The image above shows melting of Arctic sea ice extent over the last 20 days, July 5 to 25, 2020. At the bottom right, the shallow Hudson Bay goes to water rapidly, losing 500k km2 of ice. Even so, at 172k km2 that region is nearly average. The remarkable 2020 event is the effect of high Siberian temperatures causing extensive melting of the nearby shelf seas, seen on the left vertical. Already on July 5, Laptev was mostly water, and now has only 5% ice. Neighboring seas East Siberian and Kara also melted rapidly. The other feature is Baffin Bay, center right, losing 300k km2 to retain only 7% of its maximum ice extent.
The graph below shows the ice extent retreating during July compared to some other years and the 13 year average (2007 to 2019 inclusive).
Note that the MASIE NH ice extent 13 year average loses about…
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