The Arctic is warming faster than any other place on Earth. At the beginning of the year, I wrote a script to produce a daily map of arctic sea ice extent. It's been chugging along ever since, generating a new map each day. I nearly forgot about it. Then today, I read this in The Economist:

"Last winter’s Arctic sea ice was the smallest ever recorded for the second year in a row, according to analysis published by America’s national satellite and ocean-research agencies. The sea ice around the North Pole peaked at around 14m square kilometres, more than 2m square kilometres lower than the maximum extent recorded when records began in 1979, a reduction equivalent in size to Greenland."

I went into my files to see how this year's ice compares to the historic median. It's stark. Here's a look at what I found.