Earlier, I wrote that arctic sea ice had yesterday reached record low levels, blowing through the previous lowest-seen minimum in 2007, even though there's still a lot of melting left to go. NASA just released this visualization of the arctic region showing just how bad it is:
The white area is the extent of sea ice as of August 26, 2012. The orange line is the average minimum extent from 1979 - 2010, the time covered by satellite observations. In other words, every year they measure the outline of the ice when it reaches its minimum, usually in September, and then averaged those positions for that timespan. As you can see, we've been well below the usual minimum ice extent for some time - not just where we usually are this time of year, but the actual minimum amount... and we still have weeks of melting yet to go. I ...
