Technologies

As a ‘Sea Ice Free’ Arctic Looms, the Climate Consequences Are Mounting

Research points to a milestone in the 2030s, but sea ice is already disappearing at an unprecedented rate. And that affects all of us.

The sound of ice cracking underneath the hull of a 25,500-ton icebreaker is unmistakable. No matter where you are — shuffling along the lunch line in the galley or sitting on the observation deck with a pack of cards — the wincing of steel and crunching of ice can shriek through the ship. It’s almost ghostly; undeniably haunting.

The sight of the ice? That’s mesmerizing. From the deck of Australia’s icebreaker, the RSV Nuyina, on which I sailed to Antarctica for more than five weeks at the start of 2022, it’s like looking out over a Martian landscape that’s been covered in a coat of stark white paint. In the distance, castles of ice rise from the vast, unbroken ice sheet. At the foot of one fortress, a battalion of King penguins lurks, unfazed by the freezing temperatures. Behind the ship, smaller Adelie penguins avoid a scrap with a leopard seal by climbing onto an island of ice and scurrying away.

Sea ice is vital to the Antarctic ecosystem. It’s not just a refuge for penguins and other animals, but a fundamental facet of life for creatures further down the food chain too, like Antarctic krill. It means life. The ice is also critical for heat because it’s more reflective than water, bouncing back more sunlight than the ocean, and it can act as a physical barrier, impacting the exchange of gases between the ocean and the atmosphere and protecting the continent’s ice shelves.

The Antarctic is currently experiencing the lowest level of sea ice since satellites began taking measurements in 1979. It’s an anomaly scientists are concerned about and monitoring closely. It was just a decade ago that sea ice in the Antarctic reached record highs, but generally low extents have been observed since 2016. It’s worrying, and could signal a shift in the sea ice dynamics down south, but the situation is more dire at the opposite end of the planet.

There, at the Earth’s northern extreme, the Arctic is experiencing an increase in temperatures two to four times higher than anywhere else in the world, and sea ice has decreased by about 12% per decade since the beginning of the satellite era. About 548,000 square miles of sea ice has been lost since 1979, equivalent to losing an area of ice roughly half the size of India. It’s seen a more rapid decline since 2000.

It’s one of the most obvious signs that greenhouse gas emissions are shifting the planet’s equilibrium. Researchers say we can take steps to slow the changes, but we need to act with urgency.

The 4 million people who call the Arctic home rely on the Arctic Ocean for food and transportation. The Indigenous peoples of the Arctic, who make up about 10% of the population, have a vibrant and longstanding cultural connection to the region that is slowly dripping away as regions become free of sea ice for the first time in millennia.

Meanwhile, the distribution of wildlife is shifting and behaviors are changing, altering the interactions between predators and prey. The Arctic’s famous polar bears rely on the ice to hunt and now have to travel further to eat, whereas the narwhal, a near-mythic, tusked whale, faces increased threats from killer whales lingering in exposed, warmer waters and disruptions to its migratory patterns.

Our best models currently predict the Arctic will be «sea ice free» within the next few decades, perhaps as soon as the 2030s. Antarctica’s sea ice is more of a mystery. But at both poles, sea ice is disappearing at an unprecedented rate.

And when the ice ends it’s not just the ends of the Earth that will change. It’s the entire planet.

An already changed Arctic

The Arctic Ocean’s sea ice expands during the winter, peaking in March, before retreating toward the North Pole. It typically reaches its lowest extent in mid-September. It never completely melts away — the North Pole itself is typically surrounded, and up to a fifth of the ice in the Arctic is so-called multiyear ice, persisting for more than a year.

Our understanding of this rhythmic pulse in the Northern Hemisphere stretches back for millennia. Indigenous peoples of the Arctic have passed down knowledge of the sea ice’s extent for thousands of years, particularly around coastal communities. Iceland’s government has been keeping detailed records since the 1600s, while log books and diaries kept during early exploration by ship provide a surprising amount of detail on where and when the Arctic Ocean froze over.

Our ability to understand the ice changed dramatically with the launch of the Nimbus-7 satellite in late 1978. The NASA and NOAA polar-orbiting satellite was fitted with an instrument that provided a way to observe the extent of the sea ice all year round, no matter the weather conditions, by studying the microwave energy bounced back from the surface. Continuous records have been taken since 1979, and the analysis has been deeply troubling. The extent of Arctic sea ice has been decreasing across those four decades, with each of the last 16 years the lowest on record.

Video: Changes in Arctic sea ice

Video credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

For decades, scientists have tried to pinpoint when the total extent of Arctic sea ice will drop below 1 million square kilometers (or about 386,000 square miles) — the marker denoting a «sea ice-free» summer. In 2009, for instance, one study used climate models to determine that this mark would be hit by 2037. Other research has shown that the timing is unpredictable, with analyses suggesting we might still be decades away.

In June, a study in the journal Nature Communications analyzed 41 years of satellite data, from 1979 to 2019, reiterating that human greenhouse gas emissions are the dominant force in reduction of Arctic sea ice. It also generated a flurry of worrying headlines focused on the first ice-free summer, citing the near end of a range that it said had shifted to as early as the 2030s to 2050s. But those headlines gloss over a critical point: The current losses of summer sea ice are already having devastating effects.

«Although the first ice-free Arctic summer has constantly been a point of interest for understanding and communicating climate change, it’s more a symbolic threshold in some sense,» says Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at Princeton University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. «Arctic climate change is already happening now and in all months of the year.»

An Antarctic paradox

From the beginning of the satellite era until 2010, Antarctic sea ice experienced a slight increase, with an acceleration in winter sea ice extent between 2012 and 2014. This was unexpected. Global temperatures have unequivocally risen in this time, largely due to human-induced climate change, raising ocean temperatures. Sea ice should’ve been melting. It didn’t.

The phenomenon was dubbed the Antarctic paradox.

Many climate models haven’t been able to reproduce these effects, though at least one high-resolution model has had success. Though explaining the paradox has been difficult, scientists have several hypotheses.

A visit to Antarctica

Natalie Robinson, a marine physicist at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, points out that changing wind patterns, release of freshwater from Antarctica, and ocean stratification could all have played a role over the last four decades, but she says that pointing to one variable as a driver of the increase is virtually impossible. «In reality, all of these processes act simultaneously and influence each other,» she notes.

About seven years ago, the story began to change. Antarctic sea ice extent plummeted in 2016 and hasn’t totally recovered since. In 2023, winter sea ice extent is dramatically lower than we’ve ever seen in the satellite era.

«Antarctic sea-ice extent has now adopted a downward trajectory as expected under warming and is congruent with observations of surface warming in the Southern Ocean,» says Petra Heil, a polar ice scientist with the Australian Antarctic Division. Graphs generated by Labe show the stark decline.

A line graph of Antarctic sea ice extent in 2023 generated by Zachary Labe

The record low extent has scientists concerned. Understanding the paradoxical increase over the past four decades could help unlock the reasons behind this sudden change. Does it represent a shift to a worrying new normal? Or is it merely a blip that can be attributed to the normal range of variability?

«There is certainly a fair bit of concern in the scientific community that it’s the former,» says Robinson.

«And we are racing to find out.»

When the ice ends

The great white sheets at either end of the Earth are particularly good at reflecting sunlight. Sea ice covers about 15% of the world’s oceans across the year, and up to 70% of the heating energy is reflected back into space. Cover that ice with a dusting of snow and up to 90% can be reflected.

When the sea ice disappears, the energy is absorbed by the ocean, raising its temperature. «In a positive feedback loop this ocean warming leads to even more ice loss and global warming,» says Heil. She suggests conceptualizing the impact of sea-ice loss by thinking about sea ice as the air conditioning unit of the Earth.

When the sea ice disappears, our planetary AC unit is being switched off. It becomes harder to reflect that heat into space and we lose the ability to «self-regulate» the Earth’s climate.

The change doesn’t affect just the ocean surface and the Earth’s air temperatures, though. Sea ice also plays one of the most critical roles on the planet in the ocean’s depths. As seawater freezes into ice, salt is expelled, making the surrounding water denser. This heavier, colder water sinks and gets whisked around the planet. Warmer waters are predominantly pushed by wind into the polar regions, then freeze up into ice. The cycle is known as thermohaline circulation.

«This process can be regarded as the starting point/engine of the global oceans’ overturning circulation,» says Jan Lieser, a sea ice scientist with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and University of Tasmania.

image of the global conveyor belt with red arrows signifiying warmer water pushing around into the poles and blue arrows signifying colder deep currents

As the oceans continue to warm at both poles and sea ice extent decreases, this deep ocean current is likely to be disturbed. The knock-on effects could disrupt the polar ecosystems as nutrients and ocean biogeochemistry are altered, particularly in the Southern Ocean, where circulation is also heavily influenced by Antarctic meltwater and the currents already show signs of slowdown.

The atmosphere and ocean systems are incredibly complex and intertwined. Though the focus has long been on the extent of the sea ice, thickness also plays a role. So does snow cover. These measurements are harder to include in models because they’ve traditionally been difficult to gather. There are also differences at either pole. The Arctic typically has had thicker sea ice lasting for years, whereas Antarctic sea ice freezes new each year.

It now seems highly unlikely that the current declines can be stopped but Heil, and her colleague Melinda Webster from the University of Washington, say «it’s possible to slow and mitigate further detrimental effects of a warming climate by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and implementing ways to reduce existing atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations to levels that can sustain a habitable climate.»

On June 16, Heil and Webster, and more than 60 other polar scientists responded to the changes to the poles by calling for «urgent intensification of national and international research and observational capabilities in view of rapid Arctic and Antarctic change.»

«Action is required now,» she says, «to give future generations a fighting chance to mitigate the negative consequences of a warming climate.»

The anomaly in Antarctica’s sea ice this year, as if sounding its own alarm and affirming Heil’s calls, has only continued its downward trajectory.

Technologies

If You Miss MTV and Dunkaroos, This Indie Game Is for You

Mixtape is an upcoming game about being a teenager when «everything meant the end of the world or the start of the world.»

At a record store in northern Los Angeles, I walked past racks of albums, a DJ spinning records and a stack of Dunkaroos, a cookies and icing snack that was all the rage in ’90s America. It felt like stepping back into an earlier era, the same one backdropping the upcoming game Mixtape, a story about a group of self-mythologizing teens hanging out before life pulls them away from their suburban American town.

In an amusing twist of fate, the main brain behind the game is an Australian rocker who didn’t step foot in the US until his 30s. Johnny Galvatron (a stage name and lead singer of the band The Galvatrons), creative director at studio Beethoven & Dinosaur, dreamed up Mixtape based on a blend of American youth culture that was broadcast worldwide, along with his own upbringing loving music of the period and playing in bands.

In a recording room behind the record store, I chatted with Galvatron about why a man from the Antipodes would tackle American youth, nostalgia through the lens of music and analog audio tech, the earnest wrongness of being a teenager and why the US is like Middle-earth.

I also got to play a short slice of Mixtape ahead of the conversation, a demo I originally saw at Summer Game Fest last year (but with a couple extra scenes exclusive to this event). It opened up with the game’s older teen heroine, Stacy Rockford, skateboarding down a winding road with her friends, lazily pulling kickflips and calling out oncoming cars in the golden hour before twilight, a fitting start for a game about the last days before adulthood knocks.

From what I saw, there’s a bit of overlap with other nostalgia-laden narrative games about teens growing up, such as studio Don’t Nod’s Life is Strange series or last year’s Lost Records: Bloom and Rage. But Mixtape avoids the plotty drama of those games in favor of lionizing the humble wonder of teens killing time. And it does it in style, with kinetic editing and needle drops that immerse players in the MTV-drenched lives of kids whose rebellious days are numbered. It’s tonally different, reflecting Galvatron’s memories of being an earnest teen, liking music and tossing out strong opinions.

«There’s a lot of stories about teenagers where they’re portrayed as very shy and not confident. And that’s not really my experience of being a teenager,» Galvatron said. «I was very confident and wrong about things and about how I felt about music.»

Galvatron’s earnest teenagehood was in Australia, but setting the game there might have been too close to home. Plus, his favorite music and culture came from America. Despite not coming to the US until he was 32, he’s watched America every single day of his life, he said. Seeing it in person is like coming to a theme park, or a fantasy land: «To people who live in Western cultures, America is Middle-earth,» Galvatron said.

The game is split into chapters, each patterned after a carefully-chosen song. They all come together in the titular mixtape, the swan song of a cherished friend group, one last rock-out to tunes that speak to the moment. It was those songs that drove the creation of the emotional sequencing of Mixtape, Galvatron told me. Whereas most games start development by creating a «vertical slice» that represents the core loop of the game, Beethoven & Dinosaur made «a real shitty version of the whole game» and swapped around the songs to see what different stories the configurations told.

«We would play with that soundtrack until it seemed to have this cinematic flow to it, like a really lovely narrative that chained these songs together,» Galvatron said. «Once we had that right, we could put the story and the characters in.»

Picking the songs was a delicate process to find the right tone (and to ensure variety, as Galvatron joked he kept wanting more Devo songs, which the team vetoed and limited him to one). There’s a pivotal moment in the game where the main character Rockford is betrayed by her friend, and despite digging up the saddest songs they could think of, none worked. So they flipped the emotions to the other extreme, trying tunes evoking over-the-top happiness like Stuck In The Middle With You, and went with songs from the artist BJ Miller from the 1960s, «and that seemed to make it just all the more devastating,» Galvatron said.

I saw parts of 4-5 song chapters out of what Galvatron told me will be a total of 26 or 27. But each felt like a sublime snippet (in Pixar parlance, a core memory) that the player gets to control, from an embellished shopping cart escape from the cops to a flailing first kiss of awkward tongues to rocking out in the car on the way to a party. It sounds mundane, but these delightful moments hearken to a time in everyone’s lives when the people and the songs around you elevated the simple into the unforgettable.

«We don’t have skill trees, we don’t have (gameplay) loops. We have moments where mechanics, music, dialogue, narrative all meet and hit these crescendos,» Galvatron said, and emphasized the importance of their brevity. «Get in, deliver the mechanic, make it beautiful, make it a great experience. Don’t overstay your welcome.»

It’s undeniable that Mixtape reaches back into the past to evoke a feeling of place and time, specifically this moment in the American 90s where music was blasting from cassette tapes and CDs. There’s a warmth to this equipment, Galvatron noted, and to the music it produces. Moreover, the tactility lends itself very well to touching, spinning and clicking motions on game controllers, giving players a real feel for the music they’re playing on screen.

Yet when I asked how he felt the game fit amid our current era of nostalgia — which media like Stranger Things have built IP empires upon with period-appropriate references, fashion and songs — Galvatron asserts that the game has a different aim than prompting viewers to remember specific songs, CD players and Tamagotchis. «What I want people to remember is when you defined yourself by the singles you liked, by art, and I think that’s something naive and sweet,» he said.

If the rest of the game meets the bar set by the demo I saw, players will be pretty awestruck by the polished, electric delivery of moments from scene to scene. Mixtape feels intentionally designed, likely meticulously storyboarded, to land moments with camera angles and timing that make you feel along for the ride.

Beethoven & Dinosaur’s strengths are leaning into the grandness of cinematics and music, Galvatron said. «That’s how I remember being a teenager,» he said, «[it’s] something theatrical and fast, and everything meant the end of the world or the start of the world.»

Technologies

These MWC Phones and Gadgets Wowed Me, but Where Are They Now?

From AI hardware to wearable phones, these products promised a lot. So what happened to them?

Mobile World Congress sees the biggest and best tech companies, the world over, gather in Barcelona to show off their latest, greatest products. MWC 2026 runs March 2 to 5 and we expect to see several major phone launches, some wild concepts and a lot of tapas. But what about products we saw in prior years?

From Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S phones to incredible hardware from Xiaomi, we’ve seen some amazing devices in the years CNET has been attending the show. But we’ve also seen a lot of unusual products that have promised more than they’ve delivered.

From concept devices that are quickly forgotten to new gadgets that boast revolutionary functions, these are the MWC tech launches that arrived with a fanfare… but aren’t necessarily where you’d expect them to be today.

Humane AI pin

AI might still be the biggest buzzword in tech, thanks to every phone company cramming their devices with all kinds of bizarre AI functions. But at MWC 2024, one company wanted to take that further. The Humane AI pin was a wearable badge that you could talk to and ask questions about your schedule, the weather or things like sports results. It could read answers out and even project them onto your hand with a laser. Because everyone loves lasers.

Sounds fun, right? And the company’s rhetoric around how AI-based devices like this will replace phones sounded compelling. However, the product, well, sucked (just ask CNET’s Scott Stein, who spent extended time with it) and the company was eventually swallowed by HP, with the Pin itself ceasing to function in February last year. If you were one of the early adopters, do let us know what you’ve done with that $699(!) paperweight now.

Motorola Rizr

MWC is a great place to show off concepts that will excite technology nerds like us. Motorola has a good history of this at the show and the Rizr is one of my favorites. This phone didn’t just have a flexible display like we’ve seen on many of today’s foldable phones, its display could actually mechanically unroll at the push of a button, extending the top of the screen to give a more immersive display for watching videos or playing games.

It was amazing to see in person and it was certainly a different idea on how to use flexible displays. But that’s all it was; an idea. Motorola hasn’t deployed the Rizr’s mechanical unfurling into any of its products, with its upcoming Razr Fold launch being just a standard book-style foldable. The reason is obvious: The technology is likely expensive and probably fragile too. Three years on and Motorola hasn’t said a thing about this cool concept, but I’ll still keep my fingers crossed for this year.

Xiaomi SU7 EV

Xiaomi might be better known for its superb camera phones, but the Chinese firm has fingers in many pies, including scooters, vacuums, air fryers and, er, water pistols. It was no surprise then that during MWC 2024, the company showed off its first EV, the Xiaomi SU7. With sleek, sporty looks and a promised range of over 470 miles, I was excited.

I was excited again when the company showed off an even more performance-focused model at last year’s show, which had already delivered some blistering track times on the infamous Nürburgring. But I’ve yet to get behind the wheel. While Xiaomi is already producing and selling cars in its native China, the company has no plans to launch in the UK or wider Europe until at least 2027 and they almost certainly won’t sell in the US at all.

As a result, I feel like I’ve been teased somewhat with the promise of this slick, powerful EV that would have sat perfectly on my driveway. In reality, I still have a big wait ahead of me, if the SU7 European launch happens at all. Sales of the SU7 in China have surpassed those of the Tesla Model 3, according to a report by Car News China. Meanwhile, the same story shows that the SU7 Ultra’s sales have declined dramatically due to a number of controversies and lawsuits around the car and Xiaomi’s rollout.

Samsung Galaxy Ring

Samsung’s Galaxy Ring made for an interesting MWC in 2024. Here was a new type of wearable that promised advanced health and fitness tracking, while blending into your daily life by sitting unobtrusively on your finger. And that’s what it does, with CNET giving it a healthy 8.5 out of 10 in our full review.

But that was in 2024, and a full two years later, I’m left wondering what’s happening with the wonderful world of smart jewelry. Samsung has made no official comment around a follow-up, through rumors suggest we may see one in late 2026 or 2027. Smart ring manufacturer Oura, meanwhile, has filed a public lawsuit against Samsung and other smart ring companies claiming patent infringement. This is likely one of the reasons we’ll have to wait for a Galaxy Ring 2. While other smart rings do exist — like the Oura Ring 4 — it’s not a category that flourished after Samsung launched its ring.

There’s no Google Pixel Ring, no Apple iRing and not even an LED-infused Nothing Ring (1). Most other smart rings are made by smaller companies, such as Pebble’s recently announced $75 recyclable ring. Smart rings may have a place on our hands for a while yet, but Samsung’s lengthy delay in launching a follow-up might suggest that it’s not exactly a priority product.

Motorola wrist phone

I said that the aforementioned Moto Rizr was «one of» my favorite MWC concepts.That’s because the company’s flexible wrist phone from 2024 absolutely takes my top spot. This candybar-style Android phone had a fully flexible body that let you to wrap the whole thing around your wrist and wear it like something resembling Leela from Futurama’s wrist-mounted doodad.

I found it extremely intriguing. Here was a phone that doesn’t bulge out your skinny jeans when it’s in your pocket, but that’s also just a glance away like a smartwatch. And compared to the precision engineering required for the Rizr, the wrist phone’s technology seemed relatively achievable. After all, we already have flexible displays and this didn’t even require any specialized tiny motors — you just whack it onto your wrist like a ’90s slap bracelet.

But, like the Rizr, the wrist-mounted phone remained just a flight of fancy I experienced oh so briefly for a few days in Spain. And like any holiday romance, perhaps it’s best for me to simply remember it for what it was and not spend my days pining for what could have been.

With MWC 2026 just a few days away I’m excited to see new and wild products show their face, and I’m curious to see which of them will have staying power.