They have launched a new web site so we have a new address for the map on current sea ice. Be sure to check the second map to compare present levels with the twenty year average.
http://www.socc.ca/cms/en/socc/seaIce/currentSeaIce.aspx
They also have a useful list of related links including the following:
http://www.polardata.ca/login.ccin
Anyway the retreat has begun and it looks like we will get a reduction similar to last year. What is more troubling, are reports from the ice observing a lack of multiyear ice. We do not know if that is observational luck of the winds putting the wrong ice in the right place or if the losses of the past two years are way more general than anticipated. A satellite map will not help there until late summer when an accelerating collapse cannot be ignored.
It is plausible that the chronic ice loss of the past decade has not ended at all and is continuing unabated. 2007 was dramatic because wind systems revealed just how much had already been lost. We are now discovering that multi year ice appears to be largely gone.
We still have a couple of years of sea ice reduction to go through, but a clear sea by 2012 continues to look plausible. A few have actually accepted the possibility and have said as much to avoid been made fools of by Mother Nature.
We may start getting some serious surprises in large stretches of open sea already this fall.
For those unfamiliar with earlier posts by myself on this subject, it is apparent that the arctic has been subject to an incremental warming action for at least thirty years that is much the same year after year. We have now entered the collapse phase that should possibly see all the ice removed as early as 2012. This is obviously a nonlinear behavior.
The cause may be an unobserved current change or a consistent unobserved atmospheric shift. It appears to be uniform which supports a current shift.
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