It wouldn't be much of a rebound anyways when you consider how thin all of the ice is.
What good is 4 year old ice that's under a meter thick
It’s more resilient than FYI under a meter.
That difference is more academic than practical, at 1m.
Anyway, the notion that Western CAB ice is homogeneously under a meter thick is misleading.
I can imagine a field of mixed floes of different thickness, surviving tall ridges, ... the closer to CAA the thicker and older in average.
*Mostly* true, I'll agree, but I think you are overstating how much of that melange is actually MYI and of significant thickness.
The region between the NP and the Beaufort sea has suffered surface melting but has stayed relatively protected compared to the other side of the NP. It stayed substantially colder during July even when it was 24/7 under the sun.
Now this 1 millon km2 of extent has several years of being stretched, exported to Beaufort sea or the CAA channels until it completely melts. It is a region of slow turnover time compared to the Gyre or the ice on the transpolar drift. It is a buffer against abrupt apocalypse scenarios.
You are making an awful lot of assumptions there, in the face of evidence - like the melt out of thick, MYI north of Greenland this year - which don't support your rosy interpretation of the ice's survivability.
Other posters have pointed out that Transpolar drift is broken. The Gyre is broken. Pretty much every mechanism we are used to watching and basing assumptions on, is broken.
And then there is the raw question of how much what we see in models is diverging from what's actually visible where we have "feet on the ground".
The only buffer we have against "sudden apocalypse" scenarios is the weather. 1 million km2 of 1m thick MYI or the equivalent simply doesn't have the thermal inertia to stop an apocalypse if the weather isn't cooperative.
The net enthalpy in the system has exploded, between additional solar uptake, and the huge inputs implied by the salinity data we see around Atlantification, as well as less dramatic inputs through the Bering strait on the Pacific side.
At this point, it really all hinges on seasonal uptake and existing heat. Not extent. Not area. Not thickness.
We burned through ~15,000 km3 worth of ice this season already. The ice you are citing (1,000,000 km2 of more or less 1m thick MYI) would represent less than 7% of that.
Even if I'm generous, and assume say, an average of 3m thickness, (which is VERY generous), we are talking about less than 20% of what has been lost this season already (PIOMAS figures).
It's not a bastion. It's barely a cushion. At best, averaged out, it's about 4 weeks of melt. That's how thin a margin the Arctic pack's survival hinges on.
So back to my point... even if you are correct about quantity, at this stage in the evolution of the Arctic, it is weather, not ice volume which will determine any given year if we can avoid a BoE.
That's been true pretty much since 2012. Many of us have been holding our breath every year since 2012 in fear of a BoE. So far, we've lucked out. Increasingly, the deck is being stacked against us.
Some years ago, during one or another poll, I indicated that I thought there wouldn't be a BoE until sometime after 2029, and probably not before 2050. At this point, I'll be surprised if we make it to 2029 *without* a BoE. MYI won't help prevent it.
Weather will be the determinant of the pack's survival, not the existing ice.