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Ice, which covers 10 percent of Earth's surface, is disappearing rapidly. Select a topic below to see how climate change has affected glaciers, sea ice, and continental ice sheets worldwide.
- Background
- Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Cover
- Southern Hemisphere Sea Ice Cover
- About These Images
- How to Cite This Page
The sea ice cover is one of the key components of the polar climate system. It has been a focus of attention in recent years, largely because of a strong decrease in the Arctic sea ice cover and modeling results that indicate that global warming is amplified in the Arctic on account of ice-albedo feedback. This results from the high reflectivity (a...
Figure 1. 10-year averages between 1979 and 2018 and yearly averages for 2007, 2012, and 2024 of the daily (a) ice extent and (b) ice area in the Northern Hemisphere and a listing of the extent and area of the current, historical mean, minimum, and maximum values in km2. Data source: Comiso (2023)1 Figure 2. Color-coded map of the daily sea ice con...
Figure 5. 10-year averages between 1979 and 2018 and yearly averages for 2012, 2014, and 2024 of the daily (a) ice extent and (b) ice area in the Southern Hemisphere and a listing of the extent and area of the current, historical mean, minimum, and maximum values in km2. Data source: Comiso (2023)1 Figure 6. Color-coded map of the daily sea ice con...
These images were produced with daily sea ice concentrations derived with the Bootstrap Algorithm using satellite observations from the Scanning Multi-channel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR), the Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM-I) and Sounder (SSMIS), and the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) instruments. This webpage is updated wit...
J. C. Comiso, C. L. Parkinson, R. Gersten, A. C. Bliss, and T. Markus (2024), Current State of Sea Ice Cover, https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/cryo/data/current-state-sea-ice-cover, last access: MM-DD-YYYY. If referencing any current or archived images from this page, please also cite the following: J. C. Comiso, C. L. Parkinson, R. Gersten, A. C. Bliss...
Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred. Observed increases in well-mixed greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations since around 1750 are unequivocally caused by human activities.
Ice • Many of the frozen parts of the Earth are rapidly melting or thawing (defrosting). Overall, snowfall is decreasing. The widespread retreat of glaciers since 1950 has not been seen in at least 2000 years. • The area of the Arctic Ocean covered by sea ice in the summer is now 40% smaller than in the 1980s.
Large, continental ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere have grown and retreated many times in the past. We call times with large ice sheets “glacial periods” (or ice ages) and times without large ice sheets “interglacial periods.” The most recent glacial period occurred between about 120,000 and 11,500 years ago. Since then,
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Newly minted Ph.D. Sophie Coulson and her colleagues explained in a recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters that, as glacial ice from Greenland, Antarctica, and the Arctic Islands melts,...
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Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet melting rates are rapidly increasing and have raised the global sea level by 1.8cm since the 1990s. This closely matches the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s high-end (worst-case) climate warming predictions (Figure 1).
