RIGHT/LEFT to change month. RED line is Antarctic sea ice extent (pictured on the left) GREEN line is Arctic sea ice extent (pictured on the right) BLACK is the sum of the two. Pull the MONTH slider to see how sea ice has evolved in each month. Each horizontal bar on the graph represents 1 million square kilometers. Each vertical bar represents a decade. So for example, move the month slider to 9 (September) and you can see that between 1979 and today, the Arctic has lost over 2.5 million square miles of sea ice, with 4.5 remaining. The Antarctic is actually gaining sea ice, but not nearly as fast as the Arctic is losing it.
Data and images from ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135
