The image is from the NASA Worldview satellite photo browsing tool and was shared last week on the blog Arctic News. The patches are "quite striking," but it's not the first time that water has encroached upon Arctic ice in this way, said Julienne Stroeve, a professor of polar observation and modeling at University College London.
The time of year is one reason water is now visible in this region, said Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization that analyzes and reports on the climate. "By the end of summer, the sea ice generally becomes more fragmented, with areas of open water appearing more widespread between pieces of sea ice," Labe told Live Science in an email.
"Individual satellite images from around the North Pole in just the last two weeks show dramatic changes in the amount and location of visible open water," he noted.
There is no specific distance from the North Pole at which open water should normally stop, because Arctic conditions can vary substantially from year to year, Labe said. However, the summer ice has become thinner and more fragile in recent years, so open water is consistently reaching closer to the North Pole than it did before.
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"The broader implications of more open water across the Arctic Ocean are wide-ranging, from changes in local weather and ocean conditions to impacts on marine ecosystems and greater coastal risks like erosion and flooding for Arctic communities," he said.
Scientists expect that sea ice will start to refreeze by mid- to late September, closing at least some of the gaps.
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