As is traditional at this time of year, Arctic ice is in the news again. And it’s melting.

Canada is fretting over the ‘massive’ break up of its ice shelves. Trent University says nearly a quarter of the ice shelves’ area has been lost (press coverage). It’s released these pictures to drive the point home; the top one shows Ellesmere Island ice shelves at the end of August 2007, the lower shows the shelves at the same time in 2008.

“These changes are irreversible under the present climate and indicate that the environmental conditions that have kept these ice shelves in balance for thousands of years are no longer present,” says Derek Mueller, of the university (press release).

There’s also been a fair to-do over claims that the North Pole is now an island (eg here and here). Over on the NY Times’s Dot Earth blog though Andrew Revkin is unimpressed with this claim:

One of the groups focusing most closely on possible Arctic shipping lanes, the National Ice Center operated by the Navy and Commerce Department, says flatly that the satellites are misreading conditions in many spots and that there is too much ice in a critical spot along the Russian coast (highlighted in the smaller image above) to allow anything but ice-hardened ships to get through. In an e-mail message Wednesday, Sean R. Helfrich, a scientist at the ice center, said that ponds of meltwater pooling on sea ice could fool certain satellite-borne instruments into interpreting ice as open water, “suggesting areas that have substantial ice cover as being sea-ice free.”

The highlighted area is probably still impassible ice, including large amounts of thick old floes, he said. I sent the note to an array of sea-ice experts, and many, including Mark Serreze at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, concurred.

Stay tuned for more ice news…

Images: Derek Mueller, Trent University.