Arctic Ocean Loses a Substantial Amount of Sea Ice

When the Arctic sea ice stops melting this September, the ice cover is expected to have melted to an extent of 4.4 million square kilometers. This is reported by scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), and the University of Bremen.

"Worrying Decrease”

The remaining ice-covered area will be about 300,000 square kilometers smaller than last year, when the ice cover shrank to 4.7 million square kilometers. At the same time, this year’s summer minimum is again significantly below the values from 1979 to 2006. “The latest results confirm the worrying downward trend of sea ice in the Arctic, which we have been observing for more than a decade now. In Antarctica, where sea ice cover will also reach its annual maximum in a few weeks, there is less ice than on average,” says Professor Christian Haas, head of the Sea Ice Physics division of the Alfred Wegener Institute.

Satellite Data from Bremen

In their analysis, the German researchers refer to satellite ice concentration data from the Institute of Environmental Physics at the University of Bremen, whose data is used in the meereisportal.de information and data portal. They indicate this year’s sea ice minimum as the sixth smallest ice cover since measurements began in 1979. Other observation centers such as the National Snow and Ice Data Center in the USA report slightly higher figures. “These small differences result from the higher resolution of our data and the slightly different methods used by different data centers to calculate the ice concentration. They show the uncertainties that even modern satellite observations of sea ice can have,” says Gunnar Spreen from the Institute of Environmental Physics at the University of Bremen.

Press release from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI)