Holy shit, just look at the Lena River Delta...The entire region looks like that and I've just never seen it before. The Hudson Bay was also completely clear today and certainly has less ice than 2019 and 2018.
When I see so many large areas like this, I feel like it's just all going to flash out over a very short time period, but who knows.
Thumb-nail calculations I did once upon a time suggested that daily insolation this time of the year provided sufficient energy to melt about 10CM of ice a day.
Now, that's idealized, and in practical terms, the albedo is going to toss about half of that back out of the atmosphere. Of what's left, a bit over half will end up getting into the water or otherwise warming the environment.
That should still translate into ~2cm/day of top melt (YMMV). Not enough for a flash melt, but far and away enough to cause melt pond coverage to explode.
Even on cloudy days, the indirect insolation can still cause ice with melt ponds to lose a cm/day, so the outcome starts to to look more like an exercise in arithmetic than anything else. We have about 90 days +/- left in the melt season. Insolation will be doing the heavy lifting for about the next 50 or so after which the prime mover in melt becomes bottom melt. When that starts, the race will be on to see how long that continues before the energy balance shifts sufficiently that ice gets preserved (e.g. heat at the ocean surface leaves the system fast enough that it can't go into melting the ice).
During those 50 days or so, just top melt by itself could strip off all ice currently at 1m thickness or less, which is a LOT of area. And again, I haven't addressed bottom melt.
I'll be watching for melt ponds. If this sets up the way I think it might, it could mean my September predictions may have been far too high.