Despite a slight recovery in summer Arctic sea ice in 2009 from
record-setting low years in 2007 and 2008, the sea ice extent
remains significantly below previous years and remains on a
trend leading toward ice-free Arctic summers, according to the
University of Colorado at Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data
Center. According to the CU-Boulder center, the 2009 minimum sea
ice extent was the third lowest since satellite record-keeping
began in 1979. The past five years have seen the five lowest
Arctic sea ice extents ever recorded. "It's nice to see a little
recovery over the past couple of years, but there's no reason to
think that we're headed back to conditions seen in the 1970s,"
said NSIDC Director Mark Serreze, also a professor in CU-
Boulder's geography department. "We still expect to see ice-free
summers sometime in the next few decades." The average ice
extent during September, a standard measurement for climate
studies, was 2.07 million square miles (5.36 million square
kilometers). This was 409,000