Arctic Bay, the body of water as opposed to the Hamlet, has begun breaking up, about a week earlier than normal. In of itself, one week is not a lot of time, but if you couple that with the four weeks that freezeup was late this season, that makes five weeks less ice this year than normal.
Now normally we have freeze up mid-October and break-up around the 15th of July. That makes 39 weeks of ice in a normal year, so five weeks represents a difference of over 12 percent. And I know that one year taken by itself means very little, especially in a geological context, but it does give one pause. Perhaps it is just a blip, perhaps it is more indicative of what the future holds for us in the Arctic, I guess only time will tell.
This is Arctic Bay at about 6:00 pm yesterday…
This is the same view at midnight…
And this is this morning around 9:30…
Much of the darker looking "ice" is actually broken up, or Floe Ice, and we’ve had no wind to speak of, otherwise much of this would be gone.
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Gorgeous set of photos, Clare! Ditto to the July 10 ones. Have you ever thought of taking a picture from your deck of your fabulous view every day for a year and making an animated .gif or YouTube movie out of it? That would be incredible!
I agree with Nancy. Great photos. I’ve been meaning to ask about the ice up there as Arctic ice is discussed so much in the news. I figured you might have the low-down on it.