Arctic sea ice extent eighth lowest on record, says NASA
At 4.64 million square kilometres, this year’s Arctic sea ice minimum extent is the eighth lowest in the consistent long-term satellite record, which began in 1978, NASA’s satellite data analysis shows. Arctic sea ice appeared to have reached its yearly lowest extent on September 13, the US space agency said. Its minimum summertime extent, which typically occurs in September, has been decreasing, overall, at a rapid pace since the late 1970s due to warming temperatures.
This year, temperatures in the Arctic have been relatively mild for such high latitudes, even cooler than average in some regions. Still, the 2017 minimum sea ice extent is 1.58 million square kilometres below the 1981-2010 average minimum extent, NASA said. “The weather conditions have not been particularly noteworthy this summer,” said Claire Parkinson, senior climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“The fact that we still ended up with low sea ice extents is because the baseline ice conditions today are worse than the baseline 38 years ago,” Parkinson said. The three years with the lowest Arctic ice extents on record – 2012, 2016 and 2007 – experienced strong summer storms that hammered the ice cover and sped up its …read more