A CHANGING PLANET · 90° NORTH
Forty-seven summers of retreat
at the top of the world.
An ocean once hidden by ice is coming into view. Trace its changing edge.
16 September 2026 · preliminary daily extent
Ice: NSIDC · Land & depth: Natural Earth Routes are schematic, not navigation guidance.
01 / THE SPACE LEFT BEHIND
From above, the Arctic is an ocean surrounded by land. Its ice grows through winter and recedes through summer. September reveals the season’s smallest footprint.
The dotted line holds an older geography in place. Move back to 1979, then return to the present. The story lives in the water between those edges.
Retreat is uneven. Some summers leave more ice than the year before. Across the full record, a smaller late-summer ice cover emerges.
less September sea ice in 2025
than the 1981–2010 average
02 / LINES THROUGH THE BLUE
Two corridors. Many possible voyages.Along the Siberian coast
The Northeast Passage follows Eurasia’s Arctic coast. The Northern Sea Route is its Russian coastal section. The line shows a generalized corridor; local ice, vessel capability and access requirements determine a voyage.
Trace the corridorThrough the Canadian archipelago
A family of passages threads the Canadian Arctic islands. The southern corridor is shown schematically. Narrow straits can retain or receive drifting ice even when the surrounding seas look open.
Trace the corridorOpen water on this map does not establish a safe passage. Ice concentration, thickness and movement vary locally; these lines show geography, not whether a vessel can sail today.
03 / AN INHABITED OCEAN
The lights around the map are ports and settlements. For Arctic communities, including Indigenous peoples, sea ice is part of a lived landscape. A changing edge can alter connections as well as create them.
THE EVIDENCE BEHIND THE MAP
Sea ice extent marks ocean cells with at least 15% ice concentration. The year slider uses September monthly boundaries and extent statistics from NSIDC, 1979–2025. The latest view uses the 16 September 2026 daily extent raster and the matching 1981–2010 day-of-year median; historical views use the September median. All geometry is mapped in the NSIDC north polar stereographic projection. Ice boundaries are simplified by 7 km for display. Routes and settlement coordinates are editorial geographic references; they do not establish navigability.
The opening view is a fixed snapshot from 16 September 2026, retrieved 17 September 2026. It is preliminary and is not a declaration of the 2026 annual minimum. The historical slider shows September monthly data, not each year’s single-day minimum.
White transparency is a visual treatment of ice extent; it does not encode ice thickness or concentration. The monthly baseline statistic is an average of extent values; the dashed map line is a spatial median.
Fetterer, F., Knowles, K., Meier, W. N., Savoie, M., Windnagel, A. K. & Stafford, T. (2025). Sea Ice Index, Version 4. NSIDC. DOI: 10.7265/a98x-0f50. Accessed 17 September 2026.