On March 7, 2017, Arctic sea ice hit a record-low wintertime maximum extent. At 5.57 million square miles, it's the lowest maximum extent in the satellite record, and 455,600 square miles below the 1981-2010 average maximum extent. (Credit: NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio/L. Perkins)
On Feb. 13, 2017, the combined Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice numbers were at their lowest point since satellites began to continuously measure sea ice in 1979. Total polar sea ice covered 6.26 million square miles (16.21 million square kilometers), which is 790,000 square miles (2 million square kilometers) less than the average global minimum extent for 1981-2010”the equivalent of having lost a chunk of sea ice larger than Mexico.
The ice floating on top of the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas shrinks in a seasonal cycle from mid-March until mid-September. As the Arctic temperatures drop in the autumn and winter, the ice cover grows again until it reaches its yearly maximum extent, typically in March. The ring of sea ice around the Antarctic continent behaves in a similar manner, with the calendar flipped: it usually reaches its maximum in September and its minimum in February. This winter, a combination of warmer-than-average temperatures, winds unfavorable to ice expansion, and a series of storms halted sea ice growth in the Arctic.
We started from a low September minimum extent, said Walt Meier, a sea-ice scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. There was a lot of open ocean water, and we saw periods of very slow ice growth in late October and into November, because the water had a lot of accumulated heat that had to be dissipated before ice could grow.
The Arctic's sea-ice maximum extent has dropped by an average of 2.8 percent per decade since 1979. The summertime minimum extent losses are nearly five times larger: 13.5 percent per decade. Besides shrinking in extent, the sea ice cap is also thinning and becoming more vulnerable to the action of ocean waters, winds and warmer temperatures.
