Rising temperatures in the Arctic have shrunk the ice covering the polar oceans this year, the second-lowest in four decades, scientists have announced, another sign of how the climate crisis is rapidly evolving in the region.

Researchers at the National Snow and Ice Data Center said the satellites recorded a minimum of 3.744 square meters of sea ice on September 15 this year.

“It’s pretty devastating that we’ve got so consistently less sea ice. But unfortunately, that’s not surprising, ”said Toila Moon, a glycologist at the Boulder Research Center in Colorado.

The record low of 3.14 sq km, reached in late 2012. The remaining ice was broken by a cyclone in Tutu, not much less than what researchers are seeing today.

The fall of this year was particularly rapid, between August 31 and September 5, thanks to a breeze from a Siberian heatwave, the NSIDC said. The rate of ice erosion in these six days was faster than any other year on record. In July, another team of scientists discovered that the Siberian heatwave would have been impossible without man-made climate change.

As the Arctic Ocean ice disappears, it leaves patches of dark water. These dark waters absorb solar radiation instead of reflecting it out of the atmosphere, a process that amplifies warming and helps explain why Arctic temperatures have risen more than twice as fast as anywhere else on Earth in the last 30 years.

Sea ice erosion threatens Arctic wildlife from polar bears and seals to plankton and algae, says Tom Foreman, a polar wildlife expert and Arctic guide.

“The number we are getting each year as the amount of sea ice decreases has raised the level of our concern for the stability of our environment, a red alert in terms of our concerns.”

The same warming that opened up the waters of the Arctic in the summer is eating away at the Arctic lands of Canada and Greenland, even in sheets of ice. The faster this ice sheet melts with the surrounding sea, the faster the sea level will rise worldwide.

Given that warm Arctic can affect global weather patterns, Moon said the world should not wait for a new record sea ice before taking steps to limit climate change.

“We should work very hard to make a difference in our emissions of polluting gases so that we don’t see so many records in the future,” Moon said.