And this...
During an Arctic summer, the sun is in the sky 24 hours per day, giving the Arctic ocean more total sunlight than anywhere else on the planet, excepting the Antarctic during its summer season. The result is that large areas of the Arctic Ocean are ice free in summer at any one time, with large leads of open water and even larger `polynyas', stretches of open water tens of miles long and miles wide. This photo of three submarines visiting the North Pole in May 1987 shows the whole area criss-crossed with open water leads before the summer had even arrived. 
Fig.4 - HMS Superb, USS Billfish, and USS Sea Devil in a North Pole rendezvous in 1987
(U.S. Navy Photo)By contrast, a similar photo taken 12 years later of USS Hawkbill (with the ominous number SSN-666) at the North Pole during the spring of 1999 shows a vast expanse of unbroken new ice. (Hawkbill was nicknamed `the Devil Boat' due to its number, and was decommissioned in 2000 shortly after its last Arctic cruise, much to the relief of those familiar with the `Book of Revelation').
Fig.5 - USS Hawkbill at the North Pole, Spring 1999. (US Navy Photo) [19]As early as 1959, the first US submarine to surface at the North Pole, the USS Skate, did so in late March, and surfaced at 10 other locations during the same cruise, each time finding leads of open water or very thin ice from which to do so. It did a similar cruise a year earlier in August 1958, again finding numerous open leads within which to surface. Here is a photo of the Skate during one of its surfacings in 1959. As can be seen in all three photos, the flat new ice is scarcely different between 1959 and 1999, while the 1987 photo shows the extent to which open water can occur.
Thank God for that. I'll sleep easy now. Thanks Bill, I knew I could rely on you to provide the real evidence.
