Animations Show the Melting Arctic Sea Ice, and What the Earth Would Look Like When All of the Ice Melts

It’s no secret that cli­mate change has been tak­ing a toll on the Arc­tic. But it’s one thing to read about it, anoth­er thing to see it in action. Above you can watch an ani­ma­tion nar­rat­ed by NASA’s cryos­pher­ic sci­en­tist Dr. Walt Meier. Doc­u­ment­ing changes between 1984 and 2016, the ani­ma­tion lets you see the Arc­tic sea ice shrink­ing. As the impor­tant peren­ni­al sea ice dimin­ish­es, the remain­ing ice cov­er “almost looks gelati­nous as it puls­es through the sea­sons.” For any­one inter­est­ed, an updat­ed ver­sion of this visu­al­iza­tion can be down­loaded in HD here.

If you’re curi­ous what this could all lead to–well, you can also watch a har­row­ing video that mod­els what would hap­pen when all the ice melts and the seas rise some 216 feet. It isn’t pret­ty. The video below is based on the 2013 Nation­al Geo­graph­ic sto­ry, “What the World Would Look Like if All the Ice Melt­ed.”

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

Huge Hands Rise Out of Venice’s Waters to Sup­port the City Threat­ened by Cli­mate Change: A Poignant New Sculp­ture

132 Years of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in 26 Dra­mat­i­cal­ly Ani­mat­ed Sec­onds

Music for a String Quar­tet Made from Glob­al Warm­ing Data: Hear “Plan­e­tary Bands, Warm­ing World”

A Song of Our Warm­ing Plan­et: Cel­list Turns 130 Years of Cli­mate Change Data into Music

Frank Capra’s Sci­ence Film The Unchained God­dess Warns of Cli­mate Change in 1958

Watch Episode 1 of Years of Liv­ing Dan­ger­ous­ly, The New Show­time Series on Cli­mate Change