I almost called this yesterday, but I needed more data to be sure. All of the data I’ve looked at agrees, Arctic sea ice is now on the upswing, and in a big way.

Here is the plot from NSIDC:

This graph from Wipneus shows the abruptness of the change:

And the physics of ice is also a dead giveaway. Here, the Arctic temperature shows a dramatic upswing.

This is why: when water freezes it releases its specific latent heat.

The specific latent heat is the amount of energy required to convert 1 kg (or 1 lb) of a substance from solid to liquid (or vice-versa) without a change in the temperature of the surroundings — all absorbed energy goes into the phase change — is known as the specific latent heat of fusion. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_heat#Specific_latent_heat

For water, that’s about 334 KiloJoules of energy per kilogram.

Added: Note that in the record low year 2012, the date of the turning point was September 16th, this year was just a little bit earlier, but didn’t come close to a record, nor did it come close to predictions made for an ice free Arctic or less than 1 million square kilometers.

The value this year looks to be about 4.139 million square kilometers according to NSIDC data on September 11th of 2016.

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