The Summer the Conditional Became Present Tense

In Apotheora’s alternate July 2026, autonomous buoys north of Svalbard returned ice thickness readings below one metre — thinner than the melt ponds sitting on top of it. Melt pond coverage exceeded sixty per cent, surpassing the 2012 record summer.

Pola Rees speaks with Ingrid Varpe, a sea ice physicist at the Norwegian polar research institute who has spent eleven summers on the Arctic ice and this year watched her own theoretical tipping points arrive as field data.