'Tis the season in the Arctic when the sun disappears below the horizon and twilight replaces daylight. Temperatures drop and ice that melted throughout the Arctic summer begins to cover the world's northernmost ocean again. Scientists have used satellite pictures since 1979 to map the extent of such ice at its minimum, and the picture this year isn't pretty. Covering 1.59 million square miles (4.12 million square kilometers), this summer's sea ice shattered the previous record for the smallest ice cap of 2.05 million square miles (5.31 million square kilometers) in 2005—a further loss of sea ice area equivalent to the states of California and Texas combined.

"The sea ice cover this year has reached a new record low," says Mark Serreze, senior research scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. "It's not just that we beat the old record, we annihilated it."

 Source : Scientific American