least sea ice in 800 years

A new study says there is less ice today in the Fram Strait between Svalbard Island and Greenland than at any time since the 13th century. This research came about from the Niels Bohr Institute and other organizations. It is also published in the journal Climate Dynamics. "We have combined information about the climate found in ice cores from an ice cap on Svalbard and from the annual growth rings of trees in Finland and this gave us a curve of the past climate" explains Aslak Grinsted, geophysicist with the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. Even though the 13th century was a warm period, data shows that there has never been so little ice as in the 20th century. "There was a sharp change in the ice cover at the start of the 20th century," explains Aslak Grinsted. And that change has continued —"We see that the sea ice is shrinking," he says, "to a level which has not been seen in more than 800 years."

http://www.macroevolution.net/sea-ice.html