The Arctic Is Losing a Startling Amount of Sea Ice in the Summer
Though it doesn’t contribute to sea level rise since it’s already floating, Arctic sea ice is yet another indicator of the massive changes afoot. This year’s sea ice cover reached its second-smallest summer minimum on record, clocking in at just 1.44 million square miles (3.74 million square kilometers). The lowest ever minimum extent to date during the satellite era, or 1.32 million square miles (3.41 million kilometers), was recorded in 2012.
But this year’s annual summer minimum is just one startling aspect of a problem that goes back decades and is in fact more impactful if you look at it with a wider lens. The graphic above highlights the dramatic reduction of sea ice extent in just a few years. The gold line is the median ice extent for 1981-2010, in which half of the years had smaller extents and half had larger. Meanwhile, the light blue to white area represents the sea ice concentration on Sept. 15 of this year, the day of the summer minimum extent.
According to the Arctic Report Card, the downward trend for the summer minimum in 2020 is 13.1% per decade relative to the 1981-2010 average.
