Stochastic resilience of Arctic sea ice: a framework bridging theory and observation

Arctic sea ice has declined rapidly in extent, thickness, and albedo, yet a quantitative observational measure of its resilience remains elusive. Here, we introduce a resilience potential framework that links a reduced Arctic surface energy balance to an effective potential whose curvature and barrier structure provide physically interpretable stability diagnostics. Using four decades of sea ice extent, thickness, and albedo, we compare contextual diagnostics of recovery and variability with empirical potential analogs inferred from October sea ice volume-derived energy states. The empirical reconstruction reveals a shift of the occupied ice-covered state toward reduced latent energy storage, while bootstrap tests show that the recent-period barrier is not robustly identifiable and is more consistently represented as a single empirical well under the adopted preprocessing assumptions. Our results, therefore, show how a physically based potential framework can be used to interpret aggregate sea ice variability and to test alternative hypotheses about changing resilience. This framework provides a general, observation-based pathway for quantifying resilience in Arctic sea ice and, more broadly, other Earth system components.