Since 1982, the rate of surface warming in some Arctic seas at the height of summer is more than quadruple the rate of warming in the global ocean.
Where winter sea ice should be starting to cover the ocean, thousands of square miles of open water stretch westward from Alaska across the Bering and Chukchi Seas in November 2017.
A mild winter and warm spring have led to a large patch of open water in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska, an extremely unusual—possibly unprecedented—occurrence for mid-May.
Shallow melt ponds on the surface of consolidated sea ice act as skylights that promote massive under-ice phytoplankton blooms. These under-ice blooms may boost estimates of Arctic phytoplankton productivity by a factor of 10.