"Arctic sea-ice on its last legs"

Disussing the disappearing 

Arctic Ice

Seemorerocks

As we move towards a September ice minimum that could happen any time in the next 10 days - 3 weeks I am already thinking how this will be presented in the mass media.

Certainly no one will be wanting the true state of affairs to be told and I suspect that information will be massaged in such a way to hide the truth.

With 2016 coming in second after 2012 in terms of low ice they can hardly present this year as a recovery of the polar ice, but they can present things to make things seem much better than they really are.

They have to continue the fiction that despite things getting rapidly worse that nothing is going to happen until the end of the century.

So this is the situation when oit comes to polar sea ice extent.

But it  was the following (posted by Sam Carana) which shows the evolution of Arctic sea ice from 2012 (which set the record for sea ice minumum) through 2016.

Although there was less ice than what is predicted this year look very carefully at the ice thickness.

Look at how ice at the Pole in 2012 was about 2.5 meters thick. The area of really thin ice (0.5-1 meter) has grown from a small area north of Siberia to a large area that almost reaches the North Pole

Here is a more detailed map of the same area that I found.

Over the same period thick ice, and multi-year has contracted to a very small area north of Greenland (look in particular at the red area).

This year, according to Paul Beckwith, the thick areas of ice are entering inlets in the north of Canada and then melting while other large areasare exiting through the Fram Strait.

Now have a look at the situation as it is now. The only areas left of reasonably thick ice is now restricted to north of Canada and Greenland (while all but a very small area of multi – year ice is left

As a final thought if we look at the huge temperature anomalies in the waters surrounding the Arctic it doesn’t look to me as if we are going to be in for am early freeze

I will leave the final word to Paul Beckwith