Sea ice that is more than four years old has largely disappeared in the Arctic A warming, rapidly changing Arctic is the “new normal” and shows no signs of returning to the reliably frozen region of the past. This is according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic Report Card . Director of the administration’s Arctic Researcher Program, Dr Jeremy Mathis, said the region did a great service to the planet – acting as a refrigerator. “We’ve now left that refrigerator door open,” he added. Dr Mathis was speaking at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans, where Noaa presented its annual summation of Arctic science. Starving polar bear: The ‘face of climate change’? This is the 12th report the administration has produced. And although it pointed to “a few anomalies” in a recent pattern of warming in the Arctic region, Dr Mathis said: “We […]