North Pole Now a Lake

The melting of the arctic sea ice is one of the strongest evidences for global warming / climate change, especially considering last year's dramatic new record low. However, if we're going to focus on the newsworthiness of this particular bit of information, there's some other important context that is often left out by those wishing to dramatize the northern melt as much as possible.

1) The current northern ice levels, regardless of how big the lake is at the North pole, are currently better than the three lowest years on record, though still historically low[1]. So you could be equally as truthful and informative as this generally uninformative article, just with an opposite spin, saying that the whole Arctic ocean's surface ice is at a three-year high!

2) The Antarctic sea ice has been above the historical average for over a year.[2]

[1] http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm [2] http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent...

Can anyone comment as to whether this is a normal phenomenon or not? I know the temperature is warmer than normal, but the article doesn't discuss whether melting on the surface of the ice is abnormal or not.

EDIT:

I did a quick look. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_the_Arctic

Actually many studies proved that there is a natural long cycle in which artic slowly melt and then refroze. It happend that we'r in this period.

So it's harder to determine how much the global warming impact the melting of the pole, but we all know the answer.

I look at this picture and think to myself that we're in a pretty bad situation here. White snow reflects heat back at a higher rate than water does... I wonder what effect this will have.

This is some serious blogspam. There's not a single damn link to any actual information (the links for "Data Center" and "network" go to computer-system advertisements) and all other referential links go to livescience.com.

I'm not against aggregation or curation, but there is something especially galling about a science blog that omits what should be a common characteristic in scientific literature: the linking back to original data and sources.

The lack of this information makes this article pretty much useless. OK, so a "meltwater lake" started forming in July 13...is that unusual? Is it unusually early? Is it unusual in size? Who really knows, because as the OP says matter of factly in the next graf:

> July is the melting month in the Arctic, when sea ice shrinks fastest.

OK, so, is that an accepted fact of the seasonal cycle? Or is it unusual? Bad? Good? Who knows? Guess we'll have to click on the "Arctic cyclone" link for perhaps some more information, even though the forecast of such a cyclone doesn't answer any of the original questions about context, because the cyclone will purportedly make things worse than what they are now, but we just don't know what "now" is. If only there was a link back to the original data source.

And because of the Canon banner ad slapped over the lede image, I didn't really look at the image because it looked like a nice Canon travel ad.

Also, what does this mean?

> The Arctic hit a record low summer ice melt last year on Sept. 16, 2012, the smallest recorded since satellites began tracking the Arctic ice in the 1970s.

Is a "record low summer ice melt" bad? Good? Does low melt mean that the lowest amount of ice was melted? That seems good, right? Oh, if only there was a table of numbers or something to clarify things.

Note that the jet stream is split this summer and that is causing a lot of below the Arctic weirdness. Earlier I read this happens about once every 10 years and seldom in the summer.

Search on jet stream split, narrow to this year or the last few months.