And what’s happening in the New Arctic is not staying there

Another month, yet another record low for Arctic sea ice extent in a warming world.

January’s average ice extent in the Arctic was 525,000 square miles below the 1981-to-2010 average, making it the lowest January extent in the satellite record. This is an astonishingly large loss of ice — equivalent to 80 percent of Alaska.

But what happened in January was equally, if not more significant, for its timing. It happened when the