By Sharon Guynup In August, I traveled aboard the icebreaker Kinfish to the Svalbard archipelago, north of the Arctic Circle. Invited to the bridge as we cruised fjords near the 80 parallel, I was transfixed by towering blue glacier walls, but was confused by the map displayed on one of the ship’s screens. It showed our vessel sailing across a non-navigable frozen sheet. When I shared this story with Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, he didn’t seem surprised. “Things change fast there nowadays,” he said. So quickly, even polar ice mapping can’t k…