Meanwhile, ice losses elsewhere allowed a Russian tanker to make the first winter crossing of the Arctic — without an icebreaker

The Bering Sea off Alaska’s west coast has just experienced a shocking loss of ice over a 10-day period — in winter.

See the graph below for the details. To my eye it looks like sea ice extent declined from about 420,000 square kilometers on Feb. 6 to about 260,000 square kilometers on the 16th.

That’s a drop of 38 percent (and an area of lost ice a litt