Stronghold

I think we all remember what the conclusion was after the last freezing season (see 2011/2012 Winter analysis):
sea ice on the Atlantic/Siberian side of the Arctic looks vulnerable, sea ice on the Pacific/North American side should be thicker. So far there has been a very clear confirmation of the first half of this conclusion, in that the ice on the Atlantic side of the Arctic, along the Siberian coast, has retreated very fast, perhaps even faster than last year.
This comparison I made a couple of days back (for the Fringe Fries 2 blog post) shows it well. For a more recent comparison I refer you to the Concentration Maps page on the ASI Graphs website.

I now want to take a look at how the ice on the other side has been doing so far. The Pacific/North American side basically consists of three regions: the Canadian Archipelago, the Beaufort Sea and the Chukchi Sea. In last month's blog post concerning the Northwest Passage it became clear that the Canadian Archipelago was mostly filled with first-year ice, but because of a relatively cold freezing season the ice was probably a bit thicker. The ice in the Northwest Passage and the rest of the Archipelago has been holding up pretty well, better than in previous years (as confirmed by the MASIE extent graph), but due to high temperatures and quite a bit of insolation in the last couple of weeks, the NWP now seems to be breaking up from the inside out. As the fast ice in Nares Strait broke up 10 days ago and ice transport from the Arctic Basin is about to start, I don't think the ice in the NWP is going to hold out much longer.

Because the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas are neighbours, I have made this comparison of University of Bremen sea ice concentration maps on July 7th in the 2004-2012 period, showing both regions (click for a larger version):