This summer, the Arctic Ocean’s sea has shrunk almost as much as 2007 record-shattering low, despite better weather conditions, scientists are alarmed.

Usually during the summer time, the ice covering the Arctic Sea retreats under the rays of the sun, losing some territory, but is replenished during the six month night of the arctic winter. Due to global warming, the summers have been getting hotter, and the polar ice cap has been losing more and more ground each year since the 1980s, the winter replenishment being unable to keep up. This has caused massive ice shelves to break apart and start drifting away from the ice cap; one recent case is that of the Markham Ice Shelf.

In the context of that grim outlook, 2007 has been a record that caught scientists completely by surprise, ice cap losses being far greater than ever before. Mark Serreze, an arctic climate expert with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado says "The most important factor in 2007 was an unusual pattern of atmospheric circulation in summer that brought warm, southerly winds north of eastern Siberia, promoting strong melt."

Due to 2007’s summer melting away much of the old ice pack, thinner sea ice was formed in the winter, ice which melted away quickly. Serreze added "The remarkable thing about this summer is that we got all the way down to second lowest without especially favorable atmospheric patterns that would hasten melt."

The problem with the loss of much of the polar ice cap is that the arctic ice acts as a cooling agent for the planet by reflecting the Sun’s rays, but with it shrinking, the increasing surface of dark sea water absorbs more and more heat, thus entering a vicious circle.

According to Walt Meier, another scientist with the NSIDC "It’s going to take more than a year to turn this around in fact, it would take four to five consecutively cool summers to regain what has been lost in the past two years. It doesn’t seem like that’s realistic under current conditions."