- Roberto Molar Candanosa
- Posted On
Earth News: NASA finds 2021 arctic winter sea ice tied for seventh-lowest on record
Sea ice in the Arctic appears to have hit its annual maximum extent after growing through the fall and winter.
The 2021 wintertime extent reached on March 21 ties with 2007’s as the seventh-smallest extent of winter sea ice in the satellite record, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center and NASA.
This year’s maximum extent peaked at 5.70 million square miles and is 340,000 square miles below the 1981 to 2010 average maximum – equivalent to missing an area of ice larger than the state of Texas and Florida combined.
This image above, created at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, was created using data provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, acquired by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 instrument aboard the Global Change Observation Mission 1st-Water “SHIZUKU” satellite.
Roberto Molar Candanosa works for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.