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The Arctic lost an average of 34 000 square kilometres of sea ice per year
between 1978 and 1996, says Claire Parkinson of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who has studied data from microwave instruments
aboard various satellites. Parkinson, who will report her findings next month in
Geophysical Research Letters, says that this represents the loss of 2.8
per cent of the ice per decade. There were regional variations, though: ice
cover increased in the Gulf of St Lawrence, while the Kara and Barents seas lost
10.5 per cent of their ice per decade.