Klondike Kat,
I fear that you may have fallen victim to a variation of Zeno's paradox. (Ice volume decrease slow down)
Common experience suggests just the opposite. As anyone who has every drunk anything with ice in it can attest - the ice lasts and lasts and lasts, until near the end. As the volume of ice approaches zero, the exposed surface area increases and the melt rate increases with it, or ----- it at least seems to. I suspect the latter is the truth.
Rather than slowing down, I suspect that the volumetric loss rate would remain the same, all other factors remaining constant. But they aren't remaining constant. The heat input to the Arctic waters is increasing through direct solar absorption, through warmer fresh water inputs from rivers, and through intrusion of warmer waters from the Atlantic and Pacific. This is to some degree countered by increasing flows of cold (above freezing) water from Greenland melt.
At the same time, with the loss of ice, wind and wave action is increasing. This sloshing and stirring has to also be increasing the melt rate. Ditto for mixing of the Arctic Ocean bringing warmer and more saline waters into greater contact with the ice. Both increase the melt rate.
I fully expect the ice melt rate to increase as the ice volume nears zero. This I suspect will show up as increasing thinning, loss of multi year ice, shattering and dispersion of the ice, and formation of more vulnerable saline first year ice. And that is what we have seen.
Unsurprisingly, this is causing the extent to at least appear to increase compared to expectations due to the shattering and dispersion of the ice pack, coupled with the arbitrary rule that any area of Ocean that is covered by 15% or greater of ice is counted as being 100% covered.
That rule worked reasonably to smooth the edge of the intact ice sheet. It does not work at all well with a shattered ice sheet. To the contrary, it lies to us and causes us to falsely believe that conditions are no where near as bad as they really are.
And all of that leaves us vulnerable to seeing all of the ice seeming to go "poof!" over a short time span and making everyone involved look silly.
Sam