are these photos for real? how thick is the ice at the North Pole?
Yes, so far all the photos posted show the immediate area of the North Pole, not the usual Greenland icebergs or Antarctic penguins. It's astonishing to see it all extending out to the horizon, who knew?. The pole areas out to ~200 km are very difficult to observe because most satellites need to be in near-polar orbit and require fairly narrow swaths to have any resolution (or work in the visible and can't see through the clouds).
Mosaic does have some bad photo practices such as wiping Exif data including GIS, using unstated 'shipboard time' instead of UTC, showing date blogged instead of the photo timestamp, and not flattening the key data irreversibly onto the photo jpg file where it cannot be lost, forged or removed except by cropping. (Even the cheapest flip-phone will do all this.)
The first and fourth photos below from the press release shows freeboard and submerged ice a little more clearly; the ratio should be 1:9, but how do we calibrate an absolute scale? Note melt ponds are easily distinguished from 'leads' which are a mixture of leads and icebreaker paths. I don't see a floe suitable for six weeks of mooring but they have been looking around at the pole for 9 hours so far.
We've also located incoming data for the three new snow buoys re-launched at 89º in #993. I'll defer to Uniquorn on proper reading of buoy data for S93 but the green seems to be thickness and as marked by a little box on the y-axis, seems to be at 0.22 m below sea level. Live links to the data are provided above.
Mosaic is stating repeatedly that the NP is in the center of the TPD. This is
false. The pole has rarely been included over the last ten years in the TransPolar Drift, better named the CircumPolar Drift as it primarily sweeps around from the Laptev to Frame about halfway to the SZ FJL SV line. This year though, the drift took in an extraordinary swath of Arctic Ocean including areas even beyond the pole. It's all been documented repeatedly on enhanced Ascat time series -- it's futile to argue with unambiguous satellite data but
people still do.
The other take-away from these shocking pole photos: these melt ponds may be deepening and even draining but they are not new. Suppose half of the surface area shown has been ponded or open water since mid-July, the whole way up from Greenland. This means the albedo has been very low compared to snow on ice during the high insolation levels. In turn this means fractional BOE is
already upon us in terms of not reflecting excess solar energy back to space regardless of how the next two months play out.
Melt ponds + leads take up 51% of the pixels in the photo after excision of the Polarstern; there is slant bias favoring the foreground but an overhead ratio may well be similar.
PI Markus Rex: “Up until 87.5ºN, for the most part we passed through open water, in some cases stretching to the horizon. Based on the satellite imagery, we weren’t sure whether the loose ice cover was due to wind and currents, and were concerned a change in weather conditions could compact it again. Once in the region, however, they found that much of the sea ice truly had melted away, and hadn’t simply been broken up by the wind.
Captain Wunderlich: “I’m very surprised to see how soft and easy to traverse the ice up to 88° North is this year, having thawed to the point of being thin and porous. Even after passing 88° North we mostly maintained a speed of 5-7 knots; I’ve never seen that so far north...Normally it’s home to thicker and older ice and virtually impassable. But now we’re finding extended stretches of open water reaching nearly to the Pole.
Moving on from the Pole, the Polarstern may follow the Transpolar Drift a bit further (i.e. towards Siberia) until she reaches ~87° North. “Depending on the ice conditions, however, we’ll also start looking for a suitable floe in the vicinity of the North Pole.
Rex was quoted in a single news story as saying this -- all the other newspapers
cropped it out:
“It's frightening to see how thin the sea ice is and how quickly it is melting. Something needs to be done urgently. The Arctic cannot wait long."
https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2020-08-19-little-sea-ice--"polarstern"-reaches-the-north-pole-faster-than-expected.Bkfeon39Gw.html