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Arctic sea ice continued its run of record lows for the fourth consecutive month in March, culminating in the lowest maximum extent in the 47-year satellite record, according to a report by the EU Earth observation agency Copernicus.
The daily Arctic sea ice extent reached its lowest annual maximum on March 20 2025, covering 14.4mn square km, 6 per cent below the 1991-2020 average for the month.
Military and commercial vessels, particularly from Russia, are stepping up activity in the region, some of which is expected to be ice-free during summer within a decade, said Rebecca Pincus, former director of the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute.
The Arctic region is warming at up to four times the rate of the rest of the planet, which in turn is leading to long-term declines in sea ice levels. Some scientists are predicting its first ice-free day may happen before 2030.
To map the decline in Arctic sea ice, I referred to the excellent National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) database which hosts a plethora of polar-related data.
For this particular map, I acquired the shapefiles of the sea ice extent for August each year going back to 1979.
[Nerd note: a shapefile is geographically encoded data that can be read by GIS, or graphical information system, software, such as Qgis and Arcgis.]
I imported the shapefiles into Qgis and overlaid them on to an orthographic projection of the Arctic Ocean. I avoided using the typical top down azimuthal projection over the North Pole purely for aesthetic reasons as I wanted to show the region on a globe, not just a square crop.
I exported the map and sea ice data into Adobe Illustrator where final styling was applied. Regular readers will know that when it comes to creating maps, I’m extremely passionate about them looking aesthetically beautiful as well conveying the information clearly and unambiguously.
Using a dark palette for the land and sea helps the sea ice and shipping route data pop against the background. Subtle touches, including a glow around the coastline and edge of the globe, all help produce a visual that the reader will linger over for longer.
The styled map was then loaded into Adobe After Effects to animate the individual sea ice layers and sea routes, pausing the data at key points and adding contextual annotations.
Since US President Donald Trump took office in January his desire to take control of Greenland has increased attention on the area’s critical minerals and importance for trade and military strategy.
As sea-ice in the region continues to decline northern sea routes across the Arctic Ocean could become economically viable for longer periods of the year.
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