Arctic meltdown goes on

August 30, 2007

Courtesy of Far North Science
By Doug O'Harra

With two to three weeks left before the end of the annual melt season in the Arctic Ocean, the polar ice cap continues to disintegrate into unprecedented slush.

Source: NSIDC

As of Aug. 27, the Arctic ice pack covered an estimate 1.84 million square miles - at least 10 percent below the previous absolute record minimum extent set on Sept. 20-21, 2005.

During the past week, an ice-covered zone almost as large of Louisiana simply disappeared - threatening marine mammals like polar bears with increasing habitat loss and Alaska Native villages with exposure to devastating fall storms.

Satellite coverage has never recorded so little ice on the Arctic Ocean. It's been the season of the Perfect Melt.

Still, the rate has begun to slow, with the angle of the sun beginning to lengthen and the power of solar melt starting to wane, according to the latest release from the ice-melt countdown by the National Snow and Ice Data Center. (The week before, the melted zone covered an area as large as New Mexico.)

For more details on how the ice wizards at NSIDC calculate ice extent, and how they compare that information to ice area, check out the latest dispatch.

Most of Far North Science is written and edited by Doug O'Harra, a writer and journalist based in Anchorage, Alaska.