Arctic Sea Ice Extent At Record Low Off Alaska; Serreze; "We've Never Seen Anything Quite Like This"
When Arctic sea ice extent hit its annual low-point for the year in September, it clocked in at the eighth lowest on record—far better than had been feared in projections earlier in the year. But that ranking doesn't tell the whole story.
As we enter December, the Chukchi and Bering Seas, which border Alaska on its western and northern sides, have unprecedented areas of open water and the least amount of ice ever recorded there. "Certainly we've never seen anything quite like this before," said Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
In recent years, the Chukchi Sea has reached 95 percent coverage about 2.5 weeks later than it did in the late 1970s, when satellites first started recording sea ice. This year, according to Rick Thoman of Alaska's Weather Service, it's falling even further behind.
"The thing is, we saw this coming," Serreze said. Last year, he co-published a study in the Journal of Geophysical Research that found that the timing of when warm water flows from the Bering Strait up to the Chukchi Sea is a strong indicator of how the sea ice will fare.
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