The oldest and thickest Arctic sea ice is disappearing at a faster rate than the younger and thinner ice at the edges of the Arctic Ocean's floating ice cap, making Arctic sea ice more vulnerable to further decline in the summer, according to a NASA study published in Journal of Climate in February.The study examines how multiyear ice (ice that has made it through at least two summers) has diminished with each passing winter over the past three decades. Multiyear ice extent isdiminishing at a rate of -15.1 percent per decade, and multiyear ice area, which disregards areas of open water among ice floes and focuses exclusively on the regions of the Arctic Ocean that are completely covered by multi-year ice, is shrinking even faster than multiyear ice extent, by -17.2 percent per decade. The study used a 32-year time series of multiyear ice from passive microwave data from NASA's Nimbus-7 satellite and the Meteorological Satellite Program, taken during the winter months from 1978 to 2011.
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