This is just a quick note to report that our brave reporters of sea-ice conditions will now be reporting on their way back south, as they have abandoned their attempt to sail across the Pole. I think it is a wise choice. In fact, if they had continued it would have involved trusting an icebreaker would pick them up. They apparently felt that prospect would involve a certain humiliation they disliked.

What finally decided them on giving up was a long-range forecast of ten days of headwinds. But I think what really stopped them was the wall of ice just off the coast of Alaska they had to fight their way over at the very start. It took them a month to basically get started.

I’ll update later.

UPDATE

They took a day off to rest and recover, as the the winds switched around and became headwinds from the south. For only the third time since they started the ice stopped drifting south and started drifting north briefly. This was due to a weak low pressure drifting from Siberia to Alaska.

It is ironic that the south winds waited until they wanted to head south. However the winds shifted around to the north the following day as the low passed and high pressure built in from Scandinavia (so we’ll call this high pressure “Sven”.) Notice the below-freezing isotherm is becoming more common on the temperature maps.

At first the winds were too high for safe sailing, so they hauled up on a floe to wait for them to die down. They looked for some “micro plastics” in water samples. I notice there seems to be a skim of ice on the water.

They will actually be heading south and passing the path O-buoy 14 took in 2016. Every year is different, but the floe O-buoy 14 was on didn’t break up until around August 20, and the freeze-up occurred around September 10. I don’t think they want to experience being in water that freezes up. Judge for yourself by checking out the O-buoy 14 movie. Move the slider on the bottom of the screen to around the 7:45 point to start at August 14.

http://obuoy.datatransport.org/monitor#buoy14/movie

They still have a long haul before they are safe ashore, and praying for them wouldn’t hurt them any. They’ll continue to send invaluable pictures.

I tend to distrust the various “thickness” maps at this time of year, because they average-out areas of scattered big bergs and open water and make it look like neither, and rather a thin skim of ice. Also it is very hard to determine from outer space whether a melt-water pool has a black bottom due to soot or due to the fact it has melted through to the sea below. Once the ice breaks up sea-water floods over the ice-surface when waves break, and conditions can become slushy, and I think some slush is “seen” as open water. (An “adjustment” to NRL maps in 2016 sought to differentiate between ice and snow-on-the-ice, with a tweak accounting for “salty snow”, and slush may look like “salty snow”.) Therefore it can seem that several feet of ice melt over night. For example, this year hundreds of square miles of six-foot-thick ice vanished from the coast east of the Laptev Sea in only twenty days. Marvelous, if it happened, for the amount of heat used up melting that amount of ice (turning available heat into latent heat in the phase-change from ice to liquid) would be enormous. But I wonder if all that ice is actually gone, or whether it is broken up and slushy. It is very helpful to have an O-buoy camera or sailor as an on-the-scene reporter.

Here are the NRL maps comparing this year to last year. (2017 left; 2018 right.)

Besides the bluer tint in the Central Arctic, indicating thicker ice, it appears the entire ice-cap has shifted from the Atlantic side to the Pacific side. (Notice more open water north of Svalbard and Franz Josef Land; and less open water towards Alaska and East Siberia.) This shift of the sea-ice may be indicative of the persistent Atlantic-to-Pacific flow that frustrated our adventurers. They didn’t quite reach the innermost circle, which indicates 80° north latitude. It is only the area within that circle that is included in the DMI mean-temperature graph.

The recent above-normal temperatures at the Pole was largely due to Atlantic air in the cross-polar-flow, but our sailors were on the Pacific side, and if you look up to the DMI temperature maps you can see plenty of patches of sub-freezing temperatures on the Pacific side south of 80° north.

The compression of the sea-ice on the Atlantic side kept the “extent” graph low.

Because the ice was compressed, the “volume” graph gave an impression different from the “extent” graph, suggesting there was more sea-ice than usual.

With the sea-ice so compressed, I feel that if our adventurers had continued they would have run into a lot of pressure ridges rather than flat ice. Progress would have been grueling. In fact it was the same sort of jumbled “crazy ice” that stopped Nansen and Johansen as they attempted to ski to the Pole in 1895.

Nansen and Johansen’s trip south was no cup of tea, and I think our three on-the-scene reporters still have quite an adventure ahead of them.

But they have suggested that young folk headed in the wrong direction can indeed turn around and head in the right direction, which is something which grumpy old men like myself sometimes have our doubts about. (I could go on about this….but won’t).

Stay tuned.