Over the past 24 hours, the ice boundary in the Laptev Sea has moved northward by 30 km.
LOL go back 4-5 days and it has moved North like 100KM.
On top of that if you zoom far in on modis and scroll between the days you will see individual large floes that are embedded within the thin pancake pack ice.
These floes once the winds turned out of a southerly based flow immediately started to abruptly fall apart and vanish while moving 25-40km a day thanks to a stupidly warm low level wind and a blow torching open water Laptev.
ANYWAYS THE GIF ANIMATION BELOW I AM POSTING IN RESPONSE TO THE CROWD THAT THINKS THE BASIN ICE IS COMPACTED AND THAT WILL HELP PREVENT A WIDESPREAD COLLAPSE.
WELL the image is a gif of the ESS and Chuchki region.
One image is the 11th of July. The other the 16th.
1. Firstly I picked the 11th because BEFORE that DATE all the way back to June 25th that area is under a thick blanket of clouds and or fog.
I stopped at the 25th because that many days with clouds and fog theoretically would bring the assumption that the ice in the ESS region would have been shielded from major disintegration.
Well clearly that isn't the case. So on the 11th we can see the ice in that large region North of WRANGEL island has seen roughly 50% of its 2D extent vanish . Now there is a ton of open water.
Weill fast forward 5 days to the present and its very clear that at least another 15 percent of ice extent melted out. Obviously that region is all going to vanish.
Not very long ago it appeared solid but it wasn't.
Thanks to stable winds the ice hasn't been raked back n forth. Therefore it essentially melted in place within the ice around it as the entire ice pack has been moving in unison thanks to the steady ANTICYCLONIC FLOw.
The image below it is from today. Its looking at the far Northern Laptev, the central basin including the pole, the Atlantic edge, and the far Northwest ESS.
It has been slightly darkened with contrast beefed up to highlight regions where the ice appears darker than ice around it.
You may be wondering what is causing that.
Its not SOOT or DUST
it's not ALGAE or PHOTOPLANKTON
In this instance it's just ice that has drained and is very thin. Probably between 0.2 and 0.5M thick.
THIS THIN ICE STARTS TO APPEAR DARKER AND DARKER BECAUSE THE OCEAN BELOW IS STARTING TO VISIBLY APPEAR THROUGH THE ICE TO THE SAT SCANNER.
Thanks to the consistent winds and ice around the super thin ice that is still 0.5-1.25M(thicker the further South towards North Canada) the ice is steadily melting in place. Since winds have been long fetch relative motion...
BASICALLY THE ENTIRE PACK HAS BEEN MOBILE MOVING IN A CLOCKWISE DIRECTION.
This has eliminated almost all turbulence. So for now we are going to see these darkest areas start to melt out completely and large blotches of open water appear.
That happened in the ESS except it was behind the clouds.
The Atlantic /laptev side just saw the entire ice pack shrink IN A HUGE WAY towards the NA coast.
Since winds are steady blowing that way what's happening is the Ice edge on the Siberian side has pushed North while ice inside the pack has simultaneously melted out.
This is why the pack has shrunk without the appearance of large holes.
Looking at the current situation and the forecast. Its likely we are about to see some big time holes start to open up inside the pack thanks to the insane insitu melt the last 15-20 days.
God speed