End-of-summer Arctic sea ice extent is eighth lowest on record

Arctic sea ice, the layer of frozen seawater covering

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much of the Arctic Ocean and neighboring seas, is often referred to as the planet's air conditioner: its white surface bounces solar energy back to space, cooling the globe. The sea ice cap changes with the season, growing in the autumn and winter and shrinking in the spring and summer. 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 610,000 square miles (1.58 million square kilometers) below the 1981-2010 average minimum extent.

"How much ice is left at the end of summer in any given year depends on both the state of the ice cover earlier in the year and the weather conditions affecting the ice," said Claire Parkinson, senior climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "The weather conditions have not been particularly noteworthy this summer. 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."

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-end-of-summer-arctic-sea-ice-extent.html#jCp