Global Sea Ice Cover Hits Record Low in February
X/ @TheInsiderPaper
March 6, 2025 Hour: 8:02 am
The Arctic sea ice extent was 8% below average, marking the 3rd consecutive month of record-low extent for its respective month.
On Thursday, the EU-funded Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that daily global sea ice cover dropped to an unprecedented low in early February, reflecting the ongoing warming of the planet.
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Daily global sea ice extent, which combines the sea ice extents in both polar regions, reached a new all-time minimum in early February and remained below the previous record of February 2023 for the rest of the month.
The Arctic sea ice extent was 8 percent below average, marking the third consecutive month of record-low extent for its respective month, while the Antarctic sea ice extent was 26 percent below average, the fourth-lowest on record for February.
The report also said that February 2025 was the third-warmest February globally, with an average surface air temperature of 13.36 degrees Celsius.
The number was 1.59 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial levels, making February the 19th month out of the past 20 months in which the global average surface air temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level, a critical threshold set by the Paris Agreement.
“One of the consequences of a warmer world is melting sea ice, and the record-low sea ice cover at both poles has pushed global sea ice extent to an all-time minimum,” said Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
“The average temperature over European land for February 2025 was 0.44°C, 0.40°C above the 1991-2020 average for February, ranking it well outside the 10 warmest months of February for Europe… Outside Europe, temperatures were most above average over large parts of the Arctic. They were also above average over northern Chile and Argentina, western Australia and the southwestern U.S. and Mexico,” the Copernicus report pointed out.
teleSUR/ JF
Source: Xinhua – Copernicus
