2013’s Summer Arctic Sea Ice a Top 10 Low
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 A satellite image of Arctic sea ice snapped on Sept. 12, 2013.Credit  : NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
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It’s official: The Arctic icepack reached its summer low on Sept. 13, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colo., said today (Sept. 20).
The Arctic ice cover melted down to 1.97 million square miles (5.10 million square kilometers) — about the size of Texas and California combined.
The final tally puts 2013 in sixth place out of the top 10 record low ice years since tracking began with satellites 30 years ago. It also continues an overall downward trend in the extent of summer sea ice, the NSIDC said. (2012 is the top record holder, with the lowest summer ice extent ever recorded.)
The rebound in ice cover after a record low year was expected, Walt Meier, a glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement. “There is always a tendency to have an uptick after an extreme low; in our satellite data, the Arctic sea ice has never set record low minimums in consecutive years. [Video: Watch the 2013 summer ice melt]
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