No Ice Around Svalbard, West Of Novaya Zemlya, In S. Kara, White Seas - In Mid-December
Norwegian Ice Service, run by the Meteorological Institute, has several times the last week tweeted sad news in their daily updates: “This is the lowest area for this day of the year in our records dating back to 1967.”
On December 6, the Ice Service could tell that the ice chart showed a cover of 163,280 sq km. That is 185,305 sq. km. below the 1981-2010 average for the Arctic. The service provides ice-charts covering waters from Greenland in the west to the northern Kara Sea in the east.
There are no sea ice at all around Svalbard archipelago. Also, the entire west coast of Russia’s Novaya Zemlya is ice free. So is the southern part of the Kara Sea and the White Sea. Some close drift ice are found in the northern bays of the eastern Barents Sea and to a larger extent south and east of Frans Josef Land.
Not strange the ice comes later this winter: The Arctic is heating up more than twice the rest of the globe and the northern Barents Sea is becoming much warmer. Also, the thinner ice from last winter, the more melts in summer, resulting in later freeze the following winter. The Arctic ecosystem is in deep warm trouble.
EDIT
https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/arctic/2018/12/arctic-trouble-sea-ice-bottoms-carbon-emissions-peak
= new reply since forum marked as read
Response to hatrack (Original post)
