The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk to its lowest level since satellite measurements began nearly 30 years ago, opening up the Northwest Passage – a long-sought short cut between Europe and Asia that has been historically impassable.

In the mosaic image above, created from nearly 200 images acquired in early September 2007 by the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) instrument aboard ESA’s Envisat satellite, the dark gray color represents the ice-free areas while green represents areas with sea ice.

Leif Toudal Pedersen from the Danish National Space Centre said: “We have seen the ice-covered area drop to just around 3 million sq km which is about 1 million sq km less than the previous minima of 2005 and 2006. There has been a reduction of the ice cover over the last 10 years of about 100 000 sq km per year on average, so a drop of 1 million sq km in just one year is extreme. To give you an idea of how big 1 million sq km is that is about 386,000 sq miles, or 1.5 times the size of Texas.

With melting this year 10 times the average are we experiencing the tipping point? The tipping point would be when there is enough dark ocean water not covered with white reflective ice that the amount of heat absorbed would make it impossible for ice to reform. It is extremely hard to calculate just when this point will happen, but we can imagine what the results of such a scenario would be.

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