In case you missed it, after a burst of Web confusion last week about a “lake” at the North Pole, I tried on Saturday to help clarify what is, and isn’t, happening on the drifting sea ice near 90 Degrees North with a Dot Earth post and this video:

Now the polar research group at the University of Washington, which annually deploys the sea ice instruments and autonomous cameras providing the imagery that flooded the “Instanet,” has posted a helpful primer. Here’s an excerpt and link to the rest:

Santa’s workshop not flooded – but lots of melting in the Arctic by Hannah Hickey Santa’s workshop at the North Pole is not under water, despite recent reports. A dramatic image captured by a University of Washington monitoring buoy reportedly shows a lake at the North Pole. But Santa doesn’t yet need to buy a snorkel. Photo “Every summer when the sun melts the surface the water has to go someplace, so it accumulates in these ponds,” said Jamie Morison, a polar scientist at the UW Applied Physics Laboratory and principal investigator since 2000 of the North Pole Environmental Observatory. “This doesn’t look particularly extreme.” …Researchers estimate the melt pond in the picture was just over 2 feet deep and a few hundred feet wide, which is not unusual for an Arctic ice floe in late July. In the midst of all the concern, the pool drained late July 27. This is the normal life cycle for a meltwater pond that forms from snow and ice, and eventually drains through cracks or hole through the ice it has pooled on. The now-infamous buoy was first plunked into floating ice in April, at the beginning of the melt season, about 25 miles from the North Pole. Morison drilled a hole about three football fields away for a second camera, which is pointing in a different direction and shows a more typical scene. Since then the ice floe holding both cameras has drifted about 375 miles south. The U.S. National Science Foundation has funded an observatory since 2000 that makes yearly observations at fixed locations and installs 10 to 15 drifting buoys. The buoys record weather, ice, and ocean data, and the webcams transmit images via satellite every 6 hours. Images show the ice, buoys and yardsticks placed in the snow to track the surface conditions throughout the summer melt season. Maybe the instruments will survive the summer without getting crushed by shifting ice to record data for another year. Maybe they will fall in the water and eventually wash ashore. Researchers place the buoys to try to maximize their useful lifetime. While researchers say the so-called lake at the North Pole is not out of the ordinary, there is a lot of meltwater that could affect the sea ice in coming weeks, in the closely watched lead-up to the September ice minimum.

There’s much more in the piece, including Morison’s prediction of the extent of the sea ice retreat in late summer. Please read the rest and share this post with folks who might have been confused by the news. [The area around the camera is, for the moment, back to solid ice.]

And, of course, there’s much more in “The North Pole Was Here,” my award-winning book on this Arctic research project (written after I accompanied Morison and his team in 2003).

[Disclosure note: I get no royalties or other revenue from that book beyond a one-time fee when it was written.]