Arctic Sea Ice Shrinks to Smallest Winter Size in 35-Year Record
This photograph from the NASA ICESCAPE mission shows melt ponds on the surface of the Arctic sea ice cover in 2011.
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Arctic sea ice covered the smallest extent of ocean on record this winter, losing an area of ice bigger than Mississippi.
At its maximum, sea ice covered 14.54 million square kilometers (5.61 million square miles) of the northern oceans on Feb. 25, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder said Thursday in a statement. That’s 130,000 kilometers less than the previous smallest winter maximum in 2011.