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7 Ways to Visualize Just How Much the Arctic Melted This Year

The Arctic is melting so fast that NASA's top climatologist has deemed it a ""planetary emergency":http://www.americablog.com/2012/09/were-in-planetary-emergency-thanks-to.html." You might have heard: arctic sea ice reached a record-breaking low this...

The Arctic is melting so fast that NASA’s top climatologist has deemed it a “planetary emergency.” You might have heard: Arctic sea ice reached a record-breaking low this month, exceeding even some scientists’ predictions (though not InTraders’) as to the alarming extent of its retreat.

Then again, you might not have heard, because much of the media has been curiously silent regarding this rather terrifying milestone. There is a presidential election on, after all, and our media must focus on gaffes and stump speeches and deciding who looks more presidential in various situations. But, alas, when the Arctic ice extent reached its minimum this year, it was the most minimal minimum ever registered. As long as we’ve been observing the Arctic’s ice cover, it has never withered away so thoroughly.

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So how small did it get? Here’s one way of putting it: The Arctic has lost enough ice to cover Canada — the world’s second-largest nation, geographically speaking — and Texas combined. That is catastrophic. But some further visual aids might be helpful in properly absorbing the scope of this disastrous event. So here are 7 different visualizations that should help you process what a record-melting arctic really looks like.

On a graph, it looks like this:

In a slick graphical reconstruction from NASA, it looks like this:

In a chart comparing the previous reach of Arctic sea ice, it looks like this:

Let’s take it a step further. A summer cyclone further broke up that melting ice, which looked like this:

With the data visualized into a 3D representation, the record-low Arctic ice looks like this:

And most of the Arctic actually looks like this:

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Yes, it really does look like this:

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