For me that would be 16 years and a scale of 1.

it's taken a while but it has finally arrived. I expect things to pick up on that coast now.

2.5 Mkm^2 Range - .5 Mkm^2 + 1.0 Mkm^2 I've updated my outlook mainly because NSIDC has a history of showing virtually invisible ice as solid extent. It's looking like we may get a lot of feathered edges around a badly melting pack. This will show as extent. Area will be a very different story due to the fractured ice. Insolation doesn't switch off after the solstice. It continues and some of the heaviest melting can often be seen in July, when the top of the ice is being pounded by the sun and the temperature above the ice is rising constantly. From what I can see the pack is breaking up and melting over 60% of its area now and webcams are showing that every time the clouds go away, the near shore melt is very rapid and long lived. It should go over a cliff in July and August. The wildcard will be September storms. Whatever happens I don’t expect it to be dull.

"The ship only need 7 days to reach the station, which is 1,600 kilometres from Canada. 5 days earlier than planned" That would be due to the ease of getting through the ice pack perhaps??

The effect continues on the image for the 12th and becomes more widespread with more open water showing. Barrow is remaining over freezing overnight and is showing quite significant melt. Things are starting to kick off. All we need now is clear skies and we may see record daily, weekly and monthly loss rates.

Lars, Today's AMSR2 image was showing significant open water (or almost open water), north of Svalbard and past the pole on the Russian side. http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr2/arctic_AMSR2_visual.png It changes daily so I don't know what tomorrow will show. I note that Barrow is now nearly 9C today, up from -1c just a few days ago. And, yes, it looks like a blowtorch was turned on it. It's melting with a capital M http://seaice.alaska.edu/gi/observatories/barrow_webcam In fact it looks so bright right now (3pm Alaskan time showing), that the camera white balance is struggling...

Lars, I was looking here http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/imagery/subsets/?subset=Arctic_r03c04.2013162.terra And here http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/imagery/subsets/?subset=Arctic_r03c04.2013162.terra To be honest, that looks like open water but it's really hard to tell with all that cloud cover, but I'm not seeing any single piece of ice large enough to show these sizes of melt ponds. It looks like August down there to me....

Uni Bremen AMSR2 is showing significant open water in the CAB. I wonder if this really is or if it is only melt ponds.

Also I see that Barrow has risen to 36F even with heavy overcast cloud and all the ice in range of the camera is either beginning to, or has already suffered, significant melt.

Not only a big loss on CT,but large areas of melt showing on the Uni Bremen AMSR2 concentration page. Neven, perhaps this is a case for "looking for spring weirdness". It is clear from the research that there are long lasting spring storms over the cap. They may be bigger or more powerful now, but perhaps not more frequent. I feel that focusing on the "maybe" of increased storm frequency or even severity, creates a wattscrapwiththat opportunity to deny the evidence right in front of our eyes. What is certain is that the impact in the CAB from a storm of this kind is more severe and significantly greater and more widespread than has been recorded before. This is almost certainly due to the thin ice which is now heavily impacted by the storms (as has been said here many times by many people). Focusing on the impact is a good way to highlight the effect of thin ice in (within bounds), normal weather. It is glaringly obvious that the periphery is melting slowly and the centre is collapsing. This is NOT normal for Spring or early summer. Oh and BTW, with picasa you don't need to resize the image before uploading, just choose the 400x400 from the image size drop down before copying the link...

I've been looking at the Barrow webcam fairly regularly. Apart from one point in May, the temp has been consistently below 0 overnight, in the morning and late evening. However the ice is still melting, albeit more slowly with lots of melt ponds. When these clouds disperse, that ice and it's attendant volume, is going to vanish, as the Scots say, "like snow off a dyke"....

Better resolution http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr2/arctic_AMSR2_nic.png

Looking at last nights Uni Bremen AMSR2 chart, it would appear that there is either significant melt pooling or significant melt and breakup happening almost at the pole itself. Time will tell I guess but, as has been said already, the Arctic likes to surprise...

I usually look at the barrow webcam regularly in May as it is a indicator of how things are going. I noticed, earlier in the month, that it was down to 11F. Which is pretty cold compared to the last 5 years or so, so no surprise that the ice wasn't changing. Then it jumped to over 32F for a few days and melt pools began to form. I've noticed that the AMRS2 concentration maps from Uni Bremen are now beginning to show quite comprehensive change and melt beginning over large areas of the pack. I'm guessing that a late start with such thin and fractured ice is not going to be a herald of a re-growth. In fact it could even be that all the extra moisture, from that anomalously warm sea and all those open leads, is keeping the sun out at the moment. That won't last though... Time will tell. I expect it will be a record, or close to it, ice loss for June unless the weather intervenes in a big way.

The only time I really don't like speed.....

@danny Do you remember the swathe of books which came out in the 1970's, turned into films, which were in response to the original worries about climate change. Many of them, in the way of the last century, had us living in environment domes with a poisonous desertified environment outside. All set in.... 2030 - 2050... I believe the first flush of expectation in the sci fi world has slowed. We now understand that the barrier between a mechanistic advance and a quantum physics advance is exponentially different in time and effort. We also, now, seem to understand that the climate fights back. That it won't be overwhelmed quite so easily. But we also have 7bn people on the planet now and that brings new insights into our future in a changing climate. In the end I wonder if human stupidity will outdo the imagined reality of the novelists???

Now Neven you know this will be discarded as "not new" and "has happened before", so it's not "news". Of course the news is that it is now becoming commonplace and, in the near future will not happen at all because they won't find any ice to put a stable drifting ice station on to anyway..... I had considered going onto "They who shall not be named" to see what they are blathering on about on this subject. But my equilibrium is not that good at the moment and I would probably have to say something impolite which would ruin my day and I really do need to get some work done....

@ Kevin McKinney Yes I get your point about ppm in actual terms. Real increase in the volume of CO2 in the atmosphere, especially due to the fact that CO2 absorption by the Oceans seems to be dropping, giving an increased ppm value for the same, or less, emissions. I just felt the chart was too short to show the real impact with delayed oceanic thermal inertia. Thanks for the input. I was referring to some long running discussions a while ago on RealClimate where people significantly smarter than I am referred to the 30 year ocean/atmosphere climate cycles. I logged the fact that it happens and the fact that the 90% of the energy sequestered by CO2 goes into the sea. What I think they are talking about, mainly, is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. which I had to go and research. It is a 30 year cycle which overlays the El/La Nina cycles making them stronger or weaker. At least that is how I understand it. Looking at the SKS article on the thermal inertia of the oceans, it bundles that 0.6C sequestered heat into on batch and gives no estimate as to how it will come back out again. As we know the oceans give up heat in cycles and they have intervals. If we just take the PDO as an instance, then we have a 30 year cycle for the ocean which receives the largest amount of Solar energy each year. If we then overlay 30 year ocean cycles with 30 year carbon release cycles, and look at the overall CO2 emissions chart, ppm or otherwise..... The Arctic is in a shooting gallery with only one possible result. Very rapid and comprehensive decline of Arctic ice. That's the point I was trying to make. Something which appears to be missing in general charting of the overall situation. I believe it is not often incorporated into a holistic approach to climate impacts because of the chaotic and variable rate at which the energy is released. I don't believe that you can take it all together and say "This decade we will see this impact". But overall, the impact is there and the forcings get worse decade on decade. Thanks for the discussion on it, it's helped me to focus my mind on what I was seeing at an overall level, rather than at a fine level of detail.

Neven, you might want to use the Open Source collaborative computing development model for this. Someone owns the core. Contributors contribute to the core and the core updates with versions. People who wish to build on the core make Forks from the core. Taking the core material and building on top of it in different directions. Any improvements they wish to make to the core, they feed back and it forms part of the basis of the next core. When the core is upgraded to a new version, all forks then re-baseline on the new core. Does that make sense and work for you? Someone will need to own the core and manage the versions.

Kevin, R. Gates My point was fairly simple if couched in more complicated terms. Also I didn't see the Skeptical science graph, but the one I posted does as well even if it is not exactly the same. You could, if you wanted, divide by 7.76k to get ppm. The point I wanted to make is that we are running two cycles here. Heat sequestration in the oceans and CO2 emissions which increase the heat sequestration by CO2 retention of Insolation. The point is not the absolute value. It is the growing value and that we are only just beginning to feel the impact of the very rapid rise in CO2 emissions in the 60's and 70's as most of that energy was sequestrated in the sea and is only returning now. But our emissions have continued to rise. The energy being sequestered continues to rise, the rise in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere ramped up sharply in 2000 and continues on that path, mainly, but not solely, due to human output. So if we are trying to map a breakdown to of the arctic, due to CO2 heat sequestration, we must factor in the 30 year cycle of ocean heat sequestration and release. This I have learned by extensive reading on the topic. I'm not capable of understanding the math, but I am capable of understanding the interlocking nature of the systems. Neven makes a point that CO2 continues to rise, Global heat content of the Oceans continues to rise, ice extent and volume continues to fall. The point I was making is that Neven's charts do not allow for the CO2 impact at the time of the heat which is being released from the Oceans now. i.e. the 30 year cycle. Nor does it allow for the difference between the fist 100 years of carbon emissions, which drove the 1C temp raise in the 20th century and the emissions in the following 70 years which are significantly higher. If you put all that together, we are already in a state of rapid and catastrophic change and it is only going to get worse. So there is no reason why we should not see a complete failure of Arctic ice and a move to a totally new "steady state" simply from the emissions already in the environment, but 90% of the heat locked in the Oceans for 30 years. Chart's aside, that is only logic to me. Perhaps it does not pass the scientific litmus test or perhaps I'm approaching it at too simplistic an angle.

Neven, personally I feel your CO2 chart is way too short for this discussion. If we look at the historical record for the post industrial CO2 contribution by Homo Sapiens Sapiens, we see that in the first decade of the 21st century we emitted more CO2 than we did in the first CENTURY of the post industrial record. From Overlay In fact the increase was almost as much as in the three previous decades. Now if I recall my reading correctly, the majority of the heat sequestered by CO2 is absorbed by the sea. This heat energy takes 30 years to return to the atmosphere. So, Basically, in the last 2 decades we've been seeing the impact of heat energy sequestered in the sea from the CO2 rises between 1960 and 1980, which is, in fact almost twice as large as that emitted in the following two decades. So, by 2030, regardless of the impact in the Arctic by the accumulation of CO2, we move to a new state never seen before in the CO2 historical record. Where the heat energy of 7GT of CO2 per decade comes back to impact the environment. If this does not cause a step change, I don't know what will. There is likely to be a short hiatus between 2010 and 2030, then all hell should start to break loose. Because the accumulated CO2 is bad enough but we will be facing the direct impact of all that CO2, plus the direct impact of the loss of Arctic sea ice, plus the impact of ocean sequestered warming. A perfect storm of circumstances if there ever was one. What other impacts from methane clathrates, weather circulation changes, desalination due to ice shelf runoff and many others, are, to my mind, just the icing on the cake.

I spent years tracking Konrad Steffen's studies on Greenland so I'm fairly up on the melting. However I didn't actually put all the figures together. If the Wiki Greenland page is correct, then the ice mass loss in the decade between 2002 and 2012 was equivalent to 7.2mm of sea level rise. If 2012 became the norm, we would see that from Greenland alone every 6 years. But as we've seen with the Arctic, there is no "norm", just constant acceleration. OK if we stick at 500 gt per annum then it will take 5,700 Years for the ice sheet to melt. But, then, the ice sheet was in balance in the 1990's and we lost 0.1% of it in the 2010's. I'd say that only has to move to 1.0% by the 2030's and the human race is in serious trouble. That looks like a real possibility today.

I meant minimum rather than mean. But I'll stick my neck out and leave it there. Minimum has been extending further and further into September, regrowth has been slower. The mean for September must also be falling faster than expected.

2.5 +/- 0.5 mkm2 My reasoning is based on a slightly different observation. I've noticed that the areas with heavy red/yellow on the AMSR-E charts in early/mid May tend to be the final resting place of the pack melting in September. Going on what we are seeing this year, there will be a small area of pack left over Greenland and the CAA with the north pole still slightly covered. but not by much. Although it looks like the ice over by the CAA will also break down too. In the end it will depend largely on the weather patterns and that has become more and more unpredictable over the last decade. It will be interesting no matter what and I don't believe that there will be any recovery at all. If we look back to 2006, which experienced massive radical melt early on, which we now see as "normal", there was no real "regrowth" after the weather turned against melt. There was, in fact, only a near miss of the 2005 low and a continuation of the decline. Only the massive solar low at the end of cycle 23 brought a small and very limited respite from the 2007 crash, but certainly no "gains" on the trend.

@Chris, Yes on re-reading you are right, it was complimentary. To long spent talking to deniers.... Sorry.