"It will without doubt have come to your Lordship's knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.
(This) affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations."
President of the Royal Society, Minutes of Council, Volume 8. pp.149-153, Royal Society, London.
20th November, 1817.
We first posted that little oddity in 2007 and most recently in 2020's "NASA detects evidence of parallel universe that's probably better than the one we're in".
And the headline story from gCaptain:
The Royal Navy’s HMS Protector has set a record for sailing closer to the North Pole than any other British surface ship in history.
The Plymouth-based survey ship is on her first Arctic patrol after completing an extensive overhaul in January. Since then, Protector has been conducting extensive trials and training with the goal of deploying to Antarctica later this year.
HMS Protector has spent this month in the Arctic Circle, north of 80 degrees latitude, carrying out ‘Ice Ramming Trials’ to ascertain the correct ‘Polar Code’ rating post refit.
Previously, only Royal Navy submarines, such as HMS Trenchant which punched through the ice at the Pole in 2018, have travelled further north than the position reached by survey ship reached: 80°41.5 North in the Greenland Sea, about 1050 kilometers (652 miles) from the North Pole.
“Having been nowhere near the ice in more than two years, the ship tested the strength of her engines using a specialist bollard pull in Flekkefjord, southern Norway, then began icebreaking in earnest in the Fram Strait – between Greenland and the Norwegian island chain of Svalbard,” the Royal Navy said in a statement.
On board Protector are scientists, engineers and advisors including from the Ministry of Defence and the British Antarctic Survey, as well as two Royal Navy officers who sailed into the Alaskan Arctic aboard the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Polar Star this past winter, and ice-breaking expert Lieutenant Lauren Kowalski, also from the U.S. Coast Guard....
....MUCH MORE
I wish they weren't busting up the Fram Strait, the world needs that plug of ice to remain as intact as possible. Couldn't they have swung right to approach the Pole from east of Svalbard?
Danish Meteorological Institute
That said, the ice cap as a whole is in about as good shape as can be expected, with a little better plug on the other side of the basin, top center: Bering Sea, Bering Strait, Chukchi Sea, than there was ten years ago:
