It appears that the "event" is continuing. The winter season is becoming as important as the summer. It's never really been about the ice and shipping; it's about the planetary heat budget, extra moisture in the amplified Arctic atmosphere, and knock-on weather effects at mid-latitudes. Those have already begun.
The Chukchi, five months ago on 27 June 16, was 78% as open as today (bottom animation), ie it is "seasonally open" now, never mind the 2040 or 2100 nonsense.
Trend lines -- and their first or second order extensions -- may merely be providing a lid (upper bound) from here on out. Meanwhile scientific publications by necessity lag events by 18-24 months. So our niche of following real time developments is probably the best way of keeping up.
The Chukchi, as defined by the 150 m shelf break in Serreze Oct 2016 (which goes unread here, doi:10.1002/2016JC011977), has been losing open water at just below 3% per day so (if this pace keeps up) would close in 36 days from Nov 20th, so barely by year end.
The most instructive comparison to earlier years is probably ice extent in the Bering Sea, south of the Strait, below. Given the devastating tufted puffin die-off this fall, that sea may remain anomalously warm. Green indicates shows AMSR2 ice of 100% concentration. Note SMOS and AMSR2 (and other sources) give identical open water boundaries within limitations of resolution.
A quick way of gauging map resolution (~ nominal data resolution) is simply to look at the number of pixels allocated to the Little Diomede area. For example, 2 pixels in SMOS are all that is available for the entire 85 km wide Bering Strait. NOAA bathymetry has 318. AMSR2 has 42.5 and 2 for LD itself.
Variability, trends, and predictability of seasonal sea ice retreat and advance in the Chukchi Sea
MC Serreze, AD Crawford, JC Stroeve, AP Barrett, RA. Woodgate
"... In situ results highlight the seasonal evolution of a >5 m thick MYI floe from late winter to summer when it eventually melted out along with the rest of the Beaufort ice pack by 22 August 2012. During 2012, we observed rapid bottom melt which peaked at 7.1 cm/d during late July and averaged 4.8 cm/d during the observed melting period (7 June and 31 July 2012).
Our work shows that solar absorption provided less than 78% of the energy required to satisfy our in situ point observations of bottom melt, indicating other sources of heat including solar transmission, oceanic upwelling or riverine inputs must have contributed heat to bottom melt. Evidence for other heat sources is also provided by the fact that bottom melt began 2 days prior to the local reduction in sea ice concentration."