As a statistician I just feel SO bad when I read this. The odds of anything falling outside of 2 standard deviations 10 times in a row are infinitesimal. Which

As a statistician I just feel SO bad when I read this. The odds of anything falling outside of 2 standard deviations 10 times in a row are infinitesimal. Which means that you're wrong, it did not in fact do that. Now of course in this case it means that your variable is not normally distributed. And it isn't: sea ice is receding and therefore comparing the mean year over year is different, whereas a normal distribution only applies to multiple measurements of the same thing.