Atlantic Arctic ice hits record lows as the US cuts tracking
The Atlantic side of the Arctic is losing sea ice faster than at any point in the satellite record, scientists say, even as the main US system for monitoring and explaining that loss has been scaled back over funding.
As of mid-July, sea ice in the Greenland Sea and the Central Arctic basin had fallen to the lowest levels since satellite records began in 1979, and ice has all but vanished from the Barents Sea, according to Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who tracks the season in his Alaska and Arctic Climate Newsletter. Open water northeast of Svalbard now reaches as far north as 84 degrees, with the Atlantic ice edge sitting well north of its long-term median across almost the entire sector.
“The stark dichotomy in sea ice extent between the Atlantic and Pacific sectors continues,” Thoman wrote, noting that ice is “basically gone” from the Barents Sea while extent north of the Bering Strait is running unusually high for the season.
The overall picture is less dramatic. Arctic-wide extent on July 15 ranked seventh lowest in the roughly 47-year record and sat slightly above the same date last year. The Pacific side has run the opposite way, with Chukchi Sea ice at its highest for mid-July since 1994 and the Beaufort tied for its highest since 2006. It is the regional split, and the record lows feeding the North Atlantic, that scientists are watching most closely, because freshwater from melting ice is one of the factors thought to stress the ocean circulation that regulates Europe’s climate.
The record lows come as the US system for monitoring them is being scaled back. On October 15, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reduced its Sea Ice Today service, ending its regular monthly and mid-month analyses along with several sea ice comparison and volume tools. The center attributes the reduction to non-renewed funding. Reporting has linked the wider rollback to the Trump administration’s cuts to federal climate data and the earlier decision to end support for the underlying data products blindsided NSIDC staff when it was announced.
Daily ice images and the raw extent data still update automatically, but the expert analysis that put each season in historical context has stopped, leaving independent scientists to fill the gap.
When NOAA first moved to decommission the underlying Sea Ice Index in 2025, Zack Labe, a climate scientist who publishes widely used visualizations of the datasets, told the outlet Inside Climate News that the loss would be felt far beyond climate research.
“Any reduction or elimination of these data product services will have significant consequences, well beyond just tracking the state of sea-ice loss,” Labe said, noting the data also supports weather prediction, fisheries management, shipping, Alaskan communities and Arctic security decisions. Labe, whose position at NOAA was terminated under the Trump administration and who now works at the nonprofit Climate Central, was himself among the staff caught in the agency’s cuts.
The monitoring is also under pressure from ageing hardware. After a US military satellite sensor that long fed the record began to fail, and a move to cut it off was reversed following public outcry, NSIDC switched to a Japanese satellite instrument to keep the measurements running.
