Latest Sentinel image. I have never seen the Lincoln look like this:
AH, how long have you been looking? (Longer than 3 years?)
Maybe I'm jaded, but I presume I've seen the Lincoln Sea 'totally' chopped up like this. Maybe only much later in the melting season (as someone suggested), which would be bad enough (for the health of an icy Arctic) then.
AH and Tor,
This year is quite unusual and far ahead of others. In 20 years of watching the ice conditions, this is both horrible and not unexpected. I have been watching the ice closely ever since the Terra and Aqua satellites first came on line, and sporadically before that with the earlier imagery. In those first years of this new age, your had to go to the NASA website for Terra and Aqua and wander through the individual photo images in various sizes and resolutions and bands. It is so much easier now to just look at the mosaic on EOSDIS, pick your layers, run little moves, scan around, rotate and ...
I remember so clearly watching in horror when the multiyear ice failed north of Ellesmere for the first time in recorded history and drained an ephemeral lake that contained a unique ecosystem that was estimated to be over 3,000 years old.
Now it is routine to see the ice break up in the Lincoln sea, though nothing like what we are seeing this year.
More startling is the extreme shattering of the formerly multiyear ice to the west of the Lincoln sea along the north coast of Ellesmere. The long wide rip in the ice all the way to the other end of the northwest passage has happened before (in recent years). But I do not recall the ice ever shattering along the arctic side of that open lede like it is this year.
It has been happening since before 2000, and was especially severe in 2004, 2005, and 2008, then in the past few years. Still, the breakup this year is unprecedented, just as the breakup of the Lincoln Sea is.
There is simply no integrity at all left to what used to be land fast multiyear ice. The only exceptions might be in some of the channels between the islands that make up Ellesmere.
New this year is the connection between the shattered ice moving north of Greenland and exiting into the Atlantic with the shattered ice in the Lincoln Sea exiting to the south.
I would not be surprised at all this year or in the next few to see a complete breakup of the former multi-year ice all the way from the Atlantic to the Beaufort Sea and a hundred miles off shore of Ellesmere, with shattered ice being chewed up and spit out into the Atlantic, out through the Lincoln Sea and into the Beaufort simultaneously. We already see that happening in segments. And the Lincoln Sea breakup is now fully connect to the breakup north of Greenland. The rip along Ellesmere has nearly completed the free flowing connection of shattered ice moving to the Beaufort.
It used to be that the currents in the Lincoln Sea oscillated strongly across the "ice bridge" between flowing into and out of the arctic through the Lincoln Sea. Now it seems to be almost uniformly out of the Lincoln Sea to the south, with the ice being thin enough to be shattered on contact with the basalt.
As the old ice is rapidly lost, the average thickness of the ice is falling quickly, and the end of the ice rapidly approaches.
Sam