......but after this year I think almost all of the multiyear ice will be gone.
just a thought/question:
if all the MYI is gone and if we agree that certainly all the First-Year-Ice will be gone (<95%) that would mean we would end up with zero ice if i'm not totally mistaken, hence i don't think that all the MYI will go for good but that the little that will remain will be 95% MYI and all the rest gone for good.
BTW i slowly get a feeling that we could be in for very nasty surprise in about 40-50 days from now, shadowing the worst expectations based on the past 2-3 years when we dodged it.
it has been said and remains, weather is key, but it will come the day when we shall be watching in awe at nothing (no ice) despite relatively cold weather at the end of august/early september, simply because the ever thinner ice will soon simply melt away just because it started 1m thinner than 5-10 years ago.
I agree. What we end up with and where, is almost all due to winds and currents, rather than old thick ice. It looks like the reason that the ice even gets old, is because it was piled up, allowing it to survive the next summer.
At least, that is how it is now. I think in the past some ice survived through the summer to increase thickness the next winter, but after this year I think almost all of the multiyear ice will be gone.
Also, the final pattern that we end up with doesn't have that much to do with melt patterns per se, but winds. For example, if you look at 2012 around the end of June, the area between the pole and Greenland was looking pretty ragged, and yet that's exactly where the thickest ice ended up at the minimum.
If you look at all the minimums, the thickest ice ends up on the Canadian/Greenland side, usually in the notch at Nares Strait, or if not there, further west along the CAA.