The Arctic just had the warmest winter on record. The repercussions will be global

Sep 13, 2016

Icebergs float in a fjord near the south Greenland town of Narsaq July 28, 2009.

Image: REUTERS/Bob Strong

Gail Whiteman

Professor of Sustainability, University of Exeter Business School, University of Exeter

Jeremy Wilkinson

Sea Ice Physicist, British Antarctic Survey

Our Impact

The Big Picture

Explore and monitor how Climate Change is affecting economies, industries and global issues

A hand holding a looking glass by a lake

Crowdsource Innovation

Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:

Climate Change

Plot line from Ice Mass Balance buoy (IMB016) showing the air temp from the top sensor that is about 2 feet above the snow pack

Colour plot of all the sensors that were above the snow pack

Image: National Snow and Ice Data Center

This shows the September Ice extent in 1979 (upper blue), 2007 (lower blue: second lowest year), 2012 (dotted green: lowest year) and 2016 (red: up to early September 2016 only). The 1981 to 2010 average is in dark grey. The grey area around the average line shows the two standard deviation range of the data. Image: National Snow and Ice Data Center

Monthly March ice extent for 1979 to 2016 shows a decline of 2.7% per decade Image: National Snow and Ice Data Center

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.