~Again never seen before, new Spring time Arctic Ocean icescape
April 20 1988 NOAA infrared satellite , Arctic Ocean surface ice looks bland, very cold, nothing very much to report about, leads were found with difficulty, yet the setting for this picture had an extra effort application to find them. Look at Smith Sound, the reverse V polynya in black, North of Baffin Bay, between Greenland and Canada. There is some warm sea ice just to its South in faint grey. If there was any open water leads about the North Pole, they would have appeared in black. By the way, Smith Sound polynya feature is a complex creation of ocean currents, but in particular Kennedy Strait (North of the inverse pointed V) being solidly frozen, this allows many non migrating species to survive the winter, with more spacious open sea water.
Same picture, this time set to really look for the leads about the North Pole, there are many covering the Arctic Ocean, but these are old, likely some are multiyear old, frozen over and thick. The photo was enhanced to highlight dark colours, so much so that the IR temperature setting basically shaded land areas black, these were warmer further South, except for of course Greenland.
Flash forward April 3 2025, NOAA IR HRPT Photo:
Leads everywhere you look about the Arctic Ocean having warmer sea ice surface, Smith Sound Polynya deformed, viewed from space the planet appears to have obviously warmed, remember this photo is taken 2 weeks earlier than the 1988 one.
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