[Robert A Cook PE]

And how old is the “oldest and most robust sea ice”?

Is this normal for this area?

Has it been thicker or thinner in the past?

Honest answer = “We don’t really know.
Satellite records of sea ice only started in Oct 1978. Before that? Only a very, very few selected surveys in isolated sections across the Arctic in isolated years (Fram expedition, one Russian camp in the 1930’s near the pole.)

This is mindless extrapolation of one area.

(By the way, in June 2014, the Antarctic sea ice set a daily all-time record high sea ice extents record - an area greater than normal for that day more 2.16 million square kilometers. An area greater than normal larger than the entire area of Greenland (2.06 Mkm^2)!

[hinckley buzzard]

There have been periods of open water at the North Pole, as evidenced by the surfacing there of some of our nuclear submarines, photographed as early as in the late 50’s.

The reality is, most ice changes in the Arctic are due to changes in prevailing winds, not temperature change.

Scientists know this. News flunkies probably not.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks RACPE, and I wholeheartedly agree. The data set is small, and is broken into subsets because not exactly the same kinds of data have been recorded. The first year-round stay in Antarctica was documented in an old issue of Nat Geog that used to be around here (with the cover off), from circa 1956. The same kind of hysterical pandering went on about the ozone hole, which is entirely natural.