The countdown to the annual Arctic slush cup has ended, and the realm of polar bear and ice seal has shrunk yet again. The meltback may not be as bad as last year, but it’s worse than any other season logged by the satellite record.
How bad was it?
The Arctic Ocean ice cap has basically lost an area three times larger than Texas.
The eye-in-the-sky scientists from the National Snow and Ice Data Center said today that the extent of Arctic sea ice hit its minimum coverage over the weekend and has begun to slowly refreeze for the winter.
The floes and pans that create the floating bedrock of the polar ocean’s ecosystem — providing the necessary hunting platforms for polar bears and the undersea nurseries for plankton and fish — covered only about 1.74 million square miles on Sept. 12.
That coverage is still about 150,000 square miles bigger than the all-time record minimum set last fall, the NSIDC pointed out in a release (complete with links and graphics.)
But given the Arctic’s remarkably cool 2008 summer, a season where ice melt ought to have slowed dramatically, it’s not good news.
While above the record minimum set on September 16, 2007, this year further reinforces the strong negative trend in summertime ice extent observed over the past thirty years. … The 2008 minimum is the second-lowest recorded since 1979, and is 2.24 million square kilometers (0.86 million square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average minimum.