I should of course add “in the satellite era”, but the title is pretty unwieldy as it is!
I was up early (UTC) to check the latest JAXA data, and sure enough that confirmed a new record minimum Antarctic sea ice extent of 2.11 million km² was reached yesterday:
There have been a plethora of headlines in the last 24 hours along the lines outlined above!
According to an article on Science.org the answer to the question posed above seems to be “yes”:
An image captured earlier this morning by the Sentinel 1A satellite’s synthetic aperture radar reveals that another huge chunk of the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica has broken loose:
P.S. Here’s an animation of the calving courtesy of Wipneus:
In 2017 Antarctic sea ice extent is beating all the records. All flavours of the metric are already below the minimum of all previous years in the satellite record, and it looks like there’s still some more melting left to go. Here’s the NSIDC’s 5 day averaged extent:
In the Arctic the refreeze is slowing down as the March maximum extent approaches. Meanwhile in the southern hemisphere Antarctic sea ice extent has taken a tumble as the annual minimum extent approaches.