I see a lot of predictions reassuring us that 2019 will not hit first place, but the melting momentum is built in june and early july, as remarked earlier most of July 2012 was average and had cloudy bouts. All the indicators are in the red, and we can now see edge melting picking up speed, with a three fronts assault, widening and deepening of the laptev bite, quick retreat of the ess, continuous slow retreat and worsening of concentration in the chuchki. It also looks like the atlantic will activate in a couple of weeks with lower export, and the channels that possibly won t see sustained loss of extent ie beaufort and greenland are participating in the thinning of the pack with the export. When comparing with other years, that edge melting was the trademark of the later season but didn t use to be as widespread as early, because this season as seen early melting of several landfast seas, so we will probably have a new record of melting through that method. Concerning the other mechanism of melt in the later season, which is destruction by storm, i share the concern of many that fiven the ssts and awp, we might mechanically have a very stormy august, so even if it doesn t rival the gac, it will get close. This is enough to run a course parallel to 2012 and maybe (like 50/50) be first. My own prediction is that either we will see extreme compaction towards the atlantic islands, and a pack broken in two through the pole with an atlantic side and pacific side, or that we will see half the pack disappear, from the caa cab crack to the laptev bite, leaving only a very small pack close to a boe. The first scenario depends on a halting of the fram export and continuous meltponding (through rain) on the cab, whilst the other one require a gac like storm, but we will see what happens