As promised in my previous post on the situation in the Bering Strait and Sea, here's an updated comparison with previous years around this date (images from the Uni Bremen archive):
2011 seems to be ahead of 2004 and 2005, if only slightly (mainly because there's less ice in the Gulf of Anadyr). This year still ressembles 2007 most. But the melting is almost done in the Bering Sea, so from now on we'll concentrate more on the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas:
Towards the end of last melting season we had a lot of fun speculating about large patches of ice getting separated from the main pack. Well, at least I did. So much so that I wrote an article about it, called Breaking away from the pack. Much of the ice seemed to be very thin at the time and there was so much divergence that a bit of consistent freak weather ought to have been enough to blow away a patch. It didn't come about in the end, but was educative nonetheless.
I was reminded of this as we witnessed two things in the past few weeks. The first was that the ice south of the narrow Bering Strait seemed to get cut off from the ice in the Chukchi Sea. The other was a huge polynya forming north of Franz Josef Land (a group of islands more or less halfway between Svalbard and Severnaya Zemlya) that seems to extend towards Svalbard, cutting off all the ice south of it. A very important factor in this is the upwelling of warm water from the West Spitsbergen Current.
The large patches of blue water can easily be discerned through the clouds on yesterday's MODIS satellite image:
To prevent my becoming a prisoner of premature spouting of speculations I decided to have a look at previous years, using the University of Bremen's excellent archive of sea ice concentration maps. Let's see how peculiar these dark blue holes really are:
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