"Lawrence Jenkins" wrote in message
...

On Saturday, 16 July 2016 22:51:07 UTC+1, Lawrence Jenkins wrote:
Snip endless reams of politically-inspired tosh

And you wonder why most here think you're such an idiot?

Meanwhile, back in reality: For anyone who hasn't been following this
expedition closely, the actual story is as follows:

Arctic sea-ice is currently close to (though not breaking) record low
levels. Of course this does not mean that there is no ice nor even that it
should be possible easily to circumnavigate the pole, which seems to be the
expedition's aim. There is, as always for now at least, considerable
residual ice and this particular year prevailing weather patterns have
somewhat changed the peripheral distribution of the ice in the Arctic.

In recent years the typical pattern has been for the NE passage (ie via the
Russian coast) to clear first and for the NW passage (via the Canada/Alaska
coast) to clear much later, if at all (fully). But the distribution is
rather different this year in that the NW passage is closest to opening
first, while a significant section of the NE passage remains blocked (though
now starting to clear quite quickly).

So there's a good indication that the expedition will successfully complete
its mission, though the voyage is in a small yacht and looks likely to take
several weeks yet. If it ends up taking too long for the yacht to reach the
narrower passages through the Canadian archipelago then there's some
possibility that adverse weather may have started to cause refreezing of the
ice there, but with luck they'll beat that. If they had chosen to go
clockwise rather than anticlockwise around the pole this year then maybe
more progress could have been made by now, but that's weather for you.

That's the simple truth as anyone can easily verify from sites like NSIDC.
But then Lawrence probably believes that those pesky satellites have been
fiddling their own data. Can't trust anyone you know.