TORONTO – The Arctic sea ice has reached its annual minimum summer extent for the year, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).
NSIDC measures the extent of sea ice rather than the area. Extent will always be a higher value than area, since extent measures the edges of the ice and all the space between it. In measuring area, any holes devoid of ice within that space would be taken into account.
Satellite data collected by NSIDC found that the sea ice shrunk to 5.10 million square kilometres in 2013, significantly higher than 2012 when it measured 3.41 million square kilometres, the lowest on record.
Still, this summer’s minimum makes it the sixth lowest in satellite records, 1.12 million square kilometres lower than the 1981-2010 average.
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The rebound from last year was not unexpected.
“I was expecting that this year would be higher than last year,” said Walt Meier, a glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “There is always a tendency to have an uptick after an extreme low; in our satellite data, the Arctic sea ice has never set record low minimums in consecutive years.”
According to NASA, there has been a downward trend in sea ice extent since the late 1970s, which has accelerated since 2007.
Many use the loss of Arctic ice as proof of global warming, though there is debate over whether or not Earth is currently experiencing climate change.
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