Most attention on sea ice comes in early September, when the sheath of drifting, cracking floes cloaking the Arctic Ocean, warmed by nonstop sunlight and moved by summer winds, reaches its annual minimum. For a reminder of just how dynamic the ice is, click on the video above, which I shot near the North Pole in March, 2003, while standing with Tim Stanton, an expert on ice and oceans at the Naval Postgraduate School, next to a developing ridge where two floes were colliding. (We were drifting around 400 yards an hour at the time; all the sound is the crunching and huffing of the ice.)
One research group, at the University of Bremen, concluded last week that the ice this year retreated to a new record low for the era of satellite monitoring.
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