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The Arctic ice pack is the sea ice cover of the Arctic Ocean and its vicinity. The Arctic ice pack undergoes a regular seasonal cycle in which ice melts in spring and summer, reaches a minimum around mid-September, then increases during fall and winter. Summer ice cover in the Arctic is about 50% of winter cover. [1]
The Arctic Ocean is the mass of water positioned approximately above latitude 65° N. Arctic Sea Ice refers to the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by ice. The Arctic sea ice minimum is the day in a given year when Arctic sea ice reaches its smallest extent, occurring at the end of the summer melting season, normally during September.
Over the Arctic Ocean the snow cover on the sea ice disappears and ponds of melt water start to form on the sea ice, further reducing the amount of sunlight the ice reflects and helping more ice melt. Around the edges of the Arctic Ocean the ice will melt and break up, exposing the ocean water, which absorbs almost all of the solar radiation ...
The Arctic has already lost about half of its sea ice, compared to the 1980s at the end of the summer. It is known that more warming has delayed ice formation, and resulted in thinner sea ice growth.
The recent arctic blast has pushed ice cover on the Great Lakes to levels not seen since 2022. Lake Erie in particular has become mostly ice covered in quick order. As of January 23, ice cover has ...
[54]: 1249 In September 2020, the US National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that the Arctic sea ice in 2020 had melted to an extent of 3.74 million km 2, its second-smallest extent since records began in 1979. [55] Earth lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice between 1994 and 2017, with Arctic sea ice accounting for 7.6 trillion tonnes of this loss.
It is a major pathway for sea ice to leave the Arctic. It is estimated that more than 90% of the Arctic Sea Ice exported from the Arctic takes place within the East Greenland Current. [2] The volume of ice exported on an annual scale is a strong function of multiple atmospheric variables (wind, temperature, etc.) and oceanic variables and dynamics.
Air temperature records dating back to the 1880s can serve as a stand-in (proxy) for Arctic sea ice, but such temperature records were initially collected at only 11 locations. Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute has compiled ice charts dating back to 1933. Today, scientists studying Arctic sea ice trends can rely on a fairly ...