"Climate scientists have been telling you for years that Arctic Sea ice is dwindling so quickly that it might all be gone as soon as the end of this decade. Now a new research paper published in the American Geophysical Union journal points out that there has been NO statistical reduction in Arctic Sea ice surface area for the last two decades! So what's going on?"
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WATCH: The US Navy knows how fast Arctic Sea ice is disappearing! Sep 21, 2025 TRANSCRIPT: On the twenty-second of March twenty-twenty-five, the floating ice covering the vast Arctic Sea 0:06 reached its annual maximum extent. According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre, 0:12 or NSIDC, this year’s maximum was the lowest since satellite records began 0:16 some forty-seven years ago. It was one-point-three-one 0:20 MILLION square kilometres below the nineteen-eighty-one to twenty-ten average 0:24 and eighty thousand square kilometres lower than the previous record set in twenty-seventeen. 0:31 And yet, according to a very recent paper published in the American Geophysical Union’s 0:36 research letters journal, there has apparently been a SLOW_DOWN in the reduction of Arctic Sea 0:42 ice surface area over the past two decades. So, is there disagreement among climate 0:49 researchers here? It wouldn’t be the first time! Or was this year’s record low maximum 0:54 just a statistical anomaly? And what does the shortly arriving annual MINIMUM extent 0:58 look like for twenty-twenty-five? And are we even measuring the correct parameter anyway? 1:03 Confused? You won’t be after watching this video! Well, you might be! 1:14 Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think It’s hard to know what to think about 1:17 the fate of Arctic Sea ice sometimes isn’t it? There seem to be lots of different projections 1:22 of how quickly it’s dwindling and when we might actually witness a so-called ice-free Arctic, 1:28 ranging from the end of this decade to sometime in the next CENTURY! 1:33 So, what’s going on? Well before I dive into that I just want to say a massive THANK YOU to all of 1:38 you good folks who subscribed to the channel in recent weeks. Those subscriber numbers are 1:45 what gets channels like mine noticed by the mighty YouTube algorithm and get my videos 1:49 in front of more and more people each week, so I am immensely grateful for your support. 1:55 There are still on average about forty percent of viewers each week who are not subscribed though, 2:01 so if you’re on a PC, MAC, tablet or smart phone and you feel I’ve earnt your click on that little 2:06 button then you would be joining the ever-growing army of people who have my eternal gratitude. 2:13 So, let’s go back to this year’s record low Arctic Sea ice MAXIMUM, which was greeted 2:18 by institutions like the NSIDC, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, 2:23 and others like NASA, as a continuation of a long-term downward trend signalling 2:29 structural changes in the cryosphere (which is basically the frozen parts of our planet). 2:34 But as we’ve shown in several videos on this channel over the past twelve months, 2:38 ocean temperatures since the strong El Nino event that started in 2023 2:43 have been significantly warmer than the long-term trend line. 2:47 NOAA’s Global Climate Report for March–May 2025 highlighted that this period was the 2:52 second warmest in the agency’s one-hundred and seventy-year temperature record, 2:56 with notable heat in the Arctic region among the ten highest on record. This points toward 3:02 unusually warm surface conditions playing a key role in delayed or suppressed ice formation. 3:08 In other words – the record low sea ice maximum may be a statistical blip, 3:13 or it may signify the beginning of an entirely new structural paradigm in the Artcic Region. 3:19 Hard to say. Apparently. 3:22 At the time of posting this video we’re in the third week of September twenty-twenty-five, 3:26 at the time when Arctic Sea ice reaches its annual minimum extent at the end 3:30 of the northern hemisphere summer. So, what’s that looking like then? 3:35 Well, it’s certainly low compared to the 1981 to 2010 median. The dotted red line represents 3:40 the 2012 record low September minimum and if we track the red and blue lines back up to 3:45 mid-March we can see that this year’s blue line at the ice maximum time of year was way lower 3:51 than the 2012 dotted line. But if we come back down to this week’s position in mid-September, 3:57 we can see that we’re not anywhere near 2012 for our minimum extent this year. And in fact, 4:02 if we overlay all the lines from the last ten years or so, it becomes pretty clear that this 4:07 year’s minimum is not going to represent any kind of outlier in the recent record. 4:12 Which brings us to the research paper published by the AGU, that I mentioned 4:16 at the start of the video. It finds that “Over the past two decades, Arctic Sea 4:22 ice loss has slowed considerably, with no statistically significant 4:26 decline in September sea ice area since 2005” So, can we all breathe a sigh of relief then? Has 4:33 the whole ‘blue ocean event’ thing been overblown? Well not so much. 4:37 The paper goes on to state that “Climate models show that pauses in 4:41 sea ice loss across multiple decades can happen, even as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. 4:47 When we compare the current slowdown to similar pauses in model simulations, we see that it could 4:53 plausibly continue for another 5 to10 years” Those climate models that the paper mentions 4:59 are suggesting that natural climate variations, or what the science bods call ‘internal variability’ 5:05 have played a large part in slowing the human‐driven loss of sea ice. In other words, 5:10 the wiggle that happens in natural climate systems from one season to another. In the North Atlantic 5:16 and Arctic regions we’re talking about things like heat transport from lower latitudes; or upwelling 5:21 and mixing caused by storms; variability in glacial melt; or shifts in wind and pressure 5:27 systems that can either compact ice packs or spread them out depending on their strength 5:31 and direction. A good example is the Great Arctic Cyclone of 2012, which while not absolutely the 5:38 main cause of that record minimum year, would most likely have played a significant role in 5:42 breaking up the ice and reducing its overall surface area. Conversely a very dull and cloudy 5:48 season will tend to reflect more sunlight back up into the atmosphere and protect the ice pack 5:54 from additional melting. If there happens to be a very heavy snowfall in an Arctic winter season, 5:59 which you might think would add to the sea ice thickness, well in fact that snow can effectively 6:04 act as a blanket – insulating the ice from the cold air above and actually slowing the rate of 6:10 ice thickening through the rest of the year. So, you know – it’s a bit of a mine field! 6:16 Some very helpful additional commentary came from Arctic Sea ice expert and Associate 6:20 Professor at University College London, Dr Michel Tsamados in a recent LinkedIn post 6:27 “Similar pauses or hiatuses are natural in the climate system and were extensively 6:32 scrutinised in the past in the context of global climate warming”, Tsamados tells us 6:37 “In the case of sea ice decline” he says “this is made all the more 6:41 surprising because the Arctic is warming up to 4 times faster than 6:45 the rest of the planet and one would expect a continued sea ice decline.” 6:51 And then Dr Tsamodos makes a crucial point, that we’ve been banging on about on this channel for 6:57 about the last 8 years or so, when he says this… “I have always found the metric 'sea ice extent' 7:03 quite simplistic in that it encompasses a complex 3 dimensional field into a 2 dimensional 7:09 projection. Other metrics, such as sea ice age for example, paint an even more alarming picture.” 7:17 So, what’s he on about then? Well, the thing is, if an area 7:20 of sea ice survives the summer melt season and continues into the winter, then it has 7:25 a much better chance of getting thicker, which means it has an even better chance of 7:29 surviving the next summer melt and so on and so. Young Sea Ice is defined as ice that is less than 7:35 a year old and it tends to be between one and two metres thick. Old Sea Ice, which is often 7:41 called ‘multi-year ice’, has survived at least one summer melt season and is typically between three 7:47 and five metres thick and can develop ridges as thick as ten metres in places. Multi-year ice has 7:54 a lower salt content because the brine tends to drain out over time. And that makes it stronger 7:59 and more durable, which means it continues to be ever more likely to keep going through the 8:03 years in a sort of very helpful feedback loop. That older ice used to dominate the Arctic Ocean 8:08 back in the eighties, making up something like thirty to forty percent of all the sea Ice. 8:14 Not any more though. Long term viewers of the channel will have seen 8:17 me refer to these charts on several occasions over the years. They’re produced by the US Navy using 8:23 data from the global HYCOM and CICE models which use a combination of satellite imagery, in situ 8:29 Argo floats, altimetry and upward looking sonar from US and Royal Navy submarines patrolling the 8:35 region. And by the way, those subs like to know the thickness of the ice they’re sailing beneath 8:40 to the millimetre, because every now and then they have to smash through it to come up for air! 8:46 This GIF animation takes us right through 2023 and into 2024. The colour key on the right tells us 8:53 that blues into purples and very light purples indicate ice thicknesses of less than a metre, 8:58 right down to just a few centimetres, while green, yellows and reds indicate thicknesses 9:04 of 3 to five metres or more. As we go through into winter 2023-24 we can see the ice beginning 9:11 to increase in extent as atmospheric temperatures drop, and then start to thicken up as we approach 9:17 the 2024 annual maximum, when almost the entire ocean is full of ice at least two or three metres 9:22 thick. But here’s the thing. There’s hardly any multi-year ice getting above 3 or 4 metres thick 9:29 except for a few tiny slivers hugging the coastline. And as we continue on towards the 9:34 2024 annual minimum in September, almost none of the thickest ice in the middle of the ocean 9:39 is surviving. It might look like there’s still quite a good surface area covering, which would 9:45 chime with the findings of the AGU paper we looked at earlier, but it’s almost all a vivid magenta 9:51 colour indicating thicknesses of only about fifty centimetres of less –very vulnerable to one of 9:57 those internal variabilities I mentioned a moment ago - like a major storm for example. Compare that 10:03 with this chart from the record low Artcic minimum surface area from 2012. Sure, the area covered 10:10 is smaller than last year, but look at those colours. That’s almost all multi-year ice well 10:16 over two metres thick, with four or five metre ice reaching a fair way out from the coastline. 10:21 And that’s what Dr Tsamados was referring to when he said 10:24 “Other metrics, such as sea ice age for example, paint an even more alarming picture.” 10:31 There seems to be virtually no old sea ice left anymore. What we’re left with is a very 10:36 thinly spread covering of young ice ebbing and flowing with the seasons and not really surviving 10:41 from one year to the next. “To sum up”, Tsamados says 10:45 “I wouldn't call [the Geophysical Letter research paper] a good news story as the 10:51 recent slow-down of sea ice extent is only one part of a complex Arctic 10:55 landscape. I also don't think that we can draw any confident projections from 10:59 the finding of this study that the current slow-down will persist in the coming years.” 11:04 To address these concerns and to try to iron out some of the wrinkles and inconsistencies 11:09 in scientific research and reporting on Arctic Sea ice decline, Tsamados and his colleagues 11:14 at UCL together with a team from the University of Reading, also in the UK, are about to embark 11:20 upon a research project funded by the Natural Environment Research Council or NERC looking 11:26 precisely at the sea ice model deficiencies to help give a better, more accurate picture of 11:32 what’s going on up there. So, watch this space! 11:37 No doubt you’ve got news and views on this topic, so as always, the place to leave your 11:41 thought is in the comments section below. That’s it for this week though. Don’t forget 11:46 to subscribe to the channel If you found this video useful and informative. And if 11:50 you also click on ‘all notifications’ you’ll get a ping when new videos drop every Sunday. 11:56 You can also directly support my work by joining the amazing group of individuals 12:01 over at patreon dot com forward slash just have a think who enable 12:05 me to stay independent and keep ads and sponsorship messages out of your way. 12:11 Most important of all though, thanks very much for watching! Have a great week, and remember 12:18 to just have a think.
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