist (that is, not a conservative politician or a Big Oil mouthpiece, but an actual scientist who has education and experience and knowledge and everything) who states that the situation is indeed "scary". No disrespect, but I think I'll stick with his thoughts on the matter.

At any rate, the article states this about the current melt season:

The latest readings by the Norwegian Ice Service show that Arctic ice cover in the Svalbard area this week is 40% below the average for this time of year since 1981. In the past month, at least 14 days in the past month have hit record lows in this region. Although thinner ice elsewhere in the Arctic means this is unlikely to be a record low year overall, they are in line with predictions that there will be no summer ice in the Arctic Ocean at some point between 2030 and 2050.

Dismiss that by muttering "Icebergs detach and float around" if you wish, but don't expect a lot of agreement here in this reality-based forum. Anyone who's been watching can't help but agree that it is scary in every sense of the word.

[gerontocrat]

The photo was of a great big iceberg that has fallen off a glacier. Which actually is not scary until GRACE follow-on tells us how much calving from Greenland's glaciers is increasing. That could be very scary.

The article is about what was supposed to be the last redoubt of Arctic Ocean Sea Ice being of zero defence value. Add to that A-Team's mention of a 1,000 km stretch of open water where there should be ice...... Now that is scary when also adding in the poleward movement of the Atlantic Ice Front.

The sub-editor who pasted the photo to the copy screwed up.

[mostly_lurking]

"Fear-mongering as usual", huh? "Icebergs detach and float around"? Why, I do detect ideology-based denial in your statements. But you should know that the article quotes a scientist (that is, not a conservative politician or a Big Oil mouthpiece, but an actual scientist who has education and experience and knowledge and everything) who states that the situation is indeed "scary". No disrespect, but I think I'll stick with his thoughts on the matter.

At any rate, the article states this about the current melt season:

I call it fear mongering because - The average reader of that publication is not the average user of this forum. Showing a giant iceberg looming over a small town invokes fear while it has nothing to do with the actual article. It is there to enhance the "scary situation" they talk about in the article itself.

[mostly_lurking]

The sub-editor who pasted the photo to the copy screwed up.

Thank you. He did and it was intentional.

[A-Team]

Oh, no one there at the Guardian knows the difference between an iceberg and a floe. A sub-editor just picked some vaguely related click-bait off a Getty stock photo collection. Be grateful there wasn't a scantily clad Inuit carving up narwhale blubber. It is the same with newspaper headlines. Total disconnect with the reporter. Just about every article, every newspaper.

I am more concerned about plagiarism of our site by scientists. Naturally, people trolling earlier about sunspots (#2 on the Skeptical Science nonsense thermometer) is a total turn-off. However this event was noticed here 3 full weeks prior to the Guardian article and has undergone huge technical development on multiple high-visitation forums.

The hit counts here indicate multi-100,000 views of postings and graphics on the article's subject. Please don't tell me that those don't include a whole lot of mainstream Arctic researchers. They come here because it's a huge time saver over daily trawling of satellite resources. Two clicks in the left column, set an alert as many have done, and you can skip over the sunspots and speculation right to coverage of the event.

Plagiarism is failure to cite or credit. Just because it is open source doesn't mean there's no obligation to link. What they are doing is reading the blog, taking the better ideas, and then re-doing the graphics and research text, often ineptly. That's not original research, it's theft. They don't want to credit the site because of loonies here, because it's just the internet, because people mostly post anonymously, because not everyone here is a card-carrying academic scientist.

However I am, the 6,700 cites to my peer-reviewed papers are more than all the scientists quoted in the Guardian article put together. This is plagiarism as it is understood in the scientific world and I am getting real fed up with it.

[NeilT]

Naturally, people trolling earlier about sunspots (#2 on the Skeptical Science nonsense thermometer) is a total turn-off.

A-Team, I'm quite well aware about your opinion on sunspots.  However addressing the unusual nature of Solar Cycle 24 and the "potential" impact is something that serious climate scientists cannot avoid.

Witness the RealClimate What If article about the impact of the solar cycle dropping into a new Maunder Minimum.

The fact that the scientific consensus is that there is no "significant" impact compared to anthropogenic CO2 forcing does not equate to "No Impact", ever and does not justify either a "nonsense" label or, worse, trolling.

The sun provides the energy the planet uses to warm.  That sun emits more, or less, energy on an eight to 14 year cycle.  It is measurable and quantifiable.

In a noisy system, it does not make sense to ignore quantifiable datum just because you don't think it's important.

[Pmt111500]

Looks like someone changed the photo to a better one. That one could actually be of melting floes near the edge of clear water. Someone though would have had to sail the tens of miles north of Greenland to get that.

[mostly_lurking]

Looks like someone changed the photo to a better one. That one could actually be of melting floes near the edge of clear water. Someone though would have had to sail the tens of miles north of Greenland to get that.

I guess they read this forum

Was about to compare to the "starving polar bear" photo that National Geographic EVENTUALLY retracted. Explained.

For anyone that didnt see the original :

https://web.archive.org/web/20180821090421/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/21/arctics-strongest-sea-ice-breaks-up-for-first-time-on-record

[oren]

That sun emits more, or less, energy on an eight to 14 year cycle.  It is measurable and quantifiable.

The sun's energy is measured by TSI, not sunspots, if my limited understanding is correct.
I do wish for a different thread to discuss this, if anyone can find such.

[NeilT]

The sun's energy is measured by TSI, not sunspots, if my limited understanding is correct.
I do wish for a different thread to discuss this, if anyone can find such.

oren Total Solar Insolation is a combination of the output of the sun and the ability of the environment to retain it.  It includes output, reflection, absorption and the season/angle of impact.  Clearly if the output is less, then the environment has to be different to keep more of it.

But it is, sort of, OT.  Although it is the end of SS24, we are at minimum sunspots and minimum output for the cycle.

[Pmt111500]

Here you go, sunspotters:
https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,2384.msg168709.html#new

[uniquorn]

Today's ecmwf waves and wind from windy.
Mercator 0m salinity, jul20-aug20  https://tinyurl.com/y7op4a32

[iwantatr8]

As confirmation of something that we have been observing for a few years now, Nature has an article on arctic amplification and how the temperature differential reduction in summer is causing more set weather patterns.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05256-8

Open access for all.

Same again next year?

[RoxTheGeologist]

I am more concerned about plagiarism of our site by scientists. Naturally, people trolling earlier about sunspots (#2 on the Skeptical Science nonsense thermometer) is a total turn-off. However this event was noticed here 3 full weeks prior to the Guardian article and has undergone huge technical development on multiple high-visitation forums.

This is something I have worried about. I'm an ex-scientist and now make biofuels and I'm heavily involved in policy and regulation; My original thesis was on Isostasy and thermomechanical lithopshere behavior so I still identify as a geologist...

A-Team: I would have thought that the open exchange of cutting edge ideas, particularly some of the brilliant work that many posters do, is always going to be a source for scientists to develop knowledge. I don't think it's a bad thing, even if they don't at least say "Thank you" to the forum for helping seed ideas (or even extensively illustrate them). It's not people picking up the crumbs and threads to develop them that we should worry about, it's correcting misinformation. And, as for you, I would say that you are never going to be short of brilliant ideas for papers to publish. and that your illustration and illuminatingly generous work is invaluable both to us, and, apparently, to the wider scientific community.

And.. If you are one of the people scouring the forum for ideas to publish, please be gracious enough to thank us, if not cite the thread. Back on topic...?

[litesong]

The TSI, which has been substandard for 12+(more?) years.

I  think you put too much repeated emphasis on the TSI, especially as I don't think this 12-years claim is even true.
I suggest to back it up with some data and historical charts, in an appropriate thread (not here).

Yeah. The solar TSI has been substandard for 12+ years. & possibly longer:
http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/sorce/files/2011/09/TIM_TSI_Reconstruction-1.png
I'm very surprised you didn't know this data. AGW advocates & deniers both have emphasized this fact..... tho deniers don't mention it much lately, since Earth temperatures have still been rising during the "substandard TSI levels".

[magnamentis]

Is it strange that Northern greenland has water above it?

I always thought this was pure frozen ice with little chance of melt

it did not melt, it was driven away by winds and currents mostly due to the fact that due lack of thick stable ice-cover all around it as well provided much less resistance, at least IMO that explains the amount of open water in relation to wind speeds and periods.

beside that, it was documented already that disconnected ice from north greenlands coasts is not a first, not even a rare exception. what is a bit special is that it happened twice this year and the size of open water area. reasons are most probably several while one that IMO is responsible for the out of the norm  area of open waters i explained above.

[Jim Hunt]

"Snow White" did actually get "her" article out there before the Grauniad:

http://GreatWhiteCon.info/2018/08/could-northabout-circumnavigate-greenland-in-2018/

as of course did Neven. One suspects Jonathan has never heard of Polarstern, let alone Northabout?

If she put her mind to it could Northabout circumnavigate Greenland in 2018?

Here's another thought to ponder as well. I don't suppose it's in the Alfred Wegener Institute's PS115 mission plan, but do you suppose Polarstern could circumnavigate Greenland at the moment?

This from Lars Kaleschke via Twitter:

[jdallen]

The first animation, an overlay of OSI-SAF ice motion vectors on UH AMSR2 sea ice concentration, shows that this is not a lift-off event (overall icepack rotation or bulk movement) relative to north Greenland and the CAA coastline.

Amazing. Thanks as always A-Team! Lift-off would be fairly "normal" if unusual. But what's happening now seems to be way out of order.

Exactly my thought as well binntho.  That it is. Not a liftoff event really does make it more alarming, and calls into question assumptions we have made thinking a bastion of ice against the CAA  and NW Greenland  would help give some sustaining power to the pack.The 88

[oren]

I agree with the alarm re north of Greenland. I think this year we "discovered" that the thickest ice in the arctic is literally just around the corner from a vast encroaching ocean. And that rounding that corner can be a matter of small shift in currents, or eddies, or whatever.

[uniquorn]

Worldview, north Greenland, brightness temperature, band15, day and night, aug17-20.
light blue ~-2C
yellow ~0C

Are we seeing low salinity ice melting in high salinity water?
at risk of Hyperion turning in his virtual grave
edit: added url   https://tinyurl.com/y9pezsev

[Pavel]

What I've found unusual this year is the totally ice-free ocean along the Taimyr Peninsula. And it still have time to warm up the surface waters and permafrost melt what is very unusual for this the coldest Siberian peninsula

[litesong]

I call it fear mongering.......Showing a giant iceberg looming over a small town invokes fear....

Here's the graph for the 2018 Arctic sea ice Volume decrease to 44% of the 1979 level:
http://iwantsomeproof.com/extimg/siv_monthly_average_percentage_of_79_polar.png

Average Arctic sea ice VOLUME for August 1, for the period 1980-89, was ~18,000 cubic kilometers. Present August 1, 2018 sea ice VOLUME is ~7700 cubic kilometers, ~10,300 cubic kilometers less than the 1980-89 period for August 1. Not to get ya all afeared, ya know, but that's the equivalent of an ice cube, ~ 13.5miles wide by 13.5miles long by 71,0000 feet high. The energy needed to melt such an ice cube is ~ 32 times the annual energy consumption of the U.S.  But, I knows ya belieft in macho sigh-ants, so's ya ain't no fraidy cat.   

[JR-ice]

To A Team and all the other posters who give so generously of your knowledge and expertise:  I am a non-scientist who truly appreciates this forum.  For what it's worth, this is a great resource for people who want to learn even though we've never published a paper and never will.  I am sorry that those who would plagiarize and steal are discouraging free discussion.  Thank you, A Team.  Thank you, Neven.  Thank you to all of you.  Jessica

[gerontocrat]

Is it strange that Northern greenland has water above it?

I always thought this was pure frozen ice with little chance of melt

it did not melt, it was driven away by winds and currents mostly due to the fact that due lack of thick stable ice-cover all around it as well provided much less resistance, at least IMO that explains the amount of open water in relation to wind speeds and periods.

Does this quote from A-team suggest that there is melt - not just movement?

The first animation, an overlay of OSI-SAF ice motion vectors on UH AMSR2 sea ice concentration, shows that this is not a lift-off event (overall icepack rotation or bulk movement) relative to north Greenland and the CAA coastline.

[slow wing]

U. Bremen's false colour ice concentration maps show a week's action in the Arctic basin, ending on the map just released, 2018-08-21...

[FishOutofWater]

Oh, no one there at the Guardian knows the difference between an iceberg and a floe. A sub-editor just picked some vaguely related click-bait off a Getty stock photo collection. Be grateful there wasn't a scantily clad Inuit carving up narwhale blubber. It is the same with newspaper headlines. Total disconnect with the reporter. Just about every article, every newspaper.

I am more concerned about plagiarism of our site by scientists. Naturally, people trolling earlier about sunspots (#2 on the Skeptical Science nonsense thermometer) is a total turn-off. However this event was noticed here 3 full weeks prior to the Guardian article and has undergone huge technical development on multiple high-visitation forums.

The hit counts here indicate multi-100,000 views of postings and graphics on the article's subject. Please don't tell me that those don't include a whole lot of mainstream Arctic researchers. They come here because it's a huge time saver over daily trawling of satellite resources. Two clicks in the left column, set an alert as many have done, and you can skip over the sunspots and speculation right to coverage of the event.

Plagiarism is failure to cite or credit. Just because it is open source doesn't mean there's no obligation to link. What they are doing is reading the blog, taking the better ideas, and then re-doing the graphics and research text, often ineptly. That's not original research, it's theft. They don't want to credit the site because of loonies here, because it's just the internet, because people mostly post anonymously, because not everyone here is a card-carrying academic scientist.

However I am, the 6,700 cites to my peer-reviewed papers are more than all the scientists quoted in the Guardian article put together. This is plagiarism as it is understood in the scientific world and I am getting real fed up with it.

I got back from vacation with my family last night and this morning discovered the story covered on dailykos by a well intentioned non-scientist. Then I took a quick look at the Guardian article. My scientific career was not as outstanding as A-Team's nor is my contribution to this blog, but I was disturbed about the lack of credit to our group effort at synthesizing the massive amount of data on what's happening to the sea ice.
 
My personal experience with poor scientific ethics by other scientists goes back to my dissertation research. I had a grant from the USGS to do an earthquake research study by a never-used-before methodology. About a year into my research I found out that a USGS researcher was using the same new technique in a way that was unlikely (in my opinion) to produce useful results. His research failed badly and hurt everyone who was working in related areas, especially me. Forty some years later research gate is telling me that people are citing my work which got positive results on an extremely difficult problem that continues to be investigated.

I was badly burned by poor scientific ethics and the anti-environmental science attitudes of the Reagan administration. I went into developing research programs; managing, overseeing and directing nuclear waste safety research for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. All of NRC's waste safety research was eliminated in 1994 when Newt Gingrich & his wrecking crew took over Congress. Not long after that my wife finished her Ob/Gyn residency and we moved to Kauai where I greatly improved my body surfing skills and helped propagate endangered endemic plants.

I still love science and try to contribute what I can but the politics of earth and environmental science in the USA has been brutal and unethical in my personal experience. This latest unethical event is consistent with my experience. A-Team has made spectacular visualizations and done expert analysis and deserves credit for his work. Of course, I feel that, I too, deserve credit for my contributions, but I am not surprised when I don't get it.



As to the TSI: If the tiny decline in TSI were significant sea ice volume and extent would have been increasing for the past twenty years. That is not the case.

[oren]

U. Bremen's false colour ice concentration maps show a week's action in the Arctic basin, ending on the map just released, 2018-08-21...

The Beaufort seems to be on the verge of disappearing. A quick look on Worldview shows what appear to be some more resistant floes in the middle of the decaying rubble.

[NeilT]

As to the TSI: If the tiny decline in TSI were significant sea ice volume and extent would have been increasing for the past twenty years. That is not the case.

FOW, I did post the link to the RealClimate article which addressed this.  Even if the sun dropped into a Maunder Minimum, GHG emissions would overcome it in a few decades.

The emissions have already overwhelmed this signature.  All it does is retard the decline very slightly, if much at all.  The noise in the system is much higher than a small decline in TSI.

What interests me more is the impact of an increase of TSI, back to normal, at a time of growing GHG.

However TSI variations may be tiny but the impact is felt over the whole planet, for the whole year.  Much like GHG emissions. This is very different from a cloudy arctic summer.

[northsylvania]

To A Team and all the other posters who give so generously of your knowledge and expertise:  I am a non-scientist who truly appreciates this forum.  For what it's worth, this is a great resource for people who want to learn even though we've never published a paper and never will.  I am sorry that those who would plagiarize and steal are discouraging free discussion.  Thank you, A Team.  Thank you, Neven.  Thank you to all of you.  Jessica

Amen. I read Neven's blog after FishOutofWater repeatedly cited him on a political blog. When he went on hiatus, I came here because, as has been noted, most newspapers carry garbled accounts with no references or links to sources. I'm glad the story is getting out, but wish writers would get it straight and give credit where credit is due.
In the meantime, thank you from another non-scientist..

[Aluminium]

August 17-21.

[johnm33]

"The Beaufort seems to be on the verge of disappearing. A quick look on Worldview shows what appear to be some more resistant floes in the middle of the decaying rubble."
Nice image, my take is that all the lightweight rubble is being wind-blown into Amundsen, and the heavier/solid ice is being forced out into Beaufort by the Amundsen tidal bellows, we only see that ice, as 'resistant floes' where it accumulates as it's slowed by incoming Pacific water.
"August 17-21" surprising how much retreat there is in north Barents.

[mostly_lurking]

<snip, I don't have time to watch that video, I'll let others decide the merit. Right now, I'm more bothered by the off-topic TSI stuff. I've copied your comment to here; N.>

[oren]

August 17-21.

Here's another Worldview, a little animation of the rotten ice field roughly north of Wrangel Island at 75+N. The animation covers Aug 10th-14th-21st with high resolution. The ice seems almost stationary, melting in-situ. The ice concentration and floe recognizability have gone down significantly. I can't imagine much of this ice field surviving the next 4 weeks in this southerly location until the expected refreeze in the middle of September.
CLICK to animate and ZOOM.

[Jim Hunt]

Gavin "likes" "Snow White's" #ASIF marketing campaign on Twitter

https://twitter.com/GreatWhiteCon/status/1032178480438542338

[uniquorn]

Today's ecmwf wave and temps from windy.
Today would also appear to mark year long open water north of Svalbard.

amsr2-uhh, 20170729-20170908
Worldview, north of Svalbard 20170820-23 (click to animate)