The Arctic's oldest, most robust sea ice has devolved into a pathetic shell of its once-grand self.
A new two-minute video from the American Geophysical Union, a leading earth sciences organization, depicts the dramatic shrinking of the toughest Arctic sea ice over the last 35 years, since 1984. (Reliable satellite observations began in the late 1970s).
The oldest ice, which is four or more years old and most resistant to melting, is shown in white. This ice once froze over the vast Arctic basin. Today, however, just thin wisps of the old ice remain north of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported last year, the Arctic's oldest sea ice has experienced a whopping 95 percent reduction since the mid-1980s. The Arctic is now dominated by young, thin ice that's more susceptible to melting.
"We’re headed towards an ice-free summer in the not-too-distant future," Jeremy Mathis, a former NOAA Arctic scientist, told Mashable last year. "We're on the order of a decade or two away."
What's more, the American Geophysical Union also released a new study on Tuesday which found the old, robust ice above Greenland is now "declining twice as fast as ice in the rest of the Arctic."
Overall, as Earth relentlessly warms, the Arctic is rapidly losing sea ice both young and old.
"The 13 lowest [sea ice] extents in the satellite era have all occurred in the last 13 years," the National Snow and Ice Data Center noted in September.
