The extent of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has set a new record low for the wintertime in a region strongly affected by long-term trends of global warming, U.S. and European scientists said on March 22.
Sea ice around the North Pole expands to its biggest extent of the year in February or March after a deep freeze in the winter polar darkness and shrinks to the smallest of the year in September, at the end of the brief Arctic summer.
Arctic sea ice appears to have reached its annual maximum extent on March 7. It was the lowest maximum in the 38-year satellite record.
On that date, the ice covered 14.42 million square kilometers (5.57 million square miles), 97,000 square kilometers below the previous lowest maximum that occurred on Feb 25, 2015.
The trend of shrinking ice around the North Pole in recent decades has been one of the starkest signs of climate change.
At the other end of the world, sea ice around Antarctica hit a record low for the southern summer last month.
(Reuters)
