Hey folks, sorry I've been away for a bit. Unfortunately, discussing the CAA ice here is necessarily low on my list of obligations. There's been some question about how the current ice regime will interact with the traditional "garlic press" process of the CAA. Short story: there's not much garlic left to press.
The way the garlic press is supposed to work, thick MYI at the southern boundary of the CAB gets forced into the steep channels of the CAA resulting in additional ridging and compaction. Over a number of years, that ice is eventually delivered south into melt-accessible areas. All of this works because the average prevailing wind pattern in the region forces that ice into the archipelago and then south (and, to some extent, southeast). This process is the primary reason why the ice in the CAA has traditionally behaved very differently from fast ice elsewhere (although the channel size and bathymetry of the archipelago would otherwise suggest that CAA ice is comparatively uninteresting fast ice).
This melting season did a lot of damage to these assumptions. Most of the season was spent with an atypical wind pattern that forced ice from the CAA/CAB boundary north against the CAB and west into the Beaufort. Thus, the Crack was born. Additionally, while this wasn't a record-setting year for CAA melt, it was pretty devastating nevertheless. Massey Sound was a killing field for ice. The Peary and Sverdrup Channels have some ice only by dint of latitude. In the Perry Channel, the surviving ice (primarily associated with the Viscount Melville Sound) has been forced by late storms to the southwest into areas that are frequent melt-out traps. The region that has been the temperature "cold core" of the archipelago in historical data wasn't actually very cold; ice in the PGAS is badly fragmented and exceptionally mobile, and even the sheltered ice in Wilkins Strait looks more than a little roughed up.
More importantly, what remains of the MYI -- the tiny, thin line of red on the age maps -- has been displaced north into the CAB, away from the CAA boundary. The Crack has filled as the wind patterns return to their expected directions, but the ice that filled the Crack is not that MYI stopgap, but an assemblage of broken bits transported in from elsewhere, including no small part of relatively young ice from the Lincoln Sea area. This is not robust garlic for the press. It's reasonable -- one hopes -- to assume that wind flow will indeed push ice south into the CAA. But this ice has demonstrated considerable structural weakness. So I expect floe disintegration rather than ridging as the disparate floes are forced together. Winter's cold will mitigate some of this, and the whole mess will freeze into a matrix of FYI (effectively fast) ice.
The overall trend for the Arctic is, of course, hotter with more melt. But as we've seen this year and the past couple, that melt is not always distributed in the same pattern year over year. If we get a year or two where the melt focus turns away from the CAA, and we don't see Crack 2 in 2020, the garlic press will likely crank back up for awhile anyway. Otherwise, within a couple of years, we may very well see what happens when the CAA explores a new modality (as we're already seeing with Bering/Chucki mechanics).
