Interesting Times in the Arctic
August 6, 2018Well, after what has been a boring melt season, maybe even Neven thinks so, the Northern Hemisphere heat wave appears to have created some interesting times (in the sense of the Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times) at the end.
It may in the long run be nothing, but the ice pack appears to have separated from Greenland and the passage between Ellesmere Island and Greenland, or at least some impressive melt pools have formed and the ice to the west of the separation is not healthy
EH2R has a nasty gif showing this from NASA Worldview, again, interesting in the catastrophic sense with a comparison from 2012 where it was smooth enough to skate on (well not really but not nearly so broken up)
Zack Labe has a really good tweet about this
Arctic sea ice is once again pulling away from the coast of far northern Greenland. You can easily see this reflected in the current drift circulation: https://t.co/BkhAkJipgm. Sea ice extent in the Greenland Sea has been at or near a record low for most of 2018. pic.twitter.com/zvOEyNpHut
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Zack Labe (@ZLabe) August 6, 2018
And last, but not least, there are, again, interesting things happening on the Pacific side. Neven has that story. Basically WTF?