Here's a more quantitative view, to get an idea of how serious this season is. Summary: its still early in the melt season, but this year is somewhat ahead of

Here's a more quantitative view, to get an idea of how serious this season is. Summary: its still early in the melt season, but this year is somewhat ahead of every previous year. (via the excellent arctic sea ice blog's regional data aggregation page: https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/regional https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/regional) This first graph is arctic sea ice area, including the sum of all of the sub-regions that are what you normally think about as the Arctic Ocean. Several other bodies of water also get seasonal ice coverage adjacent to the arctic basin. https://14adebb0-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/amsr2/grf/basin-area-multiprod.png https://14adebb0-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/ar... There are three clusters of lines shown here. Each one corresponds to the reports provided by a different sea-ice monitoring office. Differences in technique have been used by commentators to kibbutz about the finer points of what constitutes a record minimuim in the past, so its common for independent observers to show multiple institutes all together now. While the details differ, the broad picture is the same for all three offices. The three clusters have been offset in the vertical axis to visually separate the three institutes. Roughly 2/3 of the arctic basin melts out each year. Each institute reports both sea ice area, and sea ice extent. Ice area is the total area actually covered by ice. Ice extent is somewhat trickier to understand. Much of the summer ice pack isn't a big chunk of ice, its composed of many different chunks, and they will break up and merge over time. So many of the map grid cells are only partially covered by ice. When the fraction of coverage is greater than a certain threshold, then the entire grid cell is counted towards "ice extent" - the amount of ocean that has some ice floes in it. With that definition in mind, here's the current graph of sea ice extent, along with some recent historical context: https://14adebb0-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/amsr2/grf/basin-extent-multiprod.png https://14adebb0-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/ar... One thing of note: The current record year for melting is 2012. You'll note that the shape of that year's curve is quite a bit different from every other year's curve. 2012's weather patterns drove a melt that was so substantial that every year since has followed a different trajectory than the years prior to 2012, because so much multi-year ice melted out. At this point in the Summer, several years have had less area and/or extent than the previous record.