❝ Arctic sea ice, the vast sheath of frozen seawater floating on the Arctic Ocean and its neighboring seas, has been hit with a double whammy over the past decades: as its extent shrunk, the oldest and thickest ice has either thinned or melted away, leaving the sea ice cap more vulnerable to the warming ocean and atmosphere…
❝ Direct measurements of sea ice thickness are sporadic and incomplete across the Arctic, so scientists have developed estimates of sea ice age and tracked their evolution from 1984 to the present. Now, a new NASA visualization of the age of Arctic sea ice shows how sea ice has been growing and shrinking, spinning, melting in place and drifting out of the Arctic for the past three decades.
“Ice age is a good analog for ice thickness because basically, as ice gets older it gets thicker,” Walt Meier said. “This is due to the ice generally growing more in the winter than it melts in the summer.”…
❝ The new animation shows two main bursts of thick ice loss: the first one, starting in 1989 and lasting a few years, was due to a switch in the Arctic Oscillation, an atmospheric circulation pattern, which shrunk the Beaufort Gyre and enhanced the Transpolar Drift Stream, flushing more sea ice than usual out of the Arctic. The second peak in ice loss started in the mid-2000s…
❝ “We’ve lost most of the older ice: In the 1980s, multiyear ice made up 20 percent of the sea ice cover. Now it’s only about 3 percent,” Meier said. “The older ice was like the insurance policy of the Arctic sea ice pack: as we lose it, the likelihood for a largely ice-free summer in the Arctic increases.”
Science, knowledge, marches on inevitably. Hopefully, our understanding keeps pace. That understanding comes with an imperative to aid increasing knowledge in supplanting older, sometimes spurious understanding.
Eideard 
11/19/16: “Arctic Sea Ice Is Freakishly Low Right Now : Despite the dim Arctic winter, sea ice is about 28% down around the North Pole, and temperatures are as much as 36 degrees above normal.” https://www.buzzfeed.com/dinograndoni/arctic-sea-ice-is-freakishly-low-right-now?utm_term=.xuPmQdEzyQ#.xuPmQdEzyQ
11/20/16: ‘Things are getting weird in the polar regions’ (WAPO) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/11/21/things-are-getting-weird-in-the-polar-regions/?utm_term=.2c8bbb7eec67
Arctic wintertime sea ice extent is among lowest on record (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center March 23, 2018) https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-03/nsfc-aws032318.php Sea ice in the Arctic grew to its annual maximum extent last week, and joined 2015, 2016 and 2017 as the four lowest maximum extents on record, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and NASA. More significantly from a scientific perspective, the last four years reached nearly equally low maximum extents and continued the decades-long trend of diminishing sea ice in the Arctic. For NSIDC’s analysis: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2018/03/arctic-sea-ice-maximum-second-lowest/
“Winter sea ice on the Arctic Ocean covered the second smallest area on record this year, part of a thaw that is opening the region to shipping and oil exploration and may be disrupting weather far to the south, scientists said on Friday.” http://gcaptain.com/arctic-ocean-ice-near-record-low-winter-boost-shipping/ The diminishing ice seems at odds with remarks by President Donald Trump in a television interview in January that “The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now. But now they’re setting records.”
Wintertime Arctic Sea Ice Growth Slows Long-term Decline: NASA https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/wintertime-arctic-sea-ice-growth-slows-long-term-decline-nasa
New NASA research has found that increases in the rate at which Arctic sea ice grows in the winter may have partially slowed down the decline of the Arctic sea ice cover.
This does not mean that the ice cover is recovering, though. Just delaying its demise.
“This increase in the amount of sea ice growing in winter doesn’t overcome the large increase in melting we’ve observed in recent decades,” said Alek Petty, a sea ice scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study. “Overall, thickness is decreasing. Arctic sea ice is still very much in decline across all seasons and is projected to continue its decline over the coming decades. “
Historically high temperatures and increasingly thinning ice are indicating worrisome climate trends, according to a new federal report released Tuesday. https://arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card/Report-Card-2018/ArtMID/7878/ArticleID/772/Executive-Summary Re: consequences of amplified warming of the Arctic region (AAW) on weather patterns beyond the Arctic see https://arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card/Report-Card-2018/ArtMID/7878/ArticleID/790/Clarity-and-Clouds-Progress-in-Understanding-Arctic-Influences-on-Mid-latitude-Weather
“…damage in the U.S.A. caused by extreme weather events in 2017 was the costliest in history at over 300 billion dollars (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/2017-us-billion-dollar-weather-and-climate-disasters-historic-year ).