Sea ice floating atop the Arctic Ocean reached its minimum extent for 2025 on Sept. 10, covering 4.602 million square kilometers (1.78 million square miles) concluding this year’s summer melt-out. That’s far from a record low and represents a recovery, in some ways, from where things stood earlier this year. At the winter maximum in March 2025, the Arctic ice was in bad shape. That’s the month in which sea ice, encouraged by freezing temperatures and 24-7 darkness, annually reaches its greatest extent. Ice cover in the region then barely topped 14.3 million square kilometers (5.5 million square miles) — the smallest extent at the winter maximum observed in the 47-year satellite record, and more than 1 million km2 (386,000 mi2) below the 1981 to 2010 average winter maximum. Much of 2025 followed a similar downward sloping path; throughout June and into early August, Arctic sea ice cover was tracking close to, if not at, a record low for the time of year. But things swung around in the latter half of August, as ice melt stagnated. “You get to August and the sun is setting in the Arctic, so things start to slow down,” said Walt Meier, a senior research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Colorado. “You need a lot of momentum to keep going, some kind of unusual winds or a big storm like we had in 2012,” the record low sea ice minimum year. “We haven’t really seen that this summer.”…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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