Losing To Warm Summers

To put a number to this phenomenon, the area that older ice used to cover in 1984 clocked in at 700,000 square miles. In 2016, this number was reduced to just 42,000 square miles. Old ice used to protect the Arctic ice cap in the summer.

This protection is no longer as good as it used to be, said Meier. The NASA visualization showed two periods when the loss of old ice was most noticeable. The first happened in the late ‘80s and was caused by a change in the Arctic’s circulation pattern. The second one was in the ’00s and is linked to bulk loss during the summers.