About a month ago, CTV news said “For the first time in modern history, the North Pole may be iceless this summer….”

Since then, I’ve been checking the satellite images for the Canadian Arctic, today’s picture is shown below. North would be towards the top right of the picture. Some clouds obscure the south-west portion so its hard to see what’s going on there. There does appear to be some open-water in the extreme left of the image.

Note that these images have a resolution of 4km per pixel and be careful to distinguish between ice and cloud. Generally, the ice is the smooth-looking white stuff, clouds appear to be more textured and have swirling shapes.

The area covered by the image is shown below.

The image below shows the conditions off the northern tip of Greenland.

The next shows the area east and north of Greenland.

There was too much cloud cover to see anything clearly for the Bering Sea and the area north of Russia.

You can find these images at http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/2008206/ There, you can scan through the whole set of images in sequence, around the globe.

So, if the Arctic is to be ice free this summer, it had better get a move on, as my grandmother would say.