andygates

David Barber, Manitoba Uni's big frosty boffin, went out looking for multiyear ice, and instead just found rotten, half-metre thick one-year stuff that an ice-capable ship can apparently crank through at thirteen knots.  This is navigable.  Forget the Northwest Passage, just ice-belt your boat and go for it, chew out a frasilicious sea-lane and make your millions.

1: Investment niche!  It's the coming growth area for shipping.  It'll take a while for ice-happy oil rigs to get ROI but shipping's faster. Go go gadget exploitation machine.  Ah well, it'll be good for Iceland.

2: This is another pile of scary to add to the pile of scary.  The exact pattern of melt each year is determined by weather - wind, for example, can pile ice up against land (slowing melt) or push it through straits into the open ocean (accelerating it).  In a melty year, though, the single-year ice goes away almost entirely.  In a non-warming Arctic some single-year ice persists and is built up; in the warming Arctic (3x global average, as both observed and modeled) it seems to have reached a critical tipping point.  This observation correlates well with Pen Haddow's hike'o'hell.  Massive Arctic summer melt now looks a lot like a dice-roll for weather each summer.

3: That single-year stuff is crap for polar bears.  I has a sad.

I wonder what Northern Hemisphere weather is going to do with all that extra dark absorbing surface and all that extra humidity?  Place bets now!