Hi SB, The region north of Alaska is like a tipping point or a point where the cork is out of the bottle when the ice is gone just to the east of Barrow.

Here is a fairly decent site for research on sea ice and the Bering Strait: http://psc.apl.washington.edu/HLD/Bstrait/bstrait.html

Chris, this is basically a "chicken or the egg" question. There being first-year ice over such a large expanse means the sea ice pack cannot hold out against a multitude of factors. The sea ice north of Alaska has been running out the Bering off and on since December. Any sort of clockwise movement is going to result in fracturing, and today it is fracturing over the remaining thin multi-year ice: see http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/data/satellite/hrpt_dfo_ir_100.jpg

A Team's wonderful animation of 3/9 03:03 shows that first the sea ice flowed out of the Bering Strait to the Pacific. Once enough was gone from the region north of Alaska, the remaining ice could no longer buttress the main pack and the collapse ensued.

Concerning what has more influence on the sea ice breaking up, it seems that the ice is now so thin that tides, winds, currents, etc., will all have large effects. Recall that the 2011 tsunami was able to crack off immensely-thick, floating ice tongues at Antarctica. Vast expanses of the Arctic sea ice were displaying concentric waves in their structure -- I'll try to post up some examples. Note also that there was the type of breakup along northern Alaska that reached to the end of the eastern Beaufort (usually seen in March), back in mid December! Recall also that the water under the sea ice is warmer than ever before, and that the eastern portion of the Northwest Passage has not frozen up properly even now. About the only place where the ice has seen real growth in thickness is north of Greenland. But even though temperatures have seen -50 F, this ice can work as insulation while the warmer sea water beneath continues to eat away at the multi-year ice (the bits that are left).

@ Neil T, re Gavin's remark on CMIP5 models. According to the papers on CMIP5 models that came out last year, CMIP5 models were only very marginally better than CMIP3 models wrt to sea ice projections. That is to say, they were no good.

Neven, your mentioning of Johan Cruijff brought back so many memories of watching Ruud Gullit and him play in Holland, which reminded me of the great time I had watching Hilbert van der Duim speed skate and the unforgettable vogelpoep incident (I got his autography at the Rij), among others. Watching him skate was akin to watching the Cardiac Cardinals play when Jim Hart was the quarterback and the receiver was Terry Metcalf who used to juggle the ball on his fingertips and you never knew if he was finally going to latch onto it. People were known to smash their televisions to pieces after watching those games. Jim Hart's alma mater was SIU (mine too), and he came back to coach. OK, that is my OT for the day! Great memories!

@Arcticio Gasp!

Here is the link: http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/data/satellite/hrpt_dfo_ir_100.jpg I download these photos every few hours, but miss the ones when I finally have to sleep. [Note to self: Must get out of Mom's basement.] Since the middle of December, the ice has been breaking up much as it did last year in March. The breaking up in March was a couple of months early. Back in 2006, this did not happen because so much of the ice was still multi-year ice.

Looks like Aaron has pretty much laid out the long and the short of it.

Boy, this thread sure got hijacked from the subject of corrupt officials in the U.S. government (lackeys for Shell Oil) subjecting a scientist to a witch hunt so they could drill in the Arctic, a venture that turned into a fiasco.

It is as if the poles belch out water vapor every winter: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/GlobalMaps/view.php?d1=MYDAL2_M_SKY_WV

Confirmation of current ongoing SSW here: http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/gif_files/time_pres_TEMP_ANOM_JFM_NH_2013.gif

Main SSW event still ongoing and you can see it here, but I'd imagine by tomorrow it will be over: http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/data/satellite/hrpt_dfo_ir_100.jpg

Looks like a stronger SSW one may be taking place now, more like the one last year: http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/data/satellite/hrpt_dfo_ir_100.jpg You can sort of "see" them in these satellite photos.

These Sudden Stratospheric Warming events occur every year at about this time in the Northern Hemisphere like a sort of Earth burp. In the Southern Hemisphere at the South Pole, they occur in July. It would be interesting to see a comparison of these annual events over time.

The moniker "warmist" just doesn't do it for me -- not after this summer and all the days in the 90s and 100s. The future is going to be very hot, not warm. I prefer "climate realist."

Hi Neven, Well, ice watching in the winter used to be a bit of a snooze fest, but not anymore. I think we'll all have to get it out of our heads that there will be a last stand of ice hanging around Ellesmere and north of Greenland. Ice arches are gone. Shelves around Ellesmere virtually all gone, and check this out: http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/hycomARC/navo/arcticictn/nowcast/ictn2012092118_2012092200_035_arcticictn.001.gif

Terry, thank you so much for the links. I had been looking at Envisat images for years, but it's gone offline. I would love to be able to look at the RADARSAT-2 images. Does anyone know of a link to publicly available images?

I'm going to have to take big step back here. The water around Axel Heiberg Island was also open in 2008, and the ice shelves on Ellesberg were mostly gone. This begs the question, why is it common currency that remnants of multi-year ice will still be found there in the coming years? The ice shelves are no longer there to put a drag on ice moving toward the Fram Strait. The ice now is much thinner and in smaller pieces and is moving much faster. I don't see any haven for multi-year ice. The ice arches north of Greenland are gone. They were not completely gone in 2008. So where is multi-year ice going to hang out?

Wayne, thank you! I had forgotten about the regional satellite photos. I have a post up on this now: http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2012/09/last-refuge-for-multi-year-arctic-sea.html Be sure to hit the page down key several times to get past the list of posts (I just have a very simple blog). More to come on this.

Neven, That greenish water in the MODIS images in some kind of bloom, and it is gobsmacking enormous!

@Protege Cuajimalpa Mauri Pelto's blog, From A Glacier's Perspective, has the best information on the Petermann Glacier: http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/2010/03/27/petermann-glacier/

Some pretty exciting stuff still going on around the Nares Strait -- one of the points of the Petermann tongue has broken off, no sign of any freezing up off Ellesmere or Axel Heiberg. http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/imagery/single.cgi?image=crefl1_143.A2012262195000-2012262195500.250m.jpg

Where is Argus Panoptes? Neven told me you could help with insights on the sea ice or lack thereof off the coast of Axel Heiberg Island.