It looks like the southern part of the CAA will melt out, and the state of the Eurasian side of the ice + forecast suggests significant losses on the way.
How much of the northern CAA will hold out?
The CAA is not going ice-free this season. At the very least Ballantyne Strait and Wilkins Strait were pretty much solid ice the last time they had clear skies. Physics prevents that ice from going away entirely.
However, what's going on in the north CAA is still plenty concerning. Clouds have hidden a great deal of the action there, because clouds are jerks. However, we can see that the ice in Hassel Sound has a pale blue cast which is never a good omen for days ahead.
We also know that the PGAS shattered into a number of very large floes. In a good year for the ice, those would stay mostly confined to the PGAS and would refreeze into the matrix this winter. In a bad year for ice that followed historical hydrodynamics for the region, some number of those floes would be flushed south through the Maclean Strait on their way into the Parry Channel to die the following year. Some of that is probably happening now, but, again, clouds. However, we can tell that there's a second export pathway. A very large floe (~50km) formed from the pack ice off the northern peninsula of Ellef Ringnes, sometime around July 31. It's easily visible, offset by blue open water, on Worldview on August 8. Following an interaction (likely wind-driven) with another large floe, it broke in two on or about August 11, but the "core" of the floe remained intact and is still visible through the clouds on August 14.
Historically, ice movement in the PGAS was largely controlled by a clockwise current, running north to south along the west coast of Ellef Ringnes; it is this current that slowly exported PGAS ice to the southern CAA as part of the "garlic press". However, the floe I described has been moving steadily north and northwest against the local current expectations. Early in this period, the Crack was still the dominant feature in the region. The Crack was the result of steady wind pressure from the south. That has abated somewhat, especially over the Sverdrup Islands region, and so the Crack has "closed"...
but that floe in the northern PGAS is still following the course set by the Crack hydrodynamics -- up and out of the CAA en route to the Beaufort. That suggests that it's not
just wind driving this new export scheme.
That floe will probably survive the year; it's pretty big and not moving very fast. I'm don't think there's time to get it to the Beaufort, or heat enough to melt it there. We'll see. But the problem is the northern CAA is under stress from both sides. Melt and southern export are intended to be replaced by ice from the northern CAA that ultimately originated in the CAB. That's the whole
point of the garlic press metaphor. But that supply chain is broken, first by the Crack itself and now by continued northbound export. A lot of places that should have their ice replenished externally are going to have only
in situ freezing over this winter, which means even if next year's melt isn't as nasty, the soup will be on.