Annual Arctic Sea Ice Minimum 1979-2017 (SSMI data)

  • Released Monday, October 16, 2017
View full credits

The annual minimum Arctic sea ice from 1979-2017.

Satellite-based passive microwave images of the sea ice have provided a reliable tool for continuously monitoring changes in the Arctic ice since 1979. Every summer the Arctic ice cap melts down to what scientists call its "minimum" before colder weather begins to cause ice cover to increase. This graph displays the area of the minimum sea ice coverage each year from 1979 through 2017. In 2017, the Arctic minimum sea ice covered an area of 4.17 million square kilometers.

This visualization shows the expanse of the annual minimum Arctic sea ice for each year from 1979 through 2017 as derived from passive microwave data.

The annual minimum Arctic sea ice from 1979-2017 with its corresponding year overlay.

Corresponding year for the SSM/I data time series.

Corresponding year for the SSM/I data time series.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
The Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).

This page was originally published on Monday, October 16, 2017.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:47 PM EDT.

Series

This page can be found in the following series:

Datasets used

Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.