I’ve been lurking hear for a few years, and I just wanted to say a big thank you to the whole community for the interesting and informative posts.
I also have to admit that it was only today that I realised quite how big the arctic seas are. Someone made an offhand comment in the melting thread equating 2020’s current extent lead to the size of Germany, and for all the talk of century drops over the years I didn’t have a grasp of how big that was.
I am slightly astonished to discover the area of Wales (I am from the UK, so this is our standard large area comparator) is only 20,779 km2
This means that according to the Jaxa extent data the Arctic had been losing an area 6.5 times the size of Wales PER DAY on average for the whole of this month. That’s 117 times the size of Wales this month alone