Severe seasonal melting has reduced ice floes, floating chunk of ice, in the Arctic Ocean to the thinnest on record, according to researchers.
Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany said the proportion of old, thick sea ice in the central arctic has declined significantly. The ice cover now "largely consists of thin, 1-year-old floes," they said, revealing measurements obtained from the "TransArc" project that aimed to track changes in water, air and ice across the polar sea.
Researchers said that at sites where the sea ice was mainly composed of old, thicker ice floes in the past decades, there is now primarily one-year-old ice with an average thickness of 90 centimetres. Only in the Canadian Basin and near the Severnaya Zemlya island group in northern Siberia did the sea ice physicists encounter significant amounts of several-year-old ice.
"The ice has not recovered. This summer it appears to have melted to exactly the same degree as in 2007. Yes, it is exactly as thin as in the record year," said sea ice physicist Stefan Hendricks.