Nature: "An abrupt decline of thick sea ice in the Arctic Ocean" The Fram Stait lies between Greenland + Svalbard, which is an archapelago 500 miles north of the rest of Norway. Long-term sea-ice measurements from this area reveal that the dominant form of Arctic sea ice shifted around 2007, from thick + deformed ice to thinner, more uniform ice. As as result, the proportion of the thicker ice fell by about half, + is unlikely to recover this century. Some "19% of the sea ice in the Arctic was at least 13 feet thick in 2007, but now only about 9.3% of ice is at least that thick, and the average age of the Arctic ice has dropped by more than a third to just 2.7 years." To clarify, sea ice definitionally does not get shed from land by calving glaciers, but rather forms on top of the ocean from freezing water + falling snow. “It will affect the entire Earth because the north and south pole is something like a radiator of the Earth, the air conditioning system of the Earth.” As a second clarification, the spiral graphic is of sea ice volume, not areal extent. In the arctic, maximum volume occurs in April, minimum volume in September. Sad to say, the downward spiral may be our broader metaphor unless we address climate change aggressively. Photo credit: Patrick Kelley, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.  Graphic credit: Andy Lee Robinson @haveland.