The original article does not agree with the actual conditions reported by the Canadian ice service this summer. In short it is nothing more then a pile of BS that could have been written from the desk back at the office. They went out with their minds already made up. Boats that actually traveled through the NW passage had quite a time of it and saw more then enough ice to last them a life time. This from their blogs.
The only sailors I know are in the Navy in subs so what I put forward above(with an appropriate disclaimer I might add) is from my reading here on the net. The explanations and foot notes on the various ice service charts are quite informative but I can't pinpoint now where I read the 15 knot rule.

Sorry, I didn't realize that you were completely discarding the whole article. A case of disregarding evidence that goes against your own cherished position?

On another note, I saw this article in the Guardian and thought of you. Are you a writer for these guys? Hope it makes your day, because that's what I'm here all about

link

I had read that and must agree that overstatement breeds contempt.
lets approach this from the other side shall we.
What in that article (Cabrone's) do you find of value and convincing?

That's like asking someone to prove their innocence. It is more interesting that you immediately distrust something coming from a source that seems to be completely legitimate and that confirms findings widely reported elsewhere. It also just happens to go against what you want to hear.

I just find it a curious coincidence.

People prove their innocence all the time. It's called an alibi that holds up.
What's to mistrust. They give no figures other then the preposterous 240 ft.thick sea ice. no course, no log of positions or observations nothing just the grand statement that they couldn't find any, And then there is the reliable source that states that multi year ice was and is just north of Tuktoyaktuk there only stated location.

vtsnowedin,

Your youth shows. When I was growing up, the Arctic Ice cap was treated as a permanent feature, much like a mountain range, in our schools.

You could not have found anyone who would have even considered it might ever melt.

And yes, there were areas of the cap thousands of years old and piled to the height of a couple hundred feet.

You may choose not to believe it, but some of us were actually alive then. Sorry if that's inconvienient for you.

And this from 2 years ago:

Churchill port welcomes first-ever Russian shipment


link

I know it's rough when the facts keep getting in the way.

link

\
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill, ... sportation
Churchill has been a port for quite a while. Not exactly news when a ship shows up at a well established port.

The town is the northern terminus of the Hudson Bay Railway owned by railroad holding company, OmniTRAX. It is a useful link in the export of Canadian grain to European markets, with rail-sea connections made at Churchill. The Port of Churchill is also owned by OmniTRAX. It is Canada's principal seaport on the Arctic Ocean. The Hudson Bay, a passenger train operated by Via Rail provides service between the Churchill railway station and Union Station in Winnipeg 3 times a week, a 1,700 km (1,100 mi) journey that takes about 40 hours.[18][19]


Via Rail train in Churchill stationChurchill is also the major seaport in Canada for the Eastern Arctic. Marine transportation companies, Northern Transportation Company Limited[20] (NTCL), headquartered in Hay River, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut Sealink and Supply[21] (NSSI), both have bases in Churchill and provide sealift to the Eastern Arctic and to a few Central Arctic communities.

There are no roads from Churchill leading to the rest of Canada. Churchill is serviced by two scheduled airlines offering flights to and from Winnipeg and to points north of Churchill in Nunavut. Calm Air offers service from Churchill Airport with daily flights to Winnipeg and the Kivalliq Region of Nunavut. Kivalliq Air provides direct flights six days per week between Churchill and Winnipeg and connections to all communities in the Kivalliq Region of Nunavut.

[edit] Local media

It's news when is comes from Murmansk.

The port(and rail line) has been expanded in anticipation of increased shipping.

You are a fool.

The NSIDC update also included this tidbit that I didn't know -- it might have been posted, if so sorry for the redundancy.

New record low sea ice extent for November 5th -- according to IJIS web site.

Tangentially, El Nino value was at 1.5 and increasing this past week -- thinking global temps will exceed any previous record next year. Skeptics on the run but it doesn't matter anymore -- cannot stop a runaway train.

Yes, broke through the 2007 track yesterday and is now matching the 2007 record low track.

chart

And yes, they are predicting record high temps for next year. A confluence of factors should just about guarantee significant record low ice extent next year.

Watching for that record low maximum.

So even for ice extent this year did end up setting a new record. Add that to the reduction in thickness and we have a very much reduced ice cap.

This of course will not prevent denialists from prevaricating in various ways. When one is determined not to see an awful truth, one is generally successful.

Here is a interesting bit that discusses current ice thickness etc.
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/seaice.html



Sea ice age and thickness

The age of the ice is another key descriptor of the state of the sea ice cover, since older ice tends to be thicker and more resilient than younger ice. A simple two-stage approach classifies sea ice into first year and multiyear ice. First-year is ice that has not yet survived a summer melt season, while multi-year ice has survived at least one summer and can be several years old. Satellite derived maps of ice age for March of 2007, 2008, and 2009 are presented in Figure S3.



Figure S3. Arctic sea ice distribution in March of 2007, 2008, and 2009. Multiyear ice is in white, mixed ice aqua, first-year ice teal, and ice with melting surface red. Dark blue is for open water and brown for land. From a combination of AVHRR and SSM/I satellite observations and results from drifting ice buoys. (courtesy
of Son Nghiem)

In the past decade, the extent of multiyear sea ice rapidly reduced at a rate of 1.5 x 106 km2 per decade, triple the reduction rate during the three previous decades (1970-2000). Springtime multiyear ice extent was the lowest in 2008 in the QuikSCAT data record since 2000. QuikSCAT results in March 2009 showed a multiyear ice extent of 3.0 ± 0.2 million km2. This was 0.3 million km2 larger than the multiyear ice extent on the same date in 2008, even though the total sea ice extent was similar in the spring of 2008 and 2009. While the multiyear ice extent was similar in March 2008 and 2009, its distribution was quite different. More specifically, in 2008 there was a significant amount of multiyear ice the Beaufort Sea and in 2009 there was a large amount of multiyear ice the central Arctic Ocean.

Recent estimates of Arctic Ocean sea ice thickness from satellite altimetry show a remarkable overall thinning of ~0.6 m in ice thickness between 2004 and 2008 (Figure. S4a). In contrast, the average thickness of the thinner first-year ice in mid-winter (~2 m), did not exhibit a downward trend. Seasonal ice is an important component covered more than two-thirds of the Arctic Ocean in 2008. The total multiyear ice volume in the winter experienced a net loss of more than 40% in the four years since 2005 while the first year ice cover gained volume due to increased overall coverage of the Arctic Ocean. The declines in total volume and average thickness (black line in Figure S4a) are explained almost entirely by thinning and loss of multiyear sea ice due to melting and ice export. These changes have resulted in seasonal ice becoming the dominant Arctic sea ice type, both in terms of area coverage and of volume.
snip.

Interesting, have you changed your position?