It Took Less Than 30 Years to Melt Almost All the Permanent Ice in the Arctic

The Arctic's permanent, multi-year ice—the older stuff that didn't use to melt away with the changing seasons—is almost completely gone. The video below uses twenty-seven years worth of satellite imagery from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to illustrate the sordid tale. By the end of last year, just 7 percent of the Arctic's permanent ice remained intact.

In other words, it only took us about quarter-century to melt nearly all the Arctic's oldest ice. The most durable planks of the greatest northern ice mass have essentially disintegrated in my young lifetime.

NOAA explains what you're seeing: "The winter ice pack in the Arctic was once dominated by multi-year, thick ice. Today, very little old ice remains. This animation shows maps of sea ice age from 1987 through the end of October 2013." As for the measurements, ice aged "class 1" is the stuff that's been frozen during the most recent winter, while "the oldest ice (9+) is ice that is more than 9 years old." That's the stuff that's almost gone.

Hard as it might be to wrap your brain around planet-wide warming in the midst of this frigid, interminable American winter—which, believe it or not, might also be climate change's fault—satellites make terrible liars. And the decline in Arctic ice is evident even now, in the January of a polar vortex-laden year:

According to the National Sea Ice Data Center, "the sea ice extent for January is declining at a rate of 3.2% per decade relative to the 1981 to 2012 average, or at a rate of 47,800 square kilometers (18,500 square miles) per year." When measured in January, the Arctic is losing an area of ice the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined every year. Polar vortex and all, "January 2014 is the fourth lowest extent in the satellite record, behind 2005, 2006, and the record low January 2011."

It's part of a long term trend, of course. The summer of 2012 saw "the largest loss of Arctic sea ice cover since satellite records began in the 1970s," according to Scientific American's David Biello. "The record low 3.41 million square kilometers of ice shattered the previous low—4.17 million square kilometers—set in 2007. All told, since 1979, the Arctic sea ice minimum extent has shrunk by more than 50 percent."

So why is all that ice melting, exactly? Here's why.

Global temperatures have been ticking up with increasing rapidity for decades now, thanks to humankind's proficiency with spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide now accounts for 400 parts per million up there, the highest at any point since humans have evolved—and temperatures have risen accordingly. Average global temps are now over 1.5 ˚F higher than they would be if we didn't treat the skies like an industrial carbon sewer.

Upon returning from an expedition to study the Arctic melt, Dr. Pablo Clemente-Colon, chief scientist at the National Ice Center, put things bluntly.

"The observations indicate both the planet, as a whole, and the Arctic region, even more rapidly, are warming up. The models are predicting this trend to continue in the foreseeable future," he said. "It should be noted that most of the thick, multiyear polar ice pack, composed in the 1980s of ice 10 years or more in age, has already been lost from the Arctic due to both drifting into the North Atlantic and melting."

And here's the thing: It's never coming back. Not in our lifetime, anyway.

"To get back to such a pack," Dr. Clemente-Colon said, "we would need at least a 10-year cooling trend, which is not expected, nor forecasted, by any model."