Arctic sea ice has shrunk to the lowest amount on record, according to this AP article by Seth Borenstein.
The ramifications of this are enormous. Rising sea levels mean coastal devastation globally. It’s coming, folks. Lewis and Clark’s northwest passage is now open, so to speak. A Chinese ship has taken an Arctic Ocean route to the Atlantic. This opens up a huge can of worms, with military implications to consider, in addition to the commercial prospects.
This sort of thing makes for great fiction, by the way. Tobias Buckell wrote a novel called Arctic Rising, looking into the ramifications of polar ice melt.
Borenstein, however, falls into the trap of blatantly blaming this on man-made global warming (fifth paragraph). Let’s recognize that the global warming is very unlikely to be entirely man-made. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo certainly contributed, and we are, in fact, on the upswing leg of the ice age cycle. Climate models are anything but simple. In fact, any physics where chaos theory plays a role (and not all variables are even known) cannot be simply blamed on one visible factor. Calling this man-made is political, and artificially simplistic.