Arctic ice shrank to the smallest extent ever recorded by satellite as of Sept. 3, with August of 2007 setting the all-time record as the smallest ice cap observed during any month since monitoring began more than three decades ago.
And the melt season has two weeks to go.
“It’s amazing,” NSIDC’s Mark Serreze told the Guardian Unlimited in the UK. “It’s simply fallen off a cliff and we’re still losing ice.”
The latest details on the fastest polar cap meltdown ever can be found at the fall ice season countdown by the National Snow and Ice Data Center. This shrinkage destroys critical habitat used by polar bears, walrus and seals — and will leave Alaska coastal villages like Shishmaref and Kivalina exposed to high surf and erosion come fall storms. It consumes the planet’s air conditioner, transforming reflective white floes into heat-absorbing ocean.
Satellites discerned an ice cap that covered 1.70 million square miles on Memorial Day — about 17 percent smaller than the previous absolute minimum of 2.05 million square miles observed Sept. 21-22, 2005.
The ice loss had slowed in mid August, suggesting that the melt season was winding down. But the decline accelerated during final slide into September. The disappearance of 140,000 square miles over a seven-day period — the ice cap covered about 1.84 million square miles on Aug. 27 — might not sound like much until you make the abstract concrete. So try this:
An frozen habitat almost as large as Montana disintegrated into slush last week. It’s gone.